Country Joe & The Fish - Disc of the day

Country Joe & The Fish
Electric Music For The Mind And Body

(Vanguard, 1967)

Berkeley activists usher in a new dawn with acid-drenched debut album…

Buying a record on the basis of the cover alone is a gamble, but in this age of ‘stream before you buy’ downloads, it remains an exhilarating leap into the unknown. I first saw the sleeve artwork of Electric Music For The Mind And Body appear during the BBC’s mid-’90s rock series Dancing In The Street. I knew then, even before I’d heard the tremulous, lysergic R&B contained within, it was an album I had to own. An intriguing, telescopic view of the liquid light show happenings at the Avalon Ballroom, the sleeve design remains a classic period image. Like fellow San Francisco psych-pioneers The Charlatans, Country Joe McDonald and his guitar-playing partner Barry ‘The Fish’ Melton began as a coffeehouse jug band duo who, caught up in the radical politics of the Berkeley campus and propelled by top-grade Owsley LSD, would go on to create this early totem of psychedelic revelry. At the heart of Electric Music… lies the 7-minute Section 43 – a hazy instrumental led by the kaleidoscopic stylings of organist David Cohen. With its needling guitar breaks and misshapen rhythms, it is a sound that seems to stream directly through the grey Bay Area fog, a strange, gaping black hole hovering between the carnival blues of Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine and Flying High and the echo chamber-hypnosis of Bass Strings and Grace (the latter a paean to Jefferson Airplane’s Ms Slick). Two years after this album paved the way for a clutch of Haight-Ashbury classics and a slew of piss-poor imitations, the band would be presented to audiences across the world via the Woodstock movie and their performance of anti-Vietnam rant, I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag, but in 2008 Electric Music… still stands up as their most potent work. Fantastic cover too.

Ross Bennett

Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 9:55 AM GMT 02/06/2008

Further Listening

Country Joe & The Fish - I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die (Vanguard, 1967)

The Doors – The Doors (Elektra, 1967)

Jefferson Airplane – After Bathing At Baxter’s (RCA, 1967)

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