Country Joe and The Fish
I Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die

GIMME AN F! --------> F!!!

GIMME AN I! --------> I!!!

GIMME AN S! --------> S!!!

GIMME AN H! --------> H!!!

WHAT'S THAT SPELL ??? --------> FISH !!!

WHAT'S THAT SPELL ??? --------> FISH !!!

WHAT'S THAT SPELL ??? --------> FISH !!!

That day at Woodstock was something like that, only instead of an innocuous "fish" it was another message meant for spelling. And what might that four-letter word, equally outrageous, that starts with "F" in English...? The answer is as obvious as the indignation that message, chanted in unison by a crowd of filthy unkempt hippies, provoked in the souls of all the "right-thinking" people of the New Continent. Today we would laugh about it; but on THAT stage and in THAT context, THOSE 4 letters were truly the cry of a generation that had had enough, of that inexplicable idiotic Indochinese massacre. And without much philosophizing, it spoke loudly and clearly (too clearly, to be misunderstood) thus introducing the dance rhythm of a "shameless" country rag: the same one that opens the present album, the work of the sarcasm and macabre irony of a strange social specimen from El Monte, California, born in 1942. Someone who had even served in the Navy, but seeing him stoned on that stage few would have believed it, and now he amused himself by mocking the puff-tongued proclamations of the camouflaged establishment: "Come on, you tough guys, Uncle Sam still needs your help! Put those books away and grab a rifle, you'll see we'll have a hell of a time!". And the "one, two, three" trailblazer for that strange chorus paved the way for a deep reflection... one of those: "But what are we fighting for? Don't ask me, for all I care... Yay, yeah!!! We'll all die!!!". And Uncle Sam's old America shamefully retreats to a corner, while Joe the Countryman speaks with equal sarcasm, almost like a carnival barker inviting children to the rides: "Come on fathers, don't hesitate, send down your sons before it's too late, and be the first on your block to have a son come home in a box!!!". And off with the dances, mUUUsic!!! (before the bombs...)

Three-quarters of an hour of music (year 1967) to understand that that debut of electricity "for the mind and body" could not remain isolated; and minute after minute you realize that the opening anthem was just the first brick of a castle, the first stretch of a wonderful parabola on the roads of a California bubbling with notes, the first jolt of an explosion of creativity that those years narrate like few others. Minutes to spend rediscovering the folksinger DNA of McDonald, who in "Who Am I?" picks up an acoustic and imagines life flowing under his eyes, him standing there listening to "the echo of his melancholy," the soft weeping that resonates inside all of us when we take a little time to ask ourselves - "why"...?

Minutes to spend succumbing to the fabulous acid visions of a "Pat's Song" that we all imagine set in a timeless summer, while among little bells and guitars we see this girl of whom nothing is known, except that flowers encircle her hair and dolphins push up to the shore to kiss her hands, while her body blends with the sand and, a chorus of dancing children around her, "her smile will color the sky". It's the summer of love par excellence, after all, but even in summer sadness doesn't leave you and thus comes "Rock Coast Blues," to bring a gust of bittersweet disillusionment. It's the summer in which Country Joe chooses a new Muse, "Janis," to replace the "Grace" of one album before; and in which to the notes of "Thought Dream" David Cohen's organ can alter the very perception of reality, just as Barry Melton's guitar can take the path of an "Oriental jam" just to say that India had never been so close, and that after the Byrds and Mike Bloomfield the raga no longer fears electricity. And "Magoo" could have been recorded by the Airplane, with the same reverberations and dissonances, and Jerry Garcia for his solo records could have thought of an equally bewildered and "metamorphic" "Thursday" - several movements fitted into 3 minutes and 20 of pure Genius.

Colors, new colors in closing. Not for Grace nor for Janis, only for Susan. And an idea not at all vague of what that material called "folk" could become in contact with the boiling spirits of the Bay Area: Bruce Barthol's bass and some gentle crash from Chicken Hirsh forming a pillow on which to gently lay a dreamy rarefied guitar. A pillow no less attractive than its "surrealistic" contemporary (and we are still in that fateful year, eh...).

1967. Indeed.