Talk:Outside of a Small Circle of Friends

A fact from Outside of a Small Circle of Friends appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 31 December 2008, and was viewed approximately 859 times (disclaimer) (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that A&M Records released three versions of Phil Ochs' "Outside of a Small Circle of Friends" because of the song's reference to marijuana?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2008/December.

Wikipedia

Inspirations

The first verse refers to the Murder of Kitty Genovese (citations on page). Too lazy to work it into the article right this second, but if anyone has other sources on specific events referenced, they probably warrant a mention. 184.65.72.3 (talk) 01:17, 11 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The article mentions the Kitty Genovese murder (see the second paragraph). I'm not aware that there were specific incidents on which the other verses were based, although I suspect the pornographer may be based on a publisher whose name escapes me right now. — Malik Shabazz ^Talk/_Stalk 02:21, 11 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Third single version?

According to this edit, there was a third version of the single:

Another, issued promotionally with the word "Censored" on the label, covered the words "smoking marijuana" with six beeps.

Unfortunately, I can't find any mention of this version of the song in any source. If somebody can source it, please put it back into the article. — Malik Shabazz ^Talk/_Stalk 21:06, 23 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

her sale(s)/a sale

I always heard "her sale", and a re-listening furthermore suggests "sales", plural: there is the faintest frication at the end of the word. If it is the case that Ochs sang it pluralized, it would not only comport well with "her", but make "a sale" syntactically impossible. There are only some 7 lyrics-listings supporting this 'her' variant, but I find it odd that people would write that accidentally. The natural tendency is toward simplicity and ellision. Furthermore, one of the sources for '"her" includes a doctoral dissertation https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/fe04/b854b4bd367178388387a7295e5375d103f2.pdf and we are familiar with how academics, especially when they are at that key inflection point in their careers, are hyper-finicky with their treament of citations. That guy would have plunked the recording down and listened to it carefully, just to get a literal transcription first-hand.

Naturally "her" would not fit with the later phrase "sent him off to jail", but I would find that as a reductio ad absurdum unacceptable: we must deal with the evidence exactly at hand. If reasonably asked why Ochs would construe the two pronouns so semantically disjoint on purpose, I could profer that that is what he meant by "smoking marijuana is more fun than drinking beer".JohndanR (talk) 21:33, 6 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]