Country Joe & The Fish - She's A Bird

 #Country Joe & The Fish #psychedelic rock #folk rock #psychedelic folk rock #psychedelic blues rock #acid rock #singer-songwriter #1960s

Although Country Joe and the Fish were together only four short years, the band’s political stance and eclectic rock left an important legacy. “Largely forgotten as one of the giants of psychedelic rock,” wrote Joel Selvin of MusicHound Rock, “Country Joe and the Fish towered over their contemporaries….” The band’s 1967 debut, Electric Music for the Mind and Body, remains one of the definitive psychedelic albums of the era, while “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” inspired thousands to protest the Vietnam War. The band received equal billing with San Francisco groups like the Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, and Jefferson Airplane in the late 1960s, headlining at the Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore Auditorium. Country Joe and the Fish received their greatest attention and are most remembered for their pivotal performance at Woodstock in 1969 and inclusion in the film, Woodstock. With songs that included references to politics and drugs, the band represented a perfect marriage between the radicals of Berkley and the hippies of San Francisco.
Joe McDonald’s parents were Communist workers who named their son after Russian Communist dictator Joseph Stalin. Born in 1942 in Washington, D.C., he grew up in the Los Angeles suburb of El Monte, California. McDonald learned to play the guitar and joined local folk groups, but later ran away from home and joined the Navy for three years. After his discharge, he moved to Berkley where he played guitar and harmonica in the Berkeley String Quartet and Instant Action Jug Band. “Country Joe and the Fish,” noted Bill Belmont on the Well website, “came about as part political device, part necessity, and part entertainment.”
At the end of 1965 McDonald gathered Barry Melton, Richard Saunders, and Carl Shrager from the Instant Action Jug Band, then added Bob Steele to form the first version of Country Joe and the Fish. This acoustic lineup cut two tracks, “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag,” an anti-Vietnam song, and “Superbird,” a political satire. McDonald and Melton then played for a short time as a folk duo before putting together a second, electric version of the band with Paul Armstrong, Bruce Barthol, David Cohen, and John Francis Gunning. “Bass Strings,” from their “white EP,” received radio play, and the group’s manager, Ed Denson, secured a record deal with Vanguard at the end of 1966.
When Country Joe and the Fish released Electric Music for the Mind and Body in 1967, it quickly became one of the definitive psychedelic rock albums of the era. “The record documented perfectly their unique conglomeration of folk, blues, country and rock,” wrote Marianne Ebertowski in the Marshall Cavendish History of Popular Music. “It also gave evidence of their involvement with the San Francisco drug and hippie scene on the one hand and the radical political movement on the other.” “Bass Strings” and “Flying High” contained overt references to drug use, while the aforementioned “Superbird” included a barbed attack on President Lyndon Johnson. “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” was left off the album at the request of Vanguard’s Maynard Solomon. “An unusual move,” wrote Bill Belmont, “by the company that staged the Weavers’ reunion concert at Carnegie Hall during the height of the anti-left sentiment in the United States.”
Country Joe and the Fish played at the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium throughout 1967. They performed at “The Human Be-In” at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, made an appearance at the Monterey Pop International Festival, and even visited the United Kingdom where they played at the Roundhouse in Camden Town. They released their second album, I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die, seven months after their debut. Many critics viewed the album as overindulgent, or as Richie Unterberger described it in All Music Guide, “the kind of San Francisco psychedelia that Frank Zappa skewered on his classic We’re Only in It for the Money.” Nonetheless, the title track was a keeper, noted Unterberger, “a classic antiwar satire that became one of the decade’s most famous protest songs, and the group’s most famous track.” While 1968’s Together received a warmer critical response, it would be the last album by the group’s classic lineup.  From: https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/country-joe-and-fish

Country Joe & The Fish - The Return Of Sweet Lorraine

  #Country Joe & The Fish #psychedelic rock #folk rock #psychedelic folk rock #psychedelic blues rock #acid rock #singer-songwriter #1960s

The “CJ Fish” album was the sixth to be issued by Vanguard Records in 1970, and was the last to feature new material from the group as the only subsequent album was the historical retrospective “Life And Times of Country Joe & The Fish”, issued the following year, by which time the band had broken up and Joe McDonald had embarked on a solo career. The new album can be seen as an attempt by Vanguard to see if they could steer the group towards a more mainstream pop rock position, with production duties being handled by Tom Wilson whose credits by then already included Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel. The group's earlier material had been extremely varied, ranging from blues and jug band music to folk, ballads and eastern-influenced rock, but they had gradually been cutting slightly more commercial material, some of which sat in the then-emerging country rock vein almost akin to Poco and others. This however was not a country rock album, but rather a pop rock one with a more uniform set of songs that producer Wilson was able to meld into a cohesive sounding whole.
The Fish line-up that cut the album was different from what is seen as the classic one. Gone were David Cohen, 'Chicken' Hirsh and Bruce Barthol, and now alongside Joe McDonald and Barry Melton were keyboard player Mark Kapner, bass player Doug Metzner (ex-Group Image) and drummer Greg Dewey (ex-Mad River). The album opens with Melton's very pop-oriented ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’, perhaps strangely not picked for single release at the time, and he also contributes the rockier ‘Silver And Gold’. Otherwise all the songs are from McDonald's pen, and are uniformly professional, varying from the gentle piano-led jazzy ‘Mara’ and ‘She's A Bird’ with its dreamy guitar soundscape midway through to ‘Rockin' Round The World’ which is much more upbeat and funky, as you would expect. ‘Hang On’ is an easy jog-along country-tinged song, while ‘The Baby Song’ is solidly romantic and miles from some earlier Fish material, though here is a later nod to the group's past with ‘The Return of Sweet Lorraine’. Hints of Joe's political leanings surface briefly on ‘Hey Bobby’, built on the well-trodden ‘Hang On Sloopy’ chord progressions, and the album closes with another easy mid-tempo poppy song ‘Hand Of Man’.  Before this however had come the longest track, ‘The Love Machine’, which allows much more instrumental interest. The new players, on other tracks professional but somewhat anonymous, put their heads above the parapet here with some of the invention of earlier Fish line-ups. They provide sudden keyboard interjections and solos, interesting bass runs and even a strong drum break, lifting this track as one of the most interesting and evocative of the band's history. Although quite different to much of what had gone before, this album can be seen as a solid addition to the group's canon, even though it was to be their swansong, and as such no collection should be without it.  From: https://acerecords.co.uk/c-j-fish