Tape from California

Released in July 1968, Phil Ochs' Tape from California continued the musical brilliance of 1967's Pleasures of the Harbor but scaled back the ambitious arrangements, which he felt had been overdone. Working again with producer Larry Marks, keyboardist Lincoln Mayorga, and classical arranger Ian Freebairn-Smith, Ochs even threw in The Beach Boys' creative foil Van Dyke Parks on keyboards for the title track and Ramblin' Jack Elliott for the flat-picked guitar on the straightforward folk tune "Joe Hill." The artistic beauty of these songs, however, is in the way Ochs sings about so many different eras and links them together in his satirical and philosophical way. He was still a protest singer at heart, and "White Boots Marching in a Yellow Land" is as heartbreaking a tale as any from his earlier albums. The centerpiece here, however, is the 13-minute "When in Rome," which links centuries of evil and suffering in Ochs' most poetic way. Where Dylan had explored surrealism, Ochs discovered a hallucinatory power in the history of the ages.