The Collected Country Joe and the Fish by Country Joe & The Fish

The Collected Country Joe and the Fish

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The Collected Country Joe and the Fish

Features

Audio CD (October 25, 1990)

Number of Discs: 1

Label: Vanguard Records

Catalog Number: 111

Reader Reviews
This is, so far, the best commercially available album that chronicles "the band from Berkeley."Though no live tracks are included, several cuts from every studio album performed by Country Joe and the Fish is included here. The band Country Joe and the Fish started out as a "jug band" from Berkeley,CA.The leader of this band is a musician and social activist named Joe McDonald. Anyway, as the 60s era progressed, CJ&F became a band of protest and psychedelia.To illustrate my point, let's look at the first few tracks. The first track well demonstrates the overall theme of the band's future work and is a tune which was aimed at then President Lyndon Johnson-which may had created a lot of controversy at the time. On this CD, you are exposed to jugband, psychedelia, and folk rock,not to mention anti-war satire.Let us explore some of the psychedelia.The song "Bass Strings," the Rag Baby single version, is an excellent example of the band's psychedelic side. Here, you hear the playing of the harmonica-which f a d e s into the sound of a dreary organ.In addition,the lyrics,well, has cryptic references to hallucinatory drugs-that is all I am going to say. The next track, Section 43, is another trippy song/Rag Baby single.An instrumental, Section 43 is organized in such a way that you may compare it to weaving in and out of a dream-beautiful piece. The song "Not so Sweet Martha Lorraine" is an organ-drenched classic that is about a reclusive woman who is unpredictable and is obsessed with death. The landmark theme, in my opinion, is the band's anti war stance.The controversal "Fish Cheer/Fixin To die Rag" is a song mainly about satire and giving an "in your face" approach to expressing their anti-war attitude. On a serious side, the song "An Untitled Protest" is a song of both poetry and tragedy. Here, McDonald goes into extreme graphical detail about the atrocities of the Vietnam war. These are just some of the highlights of this CD. There are other tracks included which contains references to hard luck(Sad and Lonely Times,Janis) and substance abuse (Flying High, track 4) which exhibit the common qualities of the sound of the 1960s. Though it would be nice if some live tracks or some outakes were included in this CD, this CD is a good place to start.

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