I enjoyed this post.
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, turquoiseb <no_reply@...> wrote:
>
> --- 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>
>
