Phil Ochs - Kansas City Bomber

You might expect a song called "Kansas City Bomber" by leftist troubadour Phil Ochs to be a sympathetic take on the plight of a wrongly accused Union Activist, or a scathing rebuke of a right-wing terrorist, or at least topical in some way. Instead it's a portrait of a Roller Derby Queen who finds success in love more difficult than victory in the ring. Ochs wrote the song for the 1972 Raquel Welch film of the same name, but the film's producers ended up not using it.

It's hard to listen to this song and not hear the pathos and desperation in Ochs' voice. As a committed protest singer, he had become a fish-out-of-water by the 1970s, and was struggling to remain relevant. He was battling an epic case of writers block. He was clinically depressed over the collapse of 60s idealism. His public behavior was becoming more and more erratic. So when producer Lee Housekeeper approached Ochs with the idea of writing the theme song for the upcoming Raquel Welch vehicle, he jumped at the opportunity, hoping it might re-ignite his diminished creative spark. After all, he enjoyed watching Roller Derby on TV, and a song about the sport probably seemed like as good an idea to him as anything else at the time.

Given the depressing (heartbreaking really) backdrop against which the song was composed, it is a wonder that it is listenable at all. But to my ears "Kansas City Bomber" is a catchy and--dare I say it--fun song. There's no deep meaning to be found in the song itself any more than there is in the movie. But like Ochs' best protest songs, it's about struggle and the will to persevere in the face of adversity. When Ochs sings "But now she is trapped on the track, on the track, And God help the lady in her way," I can't help but smile. Perhaps he's reaching for some grand metaphor here; if so, the fact that it doesn't really work only makes the song more appealing in its modest way.

Ochs' back up band on the track is the Australian retro-rock band Daddy Cool, who are apparently still active (you can become friends with them on Facebook). According to Wikipedia, Ochs also cut a demo of the song with The Monkees' Mickey Dolenz on backup vocals. I would love to hear that version someday.


The B-side to "Kansas City Bomber" is "Gas Station Women" a song featured on Ochs' light-selling final studio album, Greatest Hits (which was not a greatest hits compilation, but a collection of new album tracks). The fact that Ochs had to resort to using a song that had been released two years previous as a B-side suggests the depth of his writers' block at the time.

Nevertheless, "Gas Station Women" is another interesting songwriting experiment for Ochs. In form and content it is a straight ahead country number. Listening to it, I am reminded of just how closely Ochs' voice resembled that of one of his formative influences, the great honky-tonk singer Faron Young. Ochs crams as many honky-tonk clichés as he can into the lyrics. There's the mistake of leaving the farm for the city, then falling for the wrong kind of girl. There's the heartbreak that inevitably follows and turns the protagonist to drink. But then there's the chorus ("Fill 'er up with love, Please won't you, mister? Just the hi-test is what I used to say, But that was before I lost my baby, I'll have a dollar's worth of regular today") that takes the song well out of the range of generic country music and into the realm of the surreal. It is a very strange, but compelling song, and I always want to sing along to the chorus, even when I'm not drunk.

Speaking of Roller Derby, the sport seems to be making something of a comeback. Here in Rhode Island we have a highly active league that Providence Mayor David Cicilline has declared "the pulse of the city." The nice young lady who teaches my kids' sport classes at the YMCA is one of the Providence Roller Derby's biggest stars ("Crazy Dukes" of the Sakonnet River Roller Rats)... "And God help the lady in her way."

Collector's Choice Music

I complain a lot about music that should be reissued, so I wanted to cast the spotlight on a label that has reissued a lot of formerly rare albums, Collector's Choice Music. In the course of going through my record collection and looking for out-of-print music to post here, I've discovered that a lot of the records that I spent years searching for have been reissued by Collector's Choice. Here are a few of them:

Sammy Davis Jr.: Sings The Complete Dr. Doolittle. I used to have a super-cool girlfriend. On my 27th birthday this chick gave me a mint copy of Sammy Davis Jr. Sings The Complete Dr. Doolittle, plus a copy of George Jones' autobiography, I Lived To Tell It All. She must have noticed that I had spent months drooling over a copy of the record at Footlight Records in New York City, but had always balked at buying it due to the high price. Where I come from, when a woman gives you birthday presents like that, you have to marry her--so I did.

Duke Ellington: Afro Bossa, Plays Mary Poppins. You would think that an LP of the Duke Ellington Orchestra playing the music from Mary Poppins would be a sad reminder of a great band's past. You would be wrong. The album is actually a tribute to the incredible arranging talents of Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. Afro Bossa is one of the very best Ellington albums from the LP era.

Phil Ochs: Tape From California, Rehearsals For Retirement/Gunfight At Carnegie Hall, All The News That's Fit To Sing, I Ain't A Marchin' Anymore. I paid way too much for a sealed copy of Tape From California at the over-priced Orpheus Records in Washington, D.C. But for years it was the only copy of the record I ran across, so I have no regrets. It's nice to see that Collector's Choice has made Ochs' difficult to find (and sometimes difficult to listen to) A&M albums available on CD.

The dB's: Stands For Decibels/Repercussion, Like This, Christmas Time Again. You might be thinking, "Collector's Choice has the dB's? But I thought they were an oldies label?" If you are thinking that, wake up you senile old coot! Collector's Choice is an oldies label. The dB's are oldies, and so are you. The dB's music is older today than the music that was featured on Happy Days or Sha-Na-Na in the 70s. So sit on it, oldster. The dB's albums have been in and out of print for years, it's nice to see they have found a home at Collector's Choice. I would like to see them reissue the currently out-of-print Sound Of Music too.

Oh-Ok: The Complete Recordings. This is the kind of thing that is surprising to find in print. Oh-Ok featured Lynda Stype, Linda Hooper (Magnapop) and Matthew Sweet. They released a couple EPs on the dB label before splitting up. This CD combines the studio records with some live material.

Let's Active: Cypress/Afoot, Big Plans For Everybody, Every Dog Has His Day. Okay, Let's Active's music is pretty easy to find on LP, still it's nice to see it kept in print. I'm guessing someone at Collector's Choice has an 80s-southern-jangle-pop fixation.

Richard Lloyd: Alchemy, Field of Fire. I can still remember how psyched I was when, after years of searching, I found a mint, white-label promo of the former Television guitarist's solo debut, Alchemy. (In fact, I can remember it quite clearly because it happened this past Saturday). White-label promos are more valuable than ordinary record pressings (or at least they used to be). Aside from mere fetishism, there is a good reason for this: they tend to be the most minty-fresh used records available. Promo records were typically the first done in a pressing, so worn-out stampers weren't used to press them. And perhaps more importantly, the fact that it's a white-label promo means the record likely belonged to someone in the music industry, which in turn means it was never played much (if at all) because--as a rule--music industry people do not actually like music. For these reasons, white-label promos tend to be highly prized by audiophiles and other people with more money than common sense.

Alchemy is a very interesting record. The music isn't much like that of Lloyd's former band, and Lloyd isn't much of a singer, but the album sounds like a rough blueprint for much of the alternative/college rock music that followed during the 80s. I'd be willing to bet Michael Stipe wore out his copy. Drug problems kept Lloyd inactive for several years until he released Field of Fire.

Tom Verlaine: Tom Verlaine. Tom Verlaine's first solo album does sound like his former band, Television, only not as good without Richard Lloyd to serve as co-lead guitarist. It's still a very good record though.

Collector's Choice has a ton of other reissues in print that are worth checking out. But good luck navigating their website.

Phil Ochs in Africa

I have always been attracted to doomed and tragic figures, and perhaps no one was more doomed or tragic than Phil Ochs. Crushed by the weight of collapsing idealism in the late-sixties, Ochs committed suicide in 1976. He left behind an uneven, but extraordinary body of work. Even his most topical songs tend to hold up well today because of the undeniable passion and humanity he brings to them. Sadly, many of his protest songs are all too topical today; a few judicious word changes to "Here's To The State of Richard Nixon" could describe our current imperial presidency. Had Phil Ochs survived to see the Bush Presidency, he no doubt would have hung himself all over again.

Here is one of the most rare items in the Ochs discography, "Bwtue" the A-side of a single he recorded while on tour in Kenya in 1973. To my knowledge, the two songs he recorded for this single were the last studio recordings of Ochs' career. By 1973 Ochs had already fallen into a state of deep depression, and was suffering from a severe case of writer's block.

The 1973 African trip would have tragic implications for Ochs' life and career. While walking on the beach at night, he was robbed and strangled; as a result his vocal chords were permanently damaged. Ochs believed agents of the U.S. government orchestrated the attack. I cannot say if this was the case or not, but it should be pointed out that Ochs was extremely paranoid at this point in his life. It should also be pointed out that the FBI had long had him under surveillance and considered him a threat.

I suppose you could say that Ochs was doing "World Music" long before Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads or Paul Simon started incorporating elements from African music into their own compositions, but I think that is giving him too much credit. Listening to this song it is hard to figure out what the heck Ochs is even doing on it. Perhaps if he had not been so depressed he might have returned to the States to create some kind of genuine World Music fusion, but that was not to be.