Seeing Phil Ochs Hearing Marx

Album: Billy Bragg, The Internationale, 1990

Acquired: Purchased at the Record Exchange in Blacksburg in 1990

Best Track: "My Youngest Son Came Home Last Night" (by default)

Lasting Memory: Looking at this cassette for the last 17 years and thinking, "Nah, I'll play something else."

I usually listen to each of the albums I'm profiling twice before I start writing about them. I figure two close listens will refresh my memories of the lyrics and melodies, who influenced the artists, and where the artists fit in the universe of recorded music. Two back-to-back listens also allow me to think about how I used to hear the songs and to hear things I have long ignored or never even noticed before. For instance, I never realized before a week ago that David Baerwald has a solid case to make that he is a slightly better version of Don Henley.

Yesterday marked what I would swear where my second and third listens to Bragg's Internationale. I played the 6-song EP once the day I bought it, duly filed it in alphabetic/chronological order in my 100-slot pine cassette box, lugged it around through 6 moves over the past two decades, and made sure to never play it again.

Why? Because, to put a very fine point on it, socialist songs written by socialists and for socialists, suck. I am now convinced that the USSR collapsed solely because the people of Russia, Ukraine, and the other republics decided they would rather risk their lives on barricades staring down tanks than be forced to sing "The Internationale" one more goddamn time.

Have you ever heard "The Internationale?" It is supposed to be a call to arms to the workers of the world to unite and establish a just rule of the proletariat. The anthem even promises victory to the working man. In actuality, "The Internationale" is either the worst college fight song ever, or the most whiny dirge.

That is a statement that could be made about almost all of the songs on Bragg's Internationale, which I imagine he only recorded because he felt so guilty over having scored Top 20 UK hits off all of his earlier albums. Bragg is a true socialist; I'm not accusing him of any hypocrisy. But the crisis of conscience he must have experienced upon becoming a millionaire protest singer could not have been easy to resolve.

Musically, Bragg is fine form on Internationale, going a cappella on the homage "I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night" and turning "The Marching Song of the Covert Battalions," which is about the U.S. government's use of the Marines to keep Mexico and the countries of Central America feudal in the early half of the 20th century, into a campfire rave up.

The only song on Internationale that really stands out for any sort of intrinsic quality, though, is "My Youngest Son Came Home Today." Bragg explained in his liner notes that this particular song was written by Eric Bogle, who also penned "The Band Played Waltzing Matilda" in the surprising (to me anyway) year of 1972. Like "Waltzing Matilda," "My Youngest Son" is about a soldier coming home for the last time, but this time from the Troubles in Northern Ireland and on a caisson instead of in a wheelchair:

My youngest son came home today
His friends marched with him all the way
The fife and drum beat out the time
While in his box of polished pine
Like dead meat on a butcher's tray
My youngest son same home today

My youngest son was a fine young man
With a wife, a daughter and two sons
And a man he would have lived and died
Till by a bullet sanctified
Now he's a saint or so they say
They brought their young saint home today

An Irish sky looks down and weeps
Upon the narrow Belfast streets
At children's blood in gutters spilled
In dreams of glory unfulfilled
As part of freedom's price to pay
My youngest son came home today

My youngest son came home today
His friends marched with him all the way
The pipe and drum beat out the time
While in his box of polished pine
Like dead meat on a butcher's tray
My youngest son came home today
And this time he's here to stay

I learned three undeniable truths while revisiting The Internationale for what I am sure will be my last time. Those lessons are

1. Capitalism triumphed over socialism in large measure because capitalists had better songs. If Russia could have spawned a few more Autographs, we might still be fighting the Cold War.
2. Songs about the human costs of war are always affecting.
3. I like Billy Bragg best when he is singing about the asshole he becomes every time he gets a chance to spend a Sunday afternoon in the warmest room with a girl who can help him with his obsession with the young Susannah York, even if for her has to become the man in the iron mask when love gets dangerous.

Listen to a clip from "My Youngest Son Came Home Last Night"

Up Next: Billy Bragg, Don't Try This at Home, 1991

Word Count to Date: 13.029