They say that if you can remember the 60’s then you weren’t there ... well that’s true, sort of, so let me tell you what I do remember.Hippies, Flower Power, LSD, and Psychedelic Music were what the 60’s were about for most people, but the reality of the fact is that the 60’s were really the summer of 1967 and the spring of 1968 ... after that, though the look was there, the dreamer was waking to the reality of an acid trip that may have lasted just a bit too long. There are a couple of bands that float to the surface of everyone's mind from those heady days, Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Grateful Dead, The Jefferson Airplane, and a small cast of others which included Country Joe & The Fish.But, as today with the neo-psychedelic sound, there were only a handful who wrote music regarding, influenced, or to be listened to while using LSD ... it was those who dove deeply into the substance, who were so overwhelmed by the experience that they seemed compelled to try and capture this adventure in sound. These groups played live and became the soundtrack to people’s weekly adventures into the psyche of their own consciousness, at places such as The Fillmore and The Avalon Ballroom ... places where one could walk in, cop a tab, tune in turn on and be musically tripped out from 8 PM until 4 AM in the morning, with the undisputed leader of this adventure being Country Joe & The Fish, who’s every song seemed to be laced with acid.Trying to capture this live feel on record proved more then a challenge to say the least. More than likely these studio sessions were as acid fueled as the concerts, which often didn’t lead to a productive outcome, but when they did, it was pure magic. The songs seem so simple compared to the material done today by groups like The Church, Spacemen 3 or The Darkside ... but they were richly textured, with quite masked vocals, whispers of words, sounds that took advantage of the new stereophonic technology, bouncing music from one speaker to the other, all richly textured and often with a sly comic sense of the absurd.This was the beginning, this album, Electric Music For The Mind And Body was were it all started, the source from which the future of psychedelic music was to rise like giant orange flowers, growing past and through green clouds that carry moon beams to light your way in the darkness of a warm summer's eve on a San Francisco night.Let me see, there was Owlsley, Orange Barrels, Window Pains, Purple Haze, Silver Flake, Blotter ... and Country Joe & The Fish knew how to make all of them do what they did best ... trip you out.All of this being said, it's important to recognized that what Joe and his wayward cast of characters were laying down was actually a reworking of 'the blues,' and those musical attitudes are what made the music so instantly appealing and so perfect. Their reliance on something so rooted in the past, yet envisioned with the wonders of newly opened eyes and themes brought this album gracefully into a timeless present, where like 'the blues' this take on psychedelic music flowed over, was picked up and expanded on by later neo-psychedelic dreamers, where they added new complexities of visionary wonder that keep evolving, yet always as firmly rooted in what Country Joe & The Fish were doing here, as was 'the blues' to Country Joe.*** The Fun Facts: The final song on the album "Grace" was an homage to Grace Slick of The Jefferson Airplane, and the album images are from a live performance at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco.As to the band's name: The origin of the name appears to have come from the band's manager, Ed Denson, who coined the phrase drawing from Mao's saying about "the fish who swim in the sea of the people", with the Country Joe part having numerous variants, the most oft-told refers to Joe's parents having named Joe for Joseph Stalin, whose nickname during World War II was "Country Joe.”Review by Jenell Kesler

Another great and insightful review from one of the best discogs contributors