No. 24: ‘Bass Strings’

“Hey partner, won’t you pass that reefer round?” Country Joe McDonald pleaded in his song “Bass Strings.”

Pretty tame stuff, but not if you were an inhabitant of the mid-1960s, when a joint could land you a multiyear term in state prison.

“At a certain time in 1966, when we performed ‘Bass Strings,’ I thought we were gonna get busted for singing a song about smoking marijuana,” McDonald remembered.

The title was an inside-joke reference to Country Joe and the Fish band members’ code for pot, used once or twice. It originated, not surprisingly, with the bassist, Bruce Barthol.

“We had basically made a declaration. The song stated that we all smoked weed, which was a felony,” Barthol says in the liner notes to the 2013 CD rerelease of the debut album, “Electric Music for the Mind and Body.”

Hardly a political manifesto, but those were the times. The topper came in the song’s closing seconds, as McDonald intoned: “L-S-D.”

Country Joe and the Fish first recorded the moody “Bass Strings” in the summer of 1966, as half of the A side of their second EP. Viral radio play for those songs by the new “progressive” radio stations brought a deal with Vanguard Records, which presumably appreciated the Northern California group’s agitprop folk roots.

The band began work on its debut album in February 1967, rerecording from that EP both “Bass Strings” and its B-side cousin, the dark instrumental “Section 43.”

The 5-minute “Bass Strings” contains the elegant ramblings of a pot (or acid) head who believes he’s nearing the point where he’ll “never come down.” He first ponders a trip to the seashore, and then another to the desert “just to try and find my past.”

The drug references ruled out mainstream airplay, but the track became a fixture on underground FM stations. “It may seem tame now … I can assure you no radio station would play it except at late night,” said band manager ED Denson.

None of this would much matter today if “Bass Strings” were just an underground novelty song, the sort of thing Country Joe and company would later mine. It is much more. With dreamlike sonics built around a slithery bass run, timpani-style drums and a foundation of minor chords, it remains a highlight of one of the first and best psychedelic albums ever made. It’s also the only overt drug song on “Electric Music.”

“It was just a blues, but the imagery was totally psychedelic,” McDonald says in the “Electric Music” CD liner notes. Of the use of minor chords, he says, “It was a blues, but it was weird.” (It was one of two fine blues songs on “Electric Music.”)

It was just a blues, but the imagery was totally psychedelic

Country Joe McDonald

McDonald shared the folk-busker background with many of the pioneers of California’s psychedelic rock. Yet he also played in his school band, knew something of classical music, and had a recent fascination with the unorthodox sounds of roots guitarist John Fahey and avant-gardist John Cage. Stationed in Japan during his stint in the Navy, no doubt McDonald soaked up some of the local sounds. All this played into the music found on “Electric Music,” giving it a sophistication not yet heard on the recordings of fellow travelers such as the Airplane and the Dead.

“Bass Strings” was no recruitment plug for the druggie lifestyle. There’s something unsettling at work here, something perhaps out of a B-movie:

Imagine our narrator in a cheap flat, sharing his hopes for higher highs. He speaks of heading east or heading west, but he ain’t going nowhere. The jaunty Farfisa organ heard throughout the album becomes strangely muted. Meanwhile, the electric guitarist wails away, both part of the song and oddly distanced. His soloing coming through the apartment’s thin walls, or perhaps from under a nearby chiaroscuro street light.

Make your own movie, if you like. The cinematic quality of Country Joe and the Fish’s debut album was a key ingredient, part of what made it so seminal and so special.

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