| Electric Music For The Mind And Body | 1967 |
| I Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die | 1967 |
| Together | 1968 |
| Here We Are Again | 1969 |
| Greatest Hits (compilation) | 1969 |
| The Collected Country Joe & The Fish (compilation) | 1987 |
| The First Three EPs | 1987 |
| Live At The Fillmore West | 1996 |
This was a band formed in the folk revival of the 1960s which gained its psychic power from the San Francisco psychedelic scene. "Country Joe" is Joe McDonald http://www.countryjoe.com, an old Navy vet who grew up in dreadful El Monte, California. After the Fish broke up, Country Joe performed solo for some time as I recall. I saw him once in a live concert in the 1980s, he was awesome. The name "Country Joe" is a reference to the military's code name for Stalin during WWII; "the Fish" is a reference to a line in Mao's writings. This band was capable of astute satire, "Superbird" and the "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag," and a lot of mundane hippie music ("Porpoise Mouth," for instance). The Web page at http://www.well.com/~cjfish/ is quite good, you should find everything you need there. The band released two good albums and a crazy third one, then a few of its members went away and did something else, leaving Joe McDonald and Barry Melton to keep things together for two more albums, after which the whole thing disintegrated. Barry Melton eventually became a lawyer, gee, I guess the Sixties didn't destroy his brain or anything...
Country Joe and the Fish are often dismissed as trivial -- Wilson and Alroy, for instance don't cover them, not even George Starostin, but there's a sort of silly fun about listening to this band. This stuff really typified "hippie culture" music in an important way, and that's probably why an early version of the "Rolling Stone Guide to Music" claimed that it was the mark of a "card-carrying freak" to own a Country Joe and the Fish album. So here we go...
--Samuel Fassbinder
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
This album has "Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine," about a witch (well, a genuine witch, no doubt, and not simply a bad word for a woman) somewhere in the scene, "Section 43," the Fish's most famous instrumental, and "Superbird," Country Joe's parodic impression of former President Lyndon Baines Johnson. A lot of the early tracks are bluesy ballads with standard chord patterns. None of the music besides "Section 43" and the similarly-instrumental "The Masked Marauder" is terribly remarkable as far as its quality is concerned, though the lyrics alone are worth the price of the album. This is, after all, Country Joe and the Fish, a celebration of the simple charms of hippiedom. A highlight is the song "Bass Strings," about smoking marijuana, and the two next songs are pretty good, too, "The Masked Marauder" and "Grace".
In fact, come to think about it, the end of the album puts together some good psychedelic stuff. This is pot psychedelia, not LSD psychedelia, mind you -- there's no real sound effect to this stuff, the organ is cheesy, this music has all of the charm of those stoned rap sessions on That '70s Show. A lyric from "Bass Strings" puts this in writing: "Get so high this time/ that you know I'll never touch the ground." Oh sure, the lyric repeats LSD over and over again, but THC, for those of you who are interested enough to look it up in the search engine at Chemfinder (http://www.chemfinder.com/) is a tarry substance that accumulates in your body, so your tolerance for pot goes up without really coming down. This is music for remembering when you were stoned, while not being stoned at the moment yourself, which is good, you don't want to abuse it.
There's a sizable difference between the Fish version of psychedelia and (for instance) early Pink Floyd, and it has to do with the hippie movement's lack of concern with "professionalism." One of the defining things about being a hippie was in doing things which anyone could do, in keeping it simple so as to avoid being an elitist. Thus the hippie fondness for handcrafted stuff, simple games, meditation. The Fish even came out with a board game, it's posted on the Web although not in a good format, so I'd like to buy an original copy.
At any rate, that's probably how the cheesy organ got into this music, more a failure to be pretentious than a pretentious failure, and I think you really have to have that attitude to enjoy this stuff, otherwise you might as well be listening to Floyd's Piper At The Gates Of Dawn or the Airplane's After Bathing At Baxters or The United States Of America or something with a higher-octane psychedelic twang. Or maybe you might listen to this stuff only to decide that you want music to a faster tempo -- "andante" is a word I'd use only for the faster Fish tunes. It has to be remembered, though, that none of the melodies of this album, most of which were composed by Country Joe McDonald, is anything close to being obnoxious, and all of it is at least minimally charming. There's definitely a place for this stuff in my CD library. Give this one a high seven.
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
This album is a lot like the last one, it's contiguous with Electric Music, but it gets a slightly higher rating, for several reasons. First of all, it has the "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag," Country Joe McDonald's parody of Vietnam War rhetoric, "Well it's one-two-three, what are we fightin' for?/ Don't ask me I don't give a damn/ Next stop is Vietnam/". Everyone remembers the Woodstock performance, when Country Joe changed the Fish Cheer: "Gimme an F" "Gimme a U" "Gimme a C" Gimme a K"... Well, that's not on this album, you'll have to purchase the Woodstock album to find that, or better yet go see Country Joe live, he is in fact still touring.
This album also has "Who Am I" and "Magoo," which are existential statements. "Who Am I" is great because the lyric really makes you wonder why people bother with their mainstream versions of life. The refrain is: "Who am I/ To stand and wonder, to wait/ While the wheels of fate/ Slowly grind my life away. Who am I ?" And one of the verses brings us to reflect upon the struggle for survival in all its meaninglessness: "And now my friend we meet again/ We shall see which one will bend/ Under the strain of death's golden eyes/ Which one of us shall win the prize/ To live/ and which one will die"
I guess it tells you why a lot of people don't reflect. If people faced up to what they were doing, they'd hate it, so instead they distract their reflective selves with participation, although anyone can see that they hate that, too. The fact that you're wondering about this stuff means you don't get it, or maybe you DO get it, which is even worse. "Magoo," similarly, reminds me of the "don't change" lyric on the Jefferson Airplane's song "Greasy Heart," telling us "stay as you are" as thunder crashes around our eardrums.
This album also has "The Bomb Song" and "The Acid Commercial," revved-up pieces of profound silliness, the titles do tell you what they're about so I shouldn't have to elaborate. "Eastern Jam" and "Colors for Susan" end the album with a psychedelic jam on a par with "The Masked Marauder" from the previous album. "Colors for Susan" has this succession of chords played in such an excruciatingly-slow progression that you really wonder how they managed to pay attention to the script throughout the entire song. The trick, of course, is that if YOU pay attention to this stuff, it'll shut off your short-term memory and you'll forget that you heard any of it, which was apparently the point of playing those chords that way (according to a review of Electric Music posted on amazon.com). Good stuff, not outstanding, but that's not the point. Country Joe and the Fish is a successful relic of a particular time and place. Give this one a low 8.
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
This album doesn't have the stony vibes you can hear at the end of the first two. Well, really it's that it doesn't have the dizzying musical adjustments of "Colors For Susan" or "Section 43," there are pieces that are kind of like that, though they aren't as good. On Together, the band composes the pieces all together instead of having Country Joe do most of the work, so the vibe is uneven, punctuated by brainy moments here and there. "Rock And Soul Music" begins the album, it's the Fish take on James Brown, with lots of great guitar and a silly background with screaming girls. "Susan" is a delicate tune with meandering guitar, it loses something over the tunes of similar tempo in the first two albums because it's not as musically weird. "Mojo Navigator" is David Cohen's or Barry Melton's voice (I think) over mediocre rock, maybe it's their take on Jim Morrison or something.
"Bright Suburban Mr. & Mrs. Clean Machine" is the Fish jab at straight America. The "Good Guys/ Bad Guys Cheer" is hilarious, "The Streets Of Your Town" is Barry Melton's song against New York City, America's most over-rated hangout. I can totally relate, having had a similar experience in September of 1984. Hmmm. Nostalgia for bad experiences in the '80s, that's got to say something. "The Fish Moan" is unimportant, "The Harlem Song" is a parody of good old-fashioned White racism," Waltzing In The Moonlight" is some boring hippie nonsense done to the cha-cha-cha, "Away Bounce My Bubbles" is almost like Gregorian chanting but is considerably less interesting, "Cetacean" is Bruce Barthol's attempt to compose a tune as stony as the ones on first two albums, he almost pulls it off but it gets mixed in with imitation Hollies or bubblegum-rock or something along those lines. We finish up with a good hypnotic Vietnam protest, "An Untitled Protest," a tune reminiscent of Phil Ochs' "White Boots Marching In A Yellow Land" (off the Tape From California album) though Ochs' lyrics are of course better.
Country Joe and the Fish were an (initially) agit-prop band with a good sense of humor, an elevated consciousness, and a solid subcultural background. For those reasons, I really want to sing with them on every track. On albums such as Together, however, their mediocrity really shines through as their most prominent feature on about half of the tracks. Everything on the album is innocuous, but there's nothing big here, though this album is good and I'll keep it. If there's anything of any force to recommend this album, it's that it was made during the 1960s, a period of musical history that put the others to shame with its creative spunk, while the political world of that time brought down the curtains upon a then-raging Keynesian idealism while the Soviet world brought down creative Marxism with tanks in Prague. I want to revive the issues George Starostin brought up at http://starling.rinet.ru/music/essay1.htm.
What's more, we can safely say at this point that unless the protesters who showed up in Seattle and in Quebec City actually do prevent the world from becoming a boring slum of "free trade," we can't expect anything much more interesting from the future of music, or of anything else in culture, as our Nation heads into the dead end of privatization and as our elections are declared null and void by arbitrary Supreme Court decisions. If you want to hear better political music, listen to Phil Ochs; if you want hippie music, find some Jefferson Airplane or Hendrix or early Joni Mitchell, or maybe some late '60s Miles Davis, if you're not the type to search for Greatful Dead bootlegs. If you want to hear something really creative, listen to late-period John Coltrane or late-period Eric Dolphy. If you're finished with all of that, and you're still looking for something new, you may wish to explore albums such as Together.
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