Country Joe & The Fish

Country Joe and The Fish were one of the many "psychedelic" bands to emerge from the San Francisco Bay Area during the hippie explosion of 1966-67. They differed from most of their contemporaries (among them Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Grateful Dead and the Quicksilver Messenger Service) in having a backgound in the student movememt centred on the University of California in Berkeley, which lent a political edge to their songs. Most of them were written by band leader and singer Joe McDonald. Their heyday was from 1967 to 1969, with their first two albums Electric Music for the Mind and Body and I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die. They visited Britain several times in this period, although their performances (at underground venues like Middle Earth and the Roundhouse) were not heavily publicised. In the 1970s Country Joe McDonald worked mostly as a solo artist, in which capacity he recorded a session for Top Gear in 1970.

Although San Francisco was renowned as the home of the hippie movement, it was the Los Angeles groups who had made "West Coast" music popular with the audience who listened to John Peel on Radio London - the Byrds, Love, the Doors, the Buffalo Springfield and more pop-oriented acts like the Beach Boys, the Mamas and Papas and the Association. One of the first "San Francisco" albums featured by Peel on his Perfumed Garden show was Electric Music for the Mind and Body. He was particularly taken with the opening track, "Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine", which he played regularly (it appears twice as a show-opener on surviving recordings of the Perfumed Garden). Lead guitarist Barry Melton was also one of his favourites, and his work on the second album I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die was singled out for high praise when Peel obtained it and played it on Top Gear in 1968.

In his final years Peel stated that Electric Music for the Mind and Body was the one album of 1967 he could still listen to for pleasure.