--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Bhairitu <noozguru@...> wrote:
>
> My 60's band often opened for the Fish. In fact at the 1967 New
Year's
> concert at the Eagles Auditorium most people left after we played the
> opening set and there was hardly any crowd for the Fish. That led
them
> into insisting we never open for them again. :-D
>
> By then they had become far removed from their earlier psychedelic
roots
> and the crowd was more into what we were doing than a rock band that
was
> playing baseball on stage.
>
> Country Joe McDonald is still around and writing music. I saw him
> perform back in 2006 at a protest in Walnut Creek. He has some new
> songs about Iraq but the crowd pleaser was still "1-2-3 what are we
> fighting for."
It must have been fun to open for them, back in the day. The
group of hippies I promoted rock concerts and light shows with
back in that era never hired Country Joe, so I never got to meet
them. I did attend many of their concerts however.
A few years ago, still living in Santa Fe, I developed a nostalgia
Jones, fortuitously just after discovering how cheap used CDs
were on Amazon. So I invested a few bucks and gathered up a
collection of "the music of my formative youth." We're talking
Quicksilver and the Dead and Jimi and Janis and Moby Grape
and the Steve Miller Band and Jefferson Airplane and the
Byrds and others of the psychedelic era. Stuff I'd once owned
on vinyl but sold off years ago, after getting tired of moving
around twenty boxes of LPs.
I sat down and re-listened to them all on CD, and interestingly
wound up dividing them into two distinct categories. The first
was "Hey, I really was onto something,...these guys were great,
and still are." The second category was, "There is no question
about it...I was stoned." Suffice it to say that the music in the
former category "held up over time," whereas the latter did not. :-)
Country Joe wound up in the "I was stoned" category. In retro-
spect I find myself embarrassed by my affection for their
psychedelia. Jimi and isolated moments of the Dead's work
wound up in the "I was onto something" category; their music
is as astounding and as vibrant to me today as it was then.
Janis, not so much...especially with her first meth-head band,
Big Brother. Moby Grape and the Steve Miller Band both did
some remarkable work that holds up for me over time, but
they don't have that same phwam! that Jimi had, or that
Garcia had when he was on one of his cosmic rolls. Quicksilver
I can really groove to only if I -- TM puja-like -- allow my mind
to gracefully float on how much fun they were to party with.
Although I'm still a big fan of their version of "Mona," which
gave guitarists Gary Duncan and John Cippolina ("the Agony
and the Ecstasy") a chance to really stretch it out in long,
back and forth guitar duels. It was primitive stuff, musically,
but it had energy and enthusiasm. (Since you're into astrology
and all, the four guys in Quicksilver were all Virgos, with only
two birthdays between them.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D79ujliNh4Q
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D79ujliNh4Q>
Not all of the Byrds' stuff holds up for me, but some -- espec-
ially from The Notorious Byrd Brothers era -- still does. I can
still somehow psychically springboard off of this one into
the highest moments of that high time for me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWhgLjim6Rc
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWhgLjim6Rc>
