The Mojo Collection. Various Mojo Magazine
boss Ahmet Ertegun – for an album to be called Stampede. But the record was abandoned amid squabbles over songs, arrangements and band leadership (the latter role increasingly nabbed by Stills, who had been to military school as a kid). Outside pressures didn’t help: Bruce Palmer had been arrested on a dope charge and deported to Canada. Ken Koblun, Young’s old friend from The Squires, came down to help out but went back to Canada when the tense atmosphere became too much. A summer single was released – two new songs, Steve’s Bluebird backed with Neil’s Mr Soul. Stills on one side, Young on the other, just as they were in reality – they were rarely in the studio at the same time, and Young was torn between quitting the band (which he did twice, over their decisions to appear on Johnny Carson’s mainstream Tonight Show and at the Monterey Pop Festival) and asking to rejoin. Differences aside, the music they were coming up with in the rescheduled sessions (some of it reworked Stampede material) was often superb.
‘We were just really discovering a lot of new things and experimenting,’ said Young, but in May 1968 – barely four months after the second album’s release – the band broke up. A third album appeared posthumously.
Country Joe And The Fish
I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die
San Francisco scenesters’ second, an essential acid rock milestone.
Record label: Vanguard
Produced: Samuel Charters
Recorded: Vanguard Records’ 23rd Street Studio, New York City; June–September 1967
Released: November 1967
Chart peaks: None (UK) 67 (US)
Personnel: Joe McDonald (v, g, o); Barry Melton (g, v, kazoo); David Cohen (o, calliope, harpsichord, g, v); Bruce Barthol (bs, hm, v); Gary ‘Chicken’ Hirsh (d); Ed Friedner (e)
Track listing: The Fish Cheer And I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die-Rag; Who Am I (S/US); Pat’s Song; Rock Coast Blues; Magoo; Janis (S/US); Thought Dream; Thursday; Eastern Jam; Colors For Susan
Running time: 45.03
Current CD: VMD 79266-2
Further listening: Electric Music For The Mind And Body (1967), the band’s debut, which McDonald has proudly described as ‘the best psychedelic rock record ever made by anybody in the world’.
Further reading: www.countryjoe.com. Apart from being excellently informative, McDonald’s website gives you the chance to be the first on your block to buy a Gimme An F … condom!
Download: Not currently legally available
‘Gimme an F … Gimme an I … Gimme an S … Gimme an H … What’s that spell? FISH! What’s that spell? FISH!’ Country Joe’s second album begins, bizarrely, in a stoned, subversive, demented parody of high school cheerleaders. But they actually had their roots in the traditional US jugband and folk scenes, before developing their sound to become the Bay Area’s foremost psychedelic adventurers, dizzyingly blending acid rock, satire, revolutionary politics and mischief.
The rollicking title song, a satirical, anti-war masterpiece, was written as America’s involvement in Vietnam deepened disastrously. ‘Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box’ is typical of the lyrics, sung to a disconcertingly jaunty tune while the band cheerily chant, ‘Psychedelic, psychedelic!’ in the background. The song remains McDonald’s personal favourite.
‘It’s affected so many people’s lives and it’s affected history. I don’t know if I can claim writing it because it just popped out of my head one day, but I’m most proud of facilitating that.’
Janis is a tender love song for McDonald’s former girlfriend Janis Joplin, while unlisted between Thought Dream and Thursday is The Acid Commercial, a jolly jingle advertising lysergic pursuits: ‘If you’re tired or a bit rundown/Can’t seem to get your feet off the ground/Maybe you ought to try a little bit of LSD!’
The outrageousness of The Acid Commercial still startles. ‘The Establishment weren’t paying attention to what we were doing so we were able to do anything we wanted,’ reasons McDonald. ‘We were the best ever psychedelic band.’
They certainly took their role as acid pioneers seriously. ‘I’ve taken LSD 300 times,’ boasted guitarist Barry Melton in 1968. In a truly hallucinatory twist the same Melton, in another life, was in 1985 named by the San Francisco Bar Association as Outstanding Lawyer In Public Service.
Cream
Disraeli Gears
The great virtuoso excess starts here.
Record label: Reaction (UK) Atco (US)
Produced: Felix Pappalardi
Recorded: Atlantic Studios, New York; May 8–19, 1967
Released: November 1967
Chart peaks: 5 (UK) 4 (US)
Personnel: Eric Clapton (g, v); Ginger Baker (d); Jack Bruce (b, v); Tom Dowd (e)
Track listing: Strange Brew (S); Sunshine Of Your Love; World Of Pain; Dance The Night Away; Blue Condition; Tales of Brave Ulysses (S); SWLABR; We’re Going Wrong; Outside Woman Blues; Take It Back; Mother’s Lament
Running time: 31.00
Current CD: Polydor 9819312 is a mono version and stereo version of the album plus outtakes, demos and BBC sessions over two discs
Further listening: Fresh Cream (1966); Wheels Of Fire (1968); Goodbye (1969); or the whole shebang on Those Were The Days (1997)
Further reading: Strange Brew (Chris Welch, 1988); Lost In The Blues (Harry Shapiro, 1992); Edge Of Darkness (Chris Sandford, 1994); http://twtd.bluemountains.net.au/cream/contents.htm(fan site); www.cream2005.com (official reunion site)
Download: HMV Digital; iTunes
On March 25, 1967, Cream arrived in New York for their first trip to America, performing I Feel Free and I’m So Glad five times a day for ten days on Murray The K’s pop show. With three days left on their visas, they went into Atlantic Studios to record their follow-up album to Fresh Cream.
Released in December 1966, Fresh Cream was a relatively straight-ahead homage to Eric Clapton’s blues influences, covering the songs of Robert Johnson, Skip James and Muddy Waters. But Disraeli Gears was a very different proposition for three reasons. The first was the flowering of the Bruce/Brown co-writing partnership. Nearly half the album is credited to them, including enduring Cream classics such as Sunshine Of Your Love and Tales Of Brave Ulysses. Of the former, Jack Bruce recalls: ‘Pete and I had been up all night trying to write stuff and getting nowhere. I started playing this riff. Pete was looking out the window and said, “It’s getting near dawn, and lights closed their tired eyes …”’
In addition, in Felix Pappalardi they found a producer who understood Cream in a way their manager and producer of Fresh Cream, Robert Stigwood, never would. Pappalardi’s tasteful production and Tom Dowd’s sensitive engineering brought Clapton’s new Hendrix-inspired tone and effects to the fore. Pappalardi was also an excellent musician and writer himself, credited along with his wife Gail Collins with Strange Brew and World Of Pain (a tragically ironic title, as Collins was to shoot her husband dead in 1983).
Finally, there was the influence of LSD. Songs like She Was Like A Bearded Rainbow (SWLABR) weren’t conceived on cups of tea. During a conversation about racing bikes, instead of saying