1084 - Mojo 96. Country Joe and the Fish - I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die (1967)

Track Listing

1. Fish Cheer And I Feel Like I'm Fixing To Die Rag
2. Who Am I
3. Pat's Song
4. Rock Coast Blues
5. Magoo
6. Thought Dream
7. Thursday
8. Eastern Jam
9. Colors For Susan

Review

Country Joe and the Fish are definitely one of my favourite Psych bands, together with the 13th Floor Elevators. Of course it has its not so great bits, but it is generally an amazing album.

The song that they are most famous for is the first one here, but it is really not representative of their style, it works as a novelty track parodying the redneck ra-ra-ra attitude to war and it is a pretty great country pastiche. The songs more representative of their style in the rest of the album have a very particular sound.

What stands out most about their style is their very unique guitar sound which punctuates the music in amazingly beautiful ways, as in the amazing Thought Dream. The 9 tracks in the album actually feel like more because most tracks have a suite structure where they change completely in sonority within each track. This also makes it hard to choose particular favourites. Still an amazing album throughout.

Track Highlight

1. Thought Dream
2. Pat's Song
3. Colors for Susan
4. Fish Cheer And I Feel Like I'm Fixing To Die Rag

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The title track remains one of the most popular Vietnam protest songs from the 1960s and originally appeared in a 1965 7" EP titled Rag Baby: Songs of Opposition. On the album version however, "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag" appears alongside "The Fish Cheer," which at concerts, became a Country Joe standard. At Woodstock, however, Joe had the crowd yell F-U-C-K instead of F-I-S-H. The title song faced a legal challenge from the estate of New Orleans jazz trombone pioneer Edward "Kid" Ory, whose daughter Babette claimed that McDonald appropriated the melody for his song from Ory's classic "Muskrat Ramble," as recorded by Louis Armstrong & his Hot Five in 1926. A 2005 judgment upheld McDonald's copyright on the song, claiming that Ory waited too long to make the claim.

Thought Dream: