Phil Ochs
THE FBI TAPES
Salle Claude Champagne
University of Montreal
Montreal, Canada
10.22.1966
EN soundboard remaster

01 Cross My Heart
02 Song of My Returning
03 The Bells
04 Flower Lady
05 Miranda
06 Joe Hill
07 I'm Gonna Say It Now
08 Pleasures of the Harbor
09 I Ain't Marching Anymore
10 Outside a Small Circle of Friends
11 I've Had Her
12 tuning & announcements
13 There But for Fortune
14 tuning & announcements
15 Cops of the World
16 Crucifixion
17 Is There Anybody Here
18 Changes
19 The Party
20 tuning & announcements
21 Doesn't Lenny Live Here Anymore?
22 Power and the Glory

Total time: 2:02:02
disc break goes after track 10

soundboard recording thought to have been made by the FBI, remastered by EN

Phil Ochs was one the greatest political and topical folk singers of the 1960s. The FBI kept Phil Ochs under active surveillance for thirteen years. The introduction of The Freedom of Information Act revealed pages and pages of information on Phil with the FBI labelling him a "communist" with �un-American thoughts�. Despite the hundreds of pages in his FBI file, THe FBI never found that Ochs never committed any federal crimes. He continued to be under investigation until his death by suicide in 1976.

notes on the remaster by EN
12.19.2015
It's Phil's 75th birthday and I think we'd all agree he should have lived past the age of 35, so to celebrate the milestone I took all week restoring this exceptional-yet-very-rough tape our pal J. Edgar Asshole (who did as much as anyone to make sure Phil would die) made of our hero playing in Montreal almost 50 years ago, three days before I was born. It was extremely noisy and had levels all over the place, so I went track by track and cleaned it up using Sound Forge 9's Graphic EQ, Graphic Dynamics and Clipped Peak Restoration tools, removing a ton of diginoise bursts in the process. Despite how tempting it may have been, no noise reduction was used. I also made new fingerprints, added titles and tags and changed the basic cover art to distinguish this remaster from the original boot CD... if anyone wants to make a cover for this that does not look like it was constructed by a six-year-old child, polease feel free to do so cuz I am sort of inept at that part of this stuff.

Anyway, after all these modifications it sure isn't perfect, but I feel I made a tremendous improvement worthy of the impact of the performance. It certainly provides a phenomenal snapshot of the man at the peak of his populist protest powers in front of a highly sympathetic audience, all whilst the spooks commandeer the mixing desk -- to my ears this sounds like it was taped on a Nagra device -- to get a dub of the show to bring back to their bosses at Clown Central. At several points Phil actually refers to them being afoot, which I'm sure caused several in the audience to mutter to themselves about how self-important and paranoid Phil was. Hopefully Phil is beside the right hand of The Creator as I type this now, peeing enthusiastically all over Hoover's ugly fascist face... last I checked, ain't nobody covering Edgar's tunes these days -- the Obamas and the Camerons and the Putins try, but we know those guys have no swing -- or remastering his concerts on his birthday. And remember to remember Phil Ochs, who was born 75 years ago today and crammed a whole lot of serious shit-stirring into his very few years on Earth... if we had 100 True Believers like him around today, the pigs would crap their knickers, drop their tape recorders and run away.

updated lineage:
FLACs of the silver boot CD "The FBI Tapes" > wav in Sound Forge 9 > remasterizzations and workers' seizing of the means of production > FLAC 8 with sectors aligned in FLAC Frontend > DIME > you

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