By Joe

I would be remiss if I didn't put a shout out to the late Country Joe McDonald, who passed over the Rainbow Bridge to a new pond the other day.

I feel inexorably tied to Joe, in a strange way, because he played in a brief but key part in my personal evolution. I think that the statutes of limitations have long run out on these sorts of confessionals so here goes.

I was a very precocious young man, not even a teen yet if you can believe it, when a boy from junior high school, now deceased, named Donald Hill, sold me the 500 microgram hit of Orange Sunshine. Very powerful stuff, especially for my very young mind.

My father and his second wife were in Las Vegas for a three day weekend and the nanny drove me and my friend Bobbi Jenke to the Sports Arena to see Lee Michaels and Country Joe.

To say that life and reality as I knew it took a major U-Turn is a gross understatement.  I sort of left my body with one last heighty high.

I remember on the way home the nanny asking me what I had to eat at the show? I said "Orange sunshine" and she said, "We can't have that, I need to make you a cheese sandwich."

We dropped off my girlfriend and it took three days for me to feel the floor again. I actually cold called a random entry in the white pages asking for help and, god bless the universe, the guy who answered the phone had tripped before and helped talk me down.

Finally got my sea legs and nothing has ever been the same since.

*

Later I saw Joe and the fish at the Tribal Stomp in Berkeley. They were a very funny and very psychedelic band. I was able to meet Barry Melton at some point, cool guy, now a district attorney I believe.

Not a course of action that I would ever recommend but there you have it.