Dirty Hippie steals from Jazz Titan?
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Artist:
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Album:I Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die
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Track:I Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die Rag
Somebody needs to thank me. I just spent about an hour digitizing an LP by Country Joe and the Fish, solely to populate this post. But my main point:
The song I Feel Like I'm Fixin To Die Rag is the only one that anyone remembers from this band, and I now think that a large part of the music is stolen from Louis Armstrong. Attached to the post is Country Joe's anti-Vietnam War anthem (sans The Cheer, which can be found in Comments). Listen to this, and then listen to Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives and Sevens doing Muskrat Ramble (in Comments). The first time I heard Muskrat Ramble I thought it sounded damn familiar.
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Why do you need to thank me? Other than this song, Country Joe sucks - big-time. In the late sixties, I couldn't take enough drugs to make this disc sound good after track one (and I tried. I really did.) Forty years later, it's even worse. Oh, Barry Melton plays some ok psycho-delic guitar when allowed to, but Country Joe (named after Joseph Stalin! by his leftist parents, who thought Stalin, the murderer of milliions, a hero) is a shitty songwriter and a lousy vocalist and drags it to its doom. There is more hippie garbage on this than outside of Alice's Restaurant after a week-long tribal love-in.
And the Fish cheer, where he apparently spells out F-U-C-K as in "Gimme an F" etc., as controversial as that supposedly was, is near-incomprehensible on the record after "Gimme an F". Intentional, or just horrible sound engineering? Have a listen and see, if I didn't tell you what it was, if you could tell.
And that's enough from Mr. Cranky today. More later this weekend (but not more Country Joe).
Comments (21)
And here, in all its incomprehensible glory, is the Fish Cheer
Country Joe was unquestionably a ripper-off of earlier and more talented bluesmen - his style is uindeniably familiar, but I'm not enough of an acoustic blues purist to identify the tune he has "borrowed". I would agree that it's about as original as a 1969 Page/Plant composition
From Wikipedia:
In 2003 McDonald was sued for copyright infringement over his signature song, specifically the "One, two, three, what are we fighting for?" chorus part, as derived from the 1926 early jazz classic "Muskrat Ramble", co-written by Kid Ory. The suit was brought by Ory's daughter Babette, who held the copyright at the time. Since decades had already passed from the time McDonald composed his song in 1965, Ory based her suit on a new version of it recorded by McDonald in 1999. The court however upheld McDonald's laches defense, noting that Ory and her father were aware of the original version of "Fixin'", with the same section in question, for some three decades without bringing a suit until 2003, and dismissed the suit. In 2006, Ory was ordered to pay McDonald $750,000 for attorney fees, and had to sell her copyrights to do so.
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I loved then, and still love now, a few tracks from their first album (and the "EP" versions). Never bothered much with the others. I have a high tolerance for music by dirty hippies, though, perhaps especially when the lead singer's mom used to stand in line in front of me at the grocery store.
There are a few songs of Country Joe's that don't suck - "Bass Strings" is one, and it seems to me that "Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine" wasn't so bad - but I wouldn't count this one among them. Yeah, it's iconic and all that, but hard to see how it could be any more ham-fisted, or less genuinely clever.
Great post. Always love to hear the Muskrat Ramble. And I always like hearing that someone else thinks "country Joe" is waaay overated. If not for this one song he wouldn't have had a career.
Hey careful what you say about the father of my nephew's (Andy's) scout troop pal... (it’s a small world sometimes)
I think the version of the chant you have posted is pre the change to the controversial chant - Originally It was F-I-S-H, at least according to this from bio site. http://www.countryjoe.com/cjmbio.htm
Now, as a piece of background, it is necessary to add that as an introduction to the "Rag" on the second LP, the band shouts in high school cheerleader fashion, "Gimmie an F, gimmie an I ..." then "What's that spell? What's that spell?" etc. and the audience yells "FISH." All very innocent; but in the Summer of 1968, at the Shaefer Summer Festival in Woilman Rink in New York's Central Park before about 10,000 people inside and about 10,000 people outside the fence, drummer Chicken Hirsh suggested altering the cheer to "gimmie an F-U-C-K". Some writers have claimed that this act was one of true defiance, outrage toward the system and statement of how youth felt at the time; no one, so far as we know ever asked "why" the Cheer was changed -- it just was and it stuck. Also at Central Park that night were a number of executives from the Ed Sullivan Show; they had asked the band to appear near Christmas time that year. The following week they signed the contract, and sent in the agreed upon performance payment in full with a request: please don't appear on the show -- keep the money.
Oh, and dermahrk, thank you....
Thank you also for one of the most pleasant week-long commutes in recent memory. I reached Track 41 in Washington Crossing this morning....
In the late sixties, I couldn't take enough drugs to make this disc sound good after track one (and I tried. I really did.) Forty years later, it's even worse.............that made me laugh out loud, really!
Good detective work! I'll confess loving this album when it came out, but I was a callow youth living in a town of drug-soaked hippie academic types. And I especially loved 'Martha Lorraine' - an intricately arranged piece that defines psychedelic rock. I listened out of curiosity a few years ago - what derivative mediocrity! Though 'Martha Lorraine' still sounds good.
Masoo - thanks for the legal update. I searched for evidence of a lawsuit on the long, long AllMusic.com paean to Joe, but it went unmentioned. It's said that Ory's family waited too long to sue, and suffered financially as a result. This does not make me feel any kinder towards Joe.
Ivylander / Jonh Ingram - all of the tracks you cite as tolerable are from their first album Electric Music For the Mind and Body, which I think I heard in some stupor. Unfortunately, I chose to spend my teenage money on this release and then was not inspired to expand my collection.
Waydutch - Thanks for the info about the Fish Cheer. It does sound like that second letter may be an "I", but the rest? You can't tell... And Joe, that revolutionary, has a son in the Boy Scouts? I'm snorting here...of course, I considered myself a hippie in high school, living with my parents in the suburbs of Michigan and Iowa.
There are perfectly good reasons why CJ & The F are not regarded as highly as their contemporaries (Moby Grape, The Airplane, The Dead, Quicksilver): they were boring as fuck live, had made only one decent album. But as my brethren above have commented, "Electric Music...," listened to under the influence, was a pretty arresting document of its moment. When it comes to bastardized versions of "Muskrat Ramble," I'll take Freddy "Boom Boom" Cannon.
Country Joe (or maybe the Vanguard label) should have been considerate enough to pay the Orys their share early on, it being the age of peace and love back then. One additional problem with the group was that Vanguard's producer, the blues scholar Sam Charters, had nowhere near the recording engineer's skills of, say, Jimmy Page, who ironically, failed to acknowledge composer credits for numerous old blues covered by Led Zeppelin.
What about Country Joe and the Fish's song "Thurday" (minus its excruciatingly bad short intro)? If it has any sins, they are of omission rather than commission. It's got a radically different sound and structure from anything from, say, 1965, and it works for me.
So they were boring as fuck live? Gee, and some bands have trouble recreating the album experience onstage.
Spike, since I went to the trouble of digitizing the whole album, which sounded pretty bad while I was recording it, each song has been loaded onto the iPod and will get at least one more play before going to that big Recycle Bin in the sky (or on my desktop). Maybe I'll change my mind...
dermahrk, a tangential note: It wasn't until recently that I realized that if I can digitalize vinyl and tapes, I can also digitalize streaming music from others' MOG posts, and the sound is not degraded. Others must have been doing this for a long time.
...this someone thanks you sir... is that Meatloaf in the new Avatar...?
Look again, Vannatta. That's Mr. "Let's Impeach The President", Neil Young.
Ahhh... good. I feel better now. ;)
What about the clean hippies? The ones that showered daily and changed their underwear and their bongwater...
Mike, please refer back to the picture at the top of this post. Does that look like a clean hippie?
The hell with that grubby loser. I mean, seriously, who speaks for the clean hippies? The ones that respected and loved their parents. The ones that listened to nothing more radical than the Strawberry Alarm Clock? The ones who stone-washed their embroidered jeans and tie-dye T-shirts on a weekly basis?