All My Love in Vain - Country Joe MacDonald
We looked at a Joe McDonald's straight country peach t'other day "Tonight I'm Singing Just For You" which may have put a lot of folks off for reasons best known to someone else because contract filler or not it is actually a fine effort but post Fish we find a Joe battered and bruised somewhat by the political counterculture pressures and we forgive him his so called 'straight' album which actually is honestly worth a play but here's another treat that is really well worth trying. Again from TWILIGHTZONE and with notes that bear another reading but go over there and download this great little forgotten gem. He can really write a song and really sing too! But what do I know "I'm Tired" . . . . . . . . to have assembled such a fine band around him it is a shame he didn't achieve more success with them.
Joe McDonald Paris Session 1973 - Twilightzone
TWILIGHTZONE says:
...Beginning in April 1971, McDonald became active in the growing antiwar movement and appeared at demonstrations in San Francisco and Washington, D.C......Together with Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, McDonald appeared during an FTA (Free the Army) tour of Vietnam that featured skits by former Second City members Ann and Roger Bowen. Although he became disenchanted with Fonda's political views* and left the show, the experience earned McDonald a spot on President Nixon's enemies list. Returning to the United States, McDonald recorded an EP with the San Francisco-based band Grootna. A solo performance at the Bottom Line was released as a live album, Incredible Live!, in 1972. During 1972 and 1973, McDonald performed with the All-Star Band, a group mainly comprising members of the Fish and Big Brother & the Holding Company. The band accompanied McDonald on his 1973 album, Paris Sessions.
This is really worth checking out . . . . . how to write songs that are pertinent to the then current political climate and can cook along with the best! Great band too with Pete Albin on bass, Ann Rizzo on Steel Guitar & vocals, Dorothy Moscowitz on piano and vocals, Tucki Bailey on sax, John Vierra on Moog, David Getz on drums, Phil Marsh on guitars, John Rewind on wah wah guitar !
* might need to research his falling out as politically left of field radices both should have been singing from the same sheet!
Notes here go some way further to explain the clash
Country Joe McDonald - Tonight I'm Singing Just For You - TWILIGHTZONE
At the time of this release, a lot of Country Joe's audience had the nerve to act surprised and put off when he released an "actual country" record......Fifty plus years on the 21st century listener need not heed those cultural limits of a bygone era. This is a fine record and dovetails perfectly well with its predecessor solo LP, Thinking of Woody Guthrie. - tkdcoach
Well said tkdcoach as this is lovely and surely we can all have a straight day and attempt some American Songbook classics? I have been a life long Country Joe fan from his work with his Fish and to an Art college movie soundtrack we saw that blew me away Quiet Days In Clichy (check it out, its Filth!) from my Henry Miller period (as a lusty student I read everything I could find!)
Quiet Days In Clichy (1970 film) wiki
Start the day with some
FISH for Breakfast!?
Thanks to Aquarium Drunkard!
Their version of the video didn't play so here t'is from elsewhere and hope its the same pice of film but the dedication is
It’s something about that shriek—the way it piercingly cuts through the otherwise bird-chirping and cawing dewy morning tranquility of what’s on screen. What is on screen is D.A. Pennebaker’s footage of Country Joe & the Fish performing “Section 43” at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival in California. Although it’s one scene in the larger sequence of a concert film that features monumentally historic performances of Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, The Mamas & the Papas, Janis Joplin and so many more—a document that seems to wholly embody the ’60s counter-culture—these five-and-a-half-minutes feel like something, just, a little different.
Now I LOVED the Fish and learned The F-I-S-H. Cheer by rote and played it segued into Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die Rag with Johnny Marter (yes that Johnny Marter - drummer per excellence and drummer with various bands including Mr Big - no, the REAL one, the British one!) 'til out fingers bled! I loved the Fish and bought the first two albums and by the time I got to art school was following Country Joe's every move and enjoyed his soundtrack to Henry Miller's Quiet Days In Clichy (check it out - its FILTH!) So this is why I post this from the Aquarium this morning and it takes me right back. Section 43 wasn't my favourite piece but I wholeheartedly agree with the author of the article here by c depasquale
