79. Country Joe and the Fish - Electric Music for the Mind and Body (May 1967)

1. Flying High

2. Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine*

3. Death Sound Blues 

4. Happiness Is a Porpoise Mouth*

5. Section 43*

6. Superbird

7. Sad and Lonely Times

8. Love

9. Bass Strings

10. The Masked Marauder

11. Grace

B+

The extent to which you enjoy this album really depends on your fondness for loose, organ-led, vaguely bluesy jams. The first half of the album is mostly more conventional songs, but by the time we get to "Section 43" things are firmly in "hippie jam band" territory. Which, if I'm being honest, I don't hate. I don't especially care for it, either. 

Things kick off with "Flying High", a loose number full of wandering guitars and nice bits of distortion, which is about a hitchhiker being picked up by a couple of guys and being dropped off at the airport with the fare back home. It's also, get this, about drugs! I know - crazy, right? Did you realise the words "high" and "trip" can have multiple meanings? This is the sort of thing we are dealing with on this album - Country Joe and the Fish are not subtle about their advocacy of what might generously be termed "alternative lifestyles". "Superbird", about LBJ, ends with a threat to make the President eat flowers and drop acid. "Bass Strings" ends with Country Joe whispering the word "LSD" over and over again. Thankfully, this is an early example of psychedelia, and the genre hadn't quite disappeared up its own arse yet. So, these songs have an immediacy and coherence that a lot of later releases lack. A song like "Sad and Lonely Times" even has a nice sort of early Belle & Sebastien feel. "Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine" is an intelligent, though faintly obnoxious, Dylanesque number about a woman on the fringes of the scene who buries her nose in books to attain knowledge, worships death, and "never learned country ways" - both a clever song, and annoying example of hippies placing primacy on experience. And really, I've never understood that - these people will mock you for reading something in a book, but believe every word of a conversation with a stranger! Don't they realise books are written by strangers? I don't know.

Anyway the last "song" song of note is "Happiness is a Porpoise Mouth", which is a pleasant bit of surreal poetry and shows the group's folk roots. The rest of the album is comprised of lengthy jams of varying degrees of success. The best is "Section 43", probably because it comes first and you aren't sick of the approach yet. The worst is probably "Grace", which is a formless paean to Grace Slick. "Bass Strings" is a pretty, mournful number that captures the hippie zeitgeist perfectly, but goes on far too long and features the ridiculous "LSD, LSD" coda, which must have seemed pretty wild at the time but which dates this album terribly. "The Masked Marauder" is the most organ-led, and most conventionally "psych jammy" piece. It's OK I guess.

Anyway, this is a fine album musically, but the lyrics are sort of all over the place, and if you dislike lengthy songs complete with section changes, or find hippies insufferable, then it may not be for you. It's annoying, because across the first half I really enjoyed this album, but it suffers from the usual fault of side two of the LP being mostly filler. But then, your mileage may vary - to people of a certain bent, the second half might be where the rich rewards are.

I don't know. I guess I forgot when I started this project that I was going to have to wade through a lot of hippie bullshit. It's annoying, because I enjoy the music on this album quite a bit, but the lyrical excesses are kind of absurd. Also, "Grace" and "Superbird" are just annoying.

I think the best way I can sum up this album is by saying that I enjoyed listening to it, but I cannot summon a single shit to give about it.