Country Joe and the Fish – Electric Music for the Mind and Body

Electric Music For The Mind And Body is the debut album by American band Country Joe And The Fish. Released in May 1967 by Vanguard Records, it was one of the first psychedelic albums to come out in San Francisco.

Tracks from the album and especially “Section 43”, “Grace” and “Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine” were heard on progressive San Francisco FM radio stations such as KSAN and KMPX. At the legendary Woodstock Festival in August 1969 they played among others the song “Love”. The track “Grace” is also a tribute to Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick.

The album was recorded during the first week of February 1967 at Sierra Sound Laboratories in Berkeley, California by Robert De Souza, produced by Samuel Charters, and released by Vanguard Records on May 11, 1967. Due to wear on the original master tapes, the album was remixed in 1982 and this remix was used for the first CD edition of the album in 1990. A new two-CD edition was released in 2013, which included both the original original mono and later stereo recordings. The liner notes for the 2013 release state that a performance of “Thought Dream” was included on the group’s next album, I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die.

Music critic Bruce Eder in a retrospective review for AllMusic, considers the album “one of the most important and timeless works of the psychedelic era”. The album was included in Robert Dimery’s 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

The swirling and distorted guitar and organ heard on the album are at the pinnacle of the group’s musical ingenuity.

Unlike Jefferson Airplane, who worked best in conventional song structures, and the Grateful Dead, who hadn’t yet figured out how to take their music into the recording studio, Country Joe & The Fish provided for the first time a fully formed, uncompromising, and yet utterly accessible and in fact, often enjoyable and witty body of psychedelic music. On the album the band embraced all aspects of the music, with an awesome diversity of explosive guitars and keyboards, on “Flying High”, “Section 43”, “Bass Strings” and “The Masked Marauder”, folk origins on “Sad And Lonely Times,” personal odes like McDonald’s to Grace Slick on “Grace” and overtly political riffs on “Superbird.”

From this historic album we will choose the track “Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine”.

Tracklist

Flying High 2:37
Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine 4:18
Death Sound Blues 4:21
Happiness Is A Porpoise Mouth 2:47
Section 43 7:23
Superbird 2:01
Sad And Lonely Times 2:21
Love 2:20
Bass Strings 4:58
The Masked Marauder 3:07
Grace 7:03