Run The Game

With a life as tragic as any bluesman, Jackson C. Frank wrote songs laced with melancholy and pathos, and the best of these ("Blues Run the Game," "My Name Is Carnival," "Halloween Is Black as Night") are striking in their resignation and their acceptance of the dark turns of fate…

The Game Tour was a concert tour by the British rock band Queen to support their successful 1980 album The Game. This tour featured the first performances in South America by the group. In Buenos Aires, Queen drew a crowd of 300,000—the largest single concert crowd in Argentine history as of 1982. In São Paulo, Brazil, the attendance was 131,000 and 120,000 on two consecutive nights.

Taken from radio broadcast tapes of a concert given in late 1965, Hero of the Game sees the already legendary political folk singer Phil Ochs running through a set of almost completely unreleased material, with all but one of the tracks performed here already put to tape at the time of this concert. Among the bevy of tunes being heard by the audience for the first time in their rawest form, many stand out. In particular is a stunning version of "Crucifixion," a harrowing tune that was only a month old at the time of this recording, but wouldn't see a proper studio rendition until the 1967 release of Pleasures of the Harbour, an album many considered Ochs' finest moment.