79. Country Joe & The Fish — Electric Music For The Mind And Body (1967)
Published in
2 min readAug 4, 2020
- There’s something odd about a socialist psych rock band forming in San Francisco under the name of “Country Joe and the Fish,” but here we are. This is a thoroughly solid, unexciting rock album for me. You get real hints of the Woody Guthrie-influenced folk music that this group started out making, and there are hints of something potentially really great here. The lead guitar work jangles around inventively, the music is just weird enough, the vibe is smoky and laid back.
- It’s weird living in San Francisco and listening to these throwbacks to a different time in the city. Haight Street is still a pretty weird place, but I wonder if it had the same kind of income inequality then as it has now. The city was clearly once primed for socialistic instincts; it’s arguably even moreso now, as evidenced by, uh, me, a dude working in tech making good money married to a lawyer who very much thinks we need to eat the fuck out of the rich. But it’s perhaps too split now; we don’t even get great art anymore, because the artists can’t survive here, and if they choose to make money they stick with that, and we end up with nothing of great value besides a few patents and another food delivery startup robbing restaurants of revenue til the cows come home.
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