Attended the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969, became an educator for 35 years after graduation from college, and am retired now and often volunteer at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts which is on the site of that 1969 festival.
By June 1966, British influence on American pop musical tastes was firmly established and record labels had opened their recording studio doors to much more creativity.
The Incredible String Band was not the typical British Invasion band. In 1966 American radio stations were playing #1 songs by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Petula Clark, and the Troggs. Even the New Vaudeville Band’s “Winchester Cathedral” tickled our organs of Corti.
ISB, consisting originally of Mike Heron, Robin Williamson, and Clive Palmer, had recorded the album only the month before. Their style was acoustic and British folk.
Folk-rock > Psychedelic-folk
In the US, though folk music no longer enjoyed its heyday, the Byrds had become popular and their style had created the new rock genre: “folk-rock.”
ISB planted their sound’s seeds in that soil.
Compared to their later albums (minus Palmer who left after the first album), Incredible String Band is simple. In fact, most of the songs are played solo by the person who wrote them. Palmer had only written one of the songs and thus minimized his presence: five by Williamson, three by Heron and the one by Palmer.
ISB would later compose more elaborate songs resulting in yet another media label: psychedelic folk. #ahwell
Heron & Williamson
It would be those more intricate pieces that attracted the band (now only Heron and Williamson with occasional others) to American FM alternate stations.
And it was that attraction that likely brought the band to the attention of Woodstock Ventures who booked them for the Festival on May 28, 1969 for $4,500.
From YouTube: “the psychedelic guitar of country joe and the fish legend ‘barry the fish melton rockin out at guitarman bar and live music venue in chiang mai,thailand”
Brooklyn Barry Fish Melton
Brooklyn bred
Barry Melton was born in Brooklyn on June 14, 1947.
He and Joe McDonald formed the Instant Action Jug Band in San Francisco in 1965 . Acoustic was simpler than electric. Jug band music was fun. Gigs could be found.
Even when young, simple living requires some money and electric music was the more likely way to earn some. Melton and McDonald’s band evolved into Country Joe and the Fish.
Brooklyn Barry Fish Melton
Nearly dead
In February 1966, Melton and a few other nascent fish were living together and hosted the Rev Gary Davis who was going to play. They were very good hosts to the Rev who partook in the many hospitable offerings. Perhaps all involved were too hospitable.
As he got older and his hosts respectfully less-restrained, the Rev’s shows could be classically great or abysmally poor depending on his state at the time. And the mornings after could be dangerous.
According to Melton, he had to get something from the room that Davis was sleeping in. “I got whatever it was and I was headed toward the door when I heard a commanding voice, ‘Don’t move or you’re dead!’ I turned around to see Rev with a .38 revolver in his hand pointed in my general direction.”
After sincerely pleading and reassuring Davis that he was only one of the guys in the house, the Rev put down the gun. [story from the excellent Davis biography by Ian Zack, Say No To The Devil.
Brooklyn Barry Fish Melton
San Francisco scene
The Fish became part of the San Francisco scene and a jewel in its psychedelic crown. In 1967 they released their first album, Electric Music for the Mind and Body.
Later that same year they released I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die.
This was not AM-radio music. This was not American Bandstand music. FM “underground” stations were burgeoning and the Fish’s music found a home there.
Melton rode that wave all over the United States with the other San Francisco icons such as the Dead and the Airplane.
Brooklyn Barry Fish Melton
Woodstock
The movie, Woodstock, propelled many bands into a national limelight. And even though Barry Melton and the Fish were not part of it, Country Joe’s solo performance that sunny Saturday afternoon in Bethel, NY, particularly his “I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” and the “Fish Cheer” helped the whole band.
Melton at Woodstock
The band Country Joe and the Fish did not perform until that dreary post-summer downpour Sunday evening. The cataract had finally passed (“No rain no rain no rain no rain no rain…”), thousands of wet, tired, hungry, white suburban kids had begun to sludge their way back to their parents’ cars, gratefully found them there, and headed home hoping to be back to get to work on Monday on time.
Brooklyn Barry Fish Melton
Meanwhile…
The band didn’t last much longer after Country Joe went solo. Barry Melton helped keep it together for a few years with personnel coming and going.
Brooklyn Barry Fish Melton
Various bands
From Allmusic: Working as Barry “The Fish” Melton, he continued as a solo act through the 1970s and into the 1980s, also fronting the Barry “The Fish” Melton Band.
He also “…continued to play music…including a long stint with Dinosaurs, a band of 60s veterans that at various times included Peter Albin and David Getz ( Big Brother and the Holding Company), John Cipollina and Greg Elmore (Quicksilver Messenger Service), Papa John Creech (Hot Tuna and Jefferson Starship), Spencer Dryden (Jefferson Airplane and New Riders of the Purple Sage), Robert Hunter (Grateful Dead lyricist), David LaFlamme (It’s a Beautiful Day), Jerry Miller (Moby Grape) and the incomparable Merl Saunders on keyboards.”
Barry also wrote the soundtrack for the Roger Corman film, “GAS-S-S”. He had brief appearances in “The Omega Man” (1971) and “More American Graffiti” (1979).
Brooklyn Barry Fish Melton
Esquire
While the law may seem like an unlikely career for any Woodstock alum, it was what Melton chose and he has been practicing law since 1982.
According to his site, “I am primarily a criminal defense lawyer. I also provide representation in quasi-criminal matters, such as license revocation proceedings. I have a broad range of experience in general legal matters. I am and have been a musician all of my adult life, and I have always helped other artists and musicians with legal issues.”
From Barry’s FB page with the comment: “I was once a happy man, with the love of my life by my side. I miss you, Barbara Joy Langer!”
Melton posted the following on his Facebook page: …my angel …passed at 7:40 this Saturday morning, February 15, 2020. My lover, my wife, the mother of my children, my teacher — my everything. Thanks to all and each of you who loved her, too. Barbara Joy Langer, 3/27/1946 – 2/15/2020.
Brooklyn Barry Fish Melton
2021
He wrote “On Monday, 2/15/21 marks the one-year anniversary of my sweet Barbara’s passing. I love this picture from Golden Gate Park during our earliest years in San Francisco. Happy Valentine’s Day, and President’s Day weekend, to you all…”
The Beatles were essentially no more in 1970. Only a few recordings and slim hopes remained.
Apple had released the Let It Be album on May 18. It had the highest number of advance orders for any album in the US record industry, with an astonishing 3,700,000 orders placed. The album retailed at $7, creating a gross sales figure of $25,900,000 before it was even released. [Beatle Bible article]
Despite crushed hopes, on June 13, 1970 we fans gave our musical brothers two #1s: a single and an album.
YouTube “Long and Winding Road”
Beatles Let It Be
Long and Winding Road
Their last #1 single.
“The Long and Winding Road” single seemed to say it all. Especially when Paul sang, “The wild and windy night that the rain washed away/Has left a pool of tears crying for the day/Why leave me standing here, let me know the way.”
Wasn’t he singing what we were thinking?
Beatles Let It Be
Tells the story
In an ironic twist, the song reflects the progression of the Beatles’s demise. First, Paul McCartney did have the Beatles’s disharmony in mind when he wrote it. They (and Billy Preston) first recorded it in January 1969. It was a simpler version than the one that Phil Spector produced in April 1970. Those orchestral embellishments upset and maddened McCartney. So much so, that later, in his legal citations for the break up, he used those embellishments, done without his permission, as one of the reasons.
Allan Pollack says this (and much more) about the single: in spite of his [McCartney’s] unabashed and sometimes even shameless sentimentality, he comes up with an affecting, durable torch song with “The Long And Winding Road”. The secrets of his success are to be found in the manner in which novel approaches to form and harmonic structure underscore the emotional core of the song, and belie whatever curbside surface clichés it has which may initially turn you off.
Beatles Let It Be
Let It Be
The Let It Be album was released on May 8, 1970. The Beatles last release. They had already broken up. The date most often used for that breakup is Paul’s public announcement on 10 April 1970.
They had actually recorded the album before the previous one, Abbey Road, thus forever creating fodder for fans to argue that Let It Be is the penultimate and Abbey Road the last.
Horseshoes and hand grenades.
Get Back was Let It Be’s original title and intended, like its name suggested, to be a return to their musical roots. The single Get Back certainly gave that impression. A proposed album cover echoed their first album’s cover:
Disruption after dissension delayed and delayed again the completion of the album. Abbey Road intervened.
As they say in baseball, “You need a scorecard.”
Let It Be was not a critical success. However as I said previously about John and Yoko’s Some Time In New York City, the Beatles on a bad day were always better than any critic on any day.
Beatles Let It Be
What's so funny about peace, love, art, and activism?
