Customer Reviews

Feel Like I'm Fixin to Die

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The term "psychedelic" is even more elusive now than it was when it was first coined. If you ask someone what it means, you'll likely get a different answer from each person you ask. Does it mean throwing in funny sounds, fuzz and echo to make the music sound spacey? Hendrix and Pink Floyd did this, but they did much, much more. Country Joe and the Fish didn't do much of this, but some of their music still stands out in my mind as some of the very best of that era. One important characteristic of understanding this type of music is that in order to appreciate it, you have to really listen to it. Not as background or just for dancing. This was one of the big changes of the time. Instead of just dancing to music, you sat and listened to it, gathering the beauty, feelings and ideas inherent in the music itself. This album is a perfect example of this. You can't listen to it if you're in a hurry. Especially "Colors For Susan", which is a brilliant, subtle instrumental that paints pictures while you lay back and listen. I'm amazed that someone had the patience to write such a piece. It seems to go on forever, but, when it ends, I'm always disappointed, and want it to go just a little longer. My favorites exhibit a quality that I call, "shimmering beauty". The most outstanding example of this is "Thought Dream". The combination of Joe's smooth, soaring vocals, the melodic guitar figures and the solo organ lines just grab hold and go to the base of my spine and start the shivers right up my back.

The album cover is one of many of that time which pay tribute to the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper cover. The record is also an attempt to, as Sgt. Pepper did, create an album as a whole piece, from beginning to end, rather than just a collection of songs. In my opinion, it was successful. Since I got the CD version, I've listened to it dozens of times, and it still goes straight to my heart, and this is about 33 years later. Country Joe and the Fish, I thank you!

Lost beneath the interest that surrounded, and continues to surround, their first album ("Electric Music for the Mind & Body"), Country Joe & the Fish's second album merits serious consideration as the best "psychedelic" record ever made.

If psychedelic means highly innovative, ethereal music in which technical skill is secondary to the creation of pure "mood & feel" then virtually all of the tracks on this album qualify as winners. Skip the brilliantly metered, wonderfully sarcastic but (in psychedelic terms) incongruous jug-band opener, "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die", and go straight to "Magoo" (one of the most bizarrely structured, yet effective pieces of music produced by this or any other group) and "Colors for Susan" (a series of highly unusual "West Coast" guitar chords played at a snail's pace that succeeds in creating feelings of tension & relaxation at the same time) and drop into a world of weird, reflective and totally unique music that drifts, often precariously, between simplicity and brilliant ingenuity. "Pat's Song" & "Janis" could have been naively wistful hippie "love songs" if it weren't for their marvellously odd arrangements; "Thursday" combines delicately haunting vocals with a stunningly beautiful organ & guitar break before flowing into "Eastern Jam's" first, wonderfully ecstatic guitar solo, and "Who Am I" & "Rock Coast Blues" should be standard folk & blues respectively, but they're not. What they all are, and add up to, is a near perfect example of music from a different time and place in which groups dared to push themselves to the limits of their creativity.

Flawed only by two irritating between-track jingles that forewarn of the mess that their third album "Together" was to become, "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die" remains as playable and interesting today as it was over 30 years ago... a definitive, totally forgotten gem.

In general, this release doesn't approach the power and mystical satisfaction of their first album, ['Electric Music for the Mind & Body'], but still, it has its relatively stunning moments. I've always heard this basically pleasant release more as background music, but decided to finally give it the careful listen it probably deserves.

"The Fish Cheer"/"I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag" is a satirical anti-[Vietnam]war jug band piece, which is very well designed and very well played/sung [unrated].

"Who Am I?" [5 stars] has an introductory [and recurring] chorus which is lilting and tender, and a series of somewhat abstract but also very emotional meditations on the [authors'] failure to receive what life/death gives and takes away. One needs to listen to this one rather closely, as it refuses to jump out and grab one by the scruff of the neck.

"Pat's Song": Joe's 1st love song on the album. Beautiful lyrics, and great organ solo by Cohen & lead guitar solo by Melton [a little long, though]; next, a bell solo morphs into a short tarantella, after which the second verse starts, and the song repeats all the way through, except for leaving out the bell and tarantella sections. [4½ stars]

"Rock Coast Blues" [5 stars] a bouncy but mournful blues tune delivered with Joe's patented tongue-in-cheek humor. A couple of years later, the band Mother Earth founded their entire sound based on the style of this piece, [or whatever regional source Joe got it from]. CJ might have been better at it than were Mother Earth, though I'm not sure.

"Magoo" starts out almost exactly like "Bass Strings" from the previous album, but has a more meandering melody. This one is very beautiful. At times the thunderstorm (sound effect) almost overpowers the music, depending on which speakers/headphones you are using. Includes a minute-long postlude, which begins as a beautiful acoustic guitar solo and finishes improbably with a short bluesy/jazzy riff [5 stars].

"Janis" [3 stars] is Joe's pleasant love song to/about Janis Joplin. No comparison whatsoever can be made with his love song for another San Francisco diva [Grace Slick] on the first album (emotionally, this one is warm and cuddly).

"Thought Dream" this song has four false starts while Joe is chortling in the background sounding like a Bible Belt preacher [with a gospel choir intoning underneath], before temporarily morphing into the short, bluesy "Bomb Song" and finally swinging into the song proper. It's difficult to characterize this one in terms of style, but the lyrics continue in a similar vein to what was started by "Who Am I?", at a slower tempo, and provide the beginnings of emotional resolution to questions raised by the earlier song. Fades with a quick recapitulation of the "Bomb Song". [4½ stars]

["Thursday" is 'prefaced' by the infamous "Acid Commercial", performed in a similar style as "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag", and at least as funny, and buzzy.]

"Thursday" [3½-4 stars]: what's this? Maybe jazz-folk-rock? The very few lyrics serve to introduce the 'topic' of this medium-tempo jam tune (2 acoustic guitars + electric bass). There's a somewhat tepid organ solo, then a longer, inspired [cleanly picked] electric guitar solo. After the second vocal chorus, there is a brief solo on the cymbals, then . . .

we immediately segue to the next song ["Eastern Jam"] [2½ stars]: the drum kit starts playing as the acoustic guitar [the main coloration up to this point] drops out. This is in identical tempo and key to that of "Thursday", and initially it is identical in feel, but now all electric, with drums. Various duets and trio arrangements emerge one after another as the players continue to jam together, beginning in relatively mellow acid rock style, gradually becoming strident towards the climax.

"Colors for Susan" [4 stars]. This is a long, very slow acoustic two-guitar duet (mostly just strummed chords), seasoned with mallet rolls/hits on the cymbals, occasional electric bass riffs, and bells. All in all, very soothing to listen to.

From the opening track,"I feel like I'm fixing to die rag" to the final instrumental "colors for Susan",this is a wondrous musical trip. Psychedelia at its finest, in the tradition of early Jefferson Airplane, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Doors, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. I feel Vanguard, the company that recorded this album and all the Fish albums was more concerned about audio quality than any other record company of the 60's. It really shows with the clarity of the instruments and sounds and the separation of sounds. The searching poetry and psychedelic instrumentation here are just an unbeatable combination for lovers and collectors of psychedelic and early 60's music as well as people who are just getting interested. In the culture of the 60's, when the Fish piece was called "Colors for Susan", you saw those colors. "Thought Dream" was a true mind excursion. These guys knew what it was about and after them, all your psychedelic "collections" of songs from the 60's belong in the trash. This is the real deal.

...was the title of the review-via-reminiscense I originally started writing, but it inexorably turned into a personal re-living of a particular year when Country Joe (along with Spirit, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver, the Dead, HP Lovecraft and a lot of other SF-sound bands) was the theme music for my own off-kilter real-life summer movie about being a Teenage Hippy In Love. That review ended up as something else entirely, its relevance best summed up by saying that this album, along with their first, Electric Music for the Mind and Body, captures, for me, the spirit of psychedelia, the essence of the Summer of Love, the sense, in that Era, that somehow the potential for greater and freer self-invention than had ever been possible before was being unleashed, and that this would change the world.

More fools, we. The Old Hippy's Lament.

Anyway, give this a listen. It may require some parameter-realignment for younger folks, or people steeped in modern music that is seldom as spare or as gloriously unconstrained by musical precedent or expectation as this. If, as some intimate, these albums by CJ and the Fish sometimes show underwhelming instrumental technique and musical sophistication, I say they benefit thereby, as the musical "innocence" displayed seems to have facilitated the creation of music that is wonderfully inventive and somehow, pure. And if, as some others intimate, the music sometimes brazenly displays another kind of creativity, facilitated by powerful psychedelic drugs, I say "So what?" Music is written to accomodate people celebrating the humors of Venus, Mars and Bacchus, why not Morpheus as well?

And that's what this music is. A blissful, mystic, stoned-out pean to possibility, to shared moonlight, kisses at the edge of consciousnees, ecstatic dance at noon and always, always, this newborn thing, Love. I keep coming back to that, about 1967. When you listen to Porpoise Mouth, or Pat's Song, or Janis, you hear love songs for first loves, searingly sincere. Compositions like Grace or Magoo, or Colors for Susan show a willingness to pare the music down to a perfect, no-thing-more-than-necessary, purity and pace, as needed to convey a mood or color or emotion.

As conceded, this music surprised me with how powerfully it summoned up memory of that experience, of that time...so powerfully it must surely overwhelm any modest critical facilities I might otherwise apply to it. So the only recommendation I can honestly make is to observe that for myself, and others, Country Joe and the Fish ARE The Sixties. Which recommendation might get the curious to listen, and maybe hear an echo, bounced off Mars perhaps, of the tremendous, naive, and always-doomed yawp of Love still resonating from those years.

I went to Berkeley in the 1960's and I had forgotten how much I like Country Joe and the Fish, until I heard them on youtube. Had to get this album and it met and sustained my good memories. There isn't a better song than "Who Am I?" and with the change of a few words the "Fish Rag" would be, unfortunately, relevant today. Got the album in a group of three and when I listen to them, I can close my eyes and walk down Telegraph Avenue (in Berkeley).

I bought this for the title song, "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag," to use in the Vietnam War Literature class I'm teaching. My high school students loved it immediately.

country Joe was quite the character and the fish cheer is what most remember but give this a listen WHO AM I is my favorite...shipped right away and in excellent condition, thanks amazon

I bought this on vinyl the day it was released in my home town. I had played the grooves out of the first Fish album and this one was no different. I recently decided that I wanted to hear this one again after so long a time. I really was surprised at the way that this captures the feel and mood of that era. For a while I was back in time and I really didn't want to return to 2007. A great experience. Forget about being analytical or critical of the level of guitar work or instrumental expertise and realize that it was all about painting pictures and creating a feeling and a mood and sometimes relating a message.

One of the most authentic recorded examples of the San Francisco Sound. Don't be put off by the raucous cynicism of the all-too-relevant title track ... the rest of the album is mellow, delicate and often very beautiful. No collection of vintage psychedelia is complete without this and ELECTRIC MUSIC.