As the historic festival marks its 40-year anniversary, Rhino presents Woodstock 40, six-CD boxed set that features the most comprehensive collection ever available of artists that performed at the original festival, sequenced in chronological order of performance, featuring 38 previously unreleased recordings, including the Grateful Dead, The Who, Tim Hardin, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe & The Fish, and others. Also box includes 80-page book with extensive liner notes, photos and the complete and accurate set lists.

1967 marked an era of creative expression, political rebellion and experimentation, climaxing in The Summer of Love; and no other location on Earth was quite as synonymous with this period as San Francisco – the center of the counterculture movement. Perhaps one of the best musical representations of this time, place and environment came from a rock band across the Bay, who married progressive protest with groundbreaking, experimental music: Country Joe & the Fish. In that one year, the Berkeley musicians rose to prominence, releasing two albums which would go on to influence some of the biggest psychedelic acts of the decade: their debut LP, Electric Music for the Mind and Body, and I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die.

Their full-length debut is their most joyous and cohesive statement and one of the most important and enduring documents of the psychedelic era, the band's swirl of distorted guitar and organ at its most inventive. In contrast to Jefferson Airplane, who were at their best working within conventional song structures, and the Grateful Dead, who hadn't quite yet figured out how to transpose their music to the recording studio, Country Joe & the Fish delivered a fully formed, uncompromising, and yet utterly accessible - in fact, often delightfully witty - body of psychedelic music the first time out. Ranging in mood from good-timey to downright apocalyptic, it embraced all of the facets of the band's music, which were startling in their diversity: soaring guitar and keyboard excursions…

This 77-minute CD is close to an ideal compilation, reaching back to before the band's beginnings for the original 1965 recording of "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" and across seven of the better cuts off of Electric Music for the Mind and Body, up through the Woodstock Festival and the band's farewell concert that same year at the Fillmore West. It reels in most of the notable album cuts in between, all in surprisingly good sound (not usually a strong point on Vanguard CDs of the late '80s). The 19 songs, which don't follow a strict chronological order, encompass some of the band's most celebrated experimental material, as well as more traditionally structured songs such as the fiery double-lead guitar workout "Death Sound Blues," the catchy, folk-rock-style "Sing Sing Sing," and the counterculture singalong "Marijuana" and works of serious personal significance (and intimately focused genius), including "Grace" and "Janis." The disc offers a good balance between the various sides of the group's sound and includes several notable live tracks, including the November 1968 Fillmore East performance of "Superbird," an anti-Lyndon Johnson song that dated back to 1965 and which is adapted here to include an attack on president-elect Richard Nixon. The sound is amazingly good and consistent throughout, and the track order, as well as the music itself, is downright spellbinding at times; the annotation is minimal, but this CD really has only a single flaw – apparently, between the 1965 original version of "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" and the 1969 Woodstock performance, there was no room for the standard studio version off of the band's second LP.

Country Joe & the Fish est connu pour la chanson « F.U.C.K. », un hymne anti-guerre du Vietnam qu'il interprète au festival de Woodstock en août 1969. Le groupe de « Country » Joe McDonald et Barry « The Fish » Melton a également produit cinq albums dont deux balises du psychédélisme, Electric Music for the Mind & Body et I Feel Like I'm Fixing To Die Rag, sortis en 1967. Il se sépare en 1971 et renaît occasionnellement en public.