Northern California Folk-Rock Festival, Santa Clara County Fairgrounds, San Jose, CA, 5-19-1968, Part 2 - Country Joe and the Fish

This is the seventh and last album out of seven albums I'm posting from the 1968 Northern California Folk-Rock Festival. This set features Country Joe and the Fish.

The first five of the albums I've posted from this festival took place on May 18, 1968. But this one, and the previous one, the Electric Flag set, took place on May 19th. That's why I'm calling this "Part 2" in the title, instead of "Part 7," because it's Part 2 of May 19th. 

I said quite a lot in my write-up for the first album I posted from this festival, the Youngbloods set. I recommend you read that, because most of that applies to this set too. Most importantly, note that this is sourced from an audience bootleg, so the sound quality isn't up to my usual standards. I had to do a lot of work to fix all sorts of flaws. The final results sounds pretty decent for a 1968 concert, in my opinion, but you need to be tolerant about the flaws that still remain.

Out of all the sets, this one has the most issues. The main reason is because it almost certainly is incomplete. According the schedule listed before the festival began, the bigger names of the musical acts were given 45 minutes to perform. That was true of Country Joe and the Fish. To be specific, they were to perform from 3:45 P.M. to 4:30, after the Electric Flag and before the Doors. All the other acts stuck to their time allotments, give or take five minutes. But this recording is only 24 minutes long. Furthermore, the last song here is cut off. 

My theory is whoever was taping this festival had to stop recording in the middle of this set. They could have run out of batteries or run out of tapes to record on. Such problems were common in those early days of bootleg taping, especially when the costs of tapes were much higher relatively speaking than they would be later. That would also explain why there's no recording of the Doors, even though they were one of the two headlining acts for the festival. 

In fact, a majority of the last song here, "Superbird," was missing. So I filled it out with another version taken from another bootleg that same year. And a chunk of "Masked Marauder" was missing too, causing me to make a similar fix. That's why those two songs have "[Edit]" in their titles. 

In conclusion, the recordings from this festival were borderline unlistenable to my ears, especially due to the high buzzing noise I previously mentioned a few times. But thanks to recent audio editing technology advances, and a lot of grunt work on my part, I hope this festival now can be enjoyed. It still has issues, and probably always will, because audio editing can only go so far. For instance, missing sets, banter, and parts of songs can't be restored. But, in my opinion, the more time passes, the more the music of the late 1960s is seen as historically important and special, so I thought it was worth it to make what music survives from this festival accessible once again.

This album is 24 minutes long. 

01 Rock and Soul Music (Country Joe & the Fish)
02 Love (Country Joe & the Fish)
03 Masked Marauder [Instrumental] [Edit] (Country Joe & the Fish)
04 Flying High (Country Joe & the Fish)
05 Superbird [Edit] (Country Joe & the Fish)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/u9xRtcGV

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/86uy6hqxylL3AOD/file

The cover photo of Country Joe McDonald is from this exact concert. The original was in black and white, but I colorized it with the help of the Kolorize program. It's strange to me that he was wearing a suit and tie, given he was a major countercultural "hippie" figure, but maybe he was trying to be ironic or something, I don't know.