Country Joe & The Fish is a name I remember hearing in my youth, though I don’t remember hearing any of their records.

I think they became known through their appearance at the Woodstock Festival back in 1969, and, perhaps because of that, I think of them as a bunch of hippies on acid, singing about getting high and going on trips.

So it’s a surprise to find that they’re not a country band at all, though they may well be hippies with a fondness for LSD, and this particular song is deeply in debt to the blues… acid-drenched blues.

The one thing I do remember about them is the reverence in which their guitarist Barry “The Fish” Melton was held and, hearing this, I can understand why.

A Brooklyn-born Jewish New Yorker (his mothers’ parents came from Odessa, his father came from a Texas pioneer family with Irish roots), he grew up in Brighton Beach before his family moved to LA in his teens.

He started out as a folk guitarist but during the summer of ’64 he hitchhiked to San Francisco and met Joe McDonald at a Bay Area concert by folk musician and political activist Malvina Reynolds.

The duo reunited a year later in Berkeley, forming a jug band duo that grew into Country Joe & The Fish, co-writing songs that reflected the counterculture of the times, with lyrics celebrating political protest (particularly anti-war), free love and recreational drugs.