a tribute to country joe

Around the same time, at the behest of Guthrie's widow and the manager of Guthrie's archives, McDonald wrote the music for an incomplete Guthrie song which only had lyrics.      “Gimme an F …” 

      Readers of a certain age will undoubtedly know what came next in the notorious “Fish Cheer,” by Country Joe & the Fish in the late 1960s. Although he performed a variety of music for another half century, Joe McDonald, who passed away last week in Berkeley at the age of 84, will most joyously be remembered as a radical and irreverent rock star whose band gave the world both the bitingly antiwar “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” and the liberating, censor-busting cheer. 

      Country Joe & The Fish (“The Fish” was lead guitarist Barry “Fish” Melton) emerged in the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-1960s, contemporaries of bands like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company (featuring Janis Joplin). They weren’t as commercially successful as some of the other Northern California groups, but the band certainly made its mark with a distinctive sound—merging psychedelic rock ‘n’ roll with folk, country and ragtime—and a commitment to protest, social justice and political satire. 

      Born in Washington, D.C., in 1942, McDonald was raised in El Monte, a working-class suburb of Los Angeles. His parents were Communists who named him Joe in honor of Joseph Stalin. (After leaving the Communist Party, McDonald’s mother Florence became an elected official in Berkeley during the 1970s, serving both as city auditor and as a member of the City Council.) 

      McDonald was never like other rock stars. Even before he formed Country Joe & the Fish in late 1965, he had enlisted in the U.S. Navy at the age of 17 and spent three years stationed in Japan. He moved to Berkeley in the early ‘60s, participated in Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement in 1964 and in early demonstrations against the Vietnam War in 1965. 

      The original “Fish Cheer,” which in live performances led directly into “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag,” simply spelled out “F*I*S*H.” But in 1968, an inspired suggestion by the band’s drummer, Gary “Chicken” Hirsh, found the band and its fans changing the cheer to “F*U*C*K,” an exuberant, youthful cry of resistance against a prudish, hypocritical society. 

      (Remember how Richard Nixon used to decry the “bad” language of rebellious American youth, before the Watergate tapes revealed Tricky Dick’s own penchant for dropping f-bombs in the oval office. What a world we lived in when saying the word “fuck” was considered obscene, but burning babies with napalm was not.)  

      The cheer became a popular part of the band’s live shows—in the documentary on the Woodstock Festival in August 1969, one can hear 400,000 fans belting it out. The cheer also got the band banned from the “Ed Sullivan Show” (after already being paid for their forthcoming appearance) and McDonald arrested for obscenity in Worcester, Mass., and fined $500 for saying the magic word in public. 

      “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag,” with words and music and lead vocal by McDonald, remains such an extraordinary expression of anti-war sentiment, youthful irreverence and satire (McDonald called it “G.I. humor”) that it is worth remembering in detail. Consider the song’s take on:  

·      Macho posturing (“Come on all of you big strong men”) 

·      America’s endless foreign wars (“Uncle Sam needs your help again”)

·      The quagmire of Vietnam (“He’s got himself in a terrible jam, way down yonder in Vietnam”) 

·      If you don’t maintain your student deferment, you’re gonna get drafted (“So put down your books and pick up a gun”) 

·      The lie that the U.S. was defending democracy in Vietnam (“And it’s one, two, three/What are we fighting for”) 

·      Soldiers aren’t supposed to think (“Well, there ain’t no time to wonder why”)  

·      A soldier’s fatalism (“Whoop-ie! We’re all gonna die.”) 

·      Hating the military brass (“Come on generals, lets’ move fast/Your big chance has come at last”) 

·      Red-baiting (“The only good commie is one who’s dead”) 

·      The kill count (“You know that peace can only be won when we’ve blown them all to kingdom come”) 

·      War profiteering (“Come on Wall Street don’t move slow …. There’s plenty of money to be made/Supplying the Army with the tools of the trade”) 

·      The anti-war movement needs to be more than young people (Come on mothers throughout the land/Pack your boys off to Vietnam”) 

      After six years, five studio albums and countless shows, Country Joe & the Fish broke up in 1970, and McDonald began a solo career that found him performing into the 2020s and recording nearly 50 albums. 

      McDonald’s commitment to the anti-war movement was on display throughout his long career, but can be highlighted in his anti-LBJ song “Superbird,” his band’s performance at the April 1967 Spring Mobilization in San Francisco, in his testimony for the defense at the Chicago Seven Trial and in his 1971 solo album “War, War, War” (set to the poems of Robert Service). 

      He also participated in, usually through benefit concerts, organizations supporting striking farmworkers in Delano, California; Save the Whales, Greenpeace and Pete Seeger’s “Clearwater” campaign to clean up the Hudson River; the movement against the Iraq War, and more. On his website, McDonald apologized for not writing about women in his early songs, in particular the nurses who served in Vietnam. He noted that in later years when he sang “Fixin’ to Die,” he changed the lyrics to include “daughters.” 

      I’ll only highlight two phases of McDonald’s solo career: his work on behalf of Vietnam veterans and his homages to Woody Guthrie. 

      In 1970, McDonald became part of the F.T.A. tour, organized by Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, that brought an anti-war and anti-military brass message to G.I.’s in alternative coffee houses around the country. But he left the tour in 1971, feeling that Fonda and others did not understand the problems faced by soldiers upon their return from Vietnam. 

      Dedicating himself to helping Vietnam vets, McDonald performed at benefits for organizations such as Vietnam Veterans Against the War and Swords to Plowshares, and helped establish Vietnam Veterans Memorials in both Berkeley and San Francisco. In 1986, he was one of the headline performers at a “Welcome Vietnam Veterans” benefit concert in Los Angeles. Over the years, he wrote and recorded many songs about vets (including “Agent Orange,” “Kiss My Ass” and “Foreign Policy Blues”), with the best of them included on his 1995 “Vietnam Experience” album. 

      I got to interview McDonald in his Berkeley home in 2008 when he was performing “A Tribute to Woody Guthrie,” a 90-minute one-man show featuring performances of Guthrie’s songs (including “This Land Is Your Land,” “Union Maid” and “Pastures of Plenty”). Between songs, he told stories about Guthrie and read from Guthrie’s newspaper articles and private correspondence. 

      McDonald had long been associated with Guthrie’s work. After the breakup of his band, McDonald’s first solo album, “Thinking of Woody Guthrie” (1969), showcased Guthrie’s music, with McDonald being backed by a sharp Nashville studio band.

Around the same time, at the behest of Guthrie's widow and the manager of Guthrie's archives, McDonald wrote the music for an incomplete Guthrie song which only had lyrics. The result, “Woman at Home,” was later performed and recorded at “Tribute to Woody Guthrie” concerts at New York’s Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl. And in 2001, McDonald performed “This Land Is Your Land” at a touring Smithsonian Institution exhibit about Guthrie in Salinas, California. 

      Among the highlights of his one-man show were McDonald’s stories about the parallels between his father’s life and Guthrie’s. Worden “Mac” McDonald and Guthrie were both born in Oklahoma, hopped on railway cars and moved to Southern California during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl of the 1930s.  

      They were both leftists who married Jewish women and were later blacklisted for their beliefs and activities. And both men raised sons who became famous musicians. A 2-CD live concert album from the show, entitled “A Tribute to Woody Guthrie Performed by Country Joe McDonald,” was released on McDonald’s own Rag Baby label. 

      In addition to his music, Joe McDonald left behind a terrific, and voluminous, website— www.countryjoe.com—that provides a detailed history of his life and career, plus many links to his songs. 

      I asked McDonald in 2008 whether he had any plans to retire. He said: 

      “Eubie Blake, the great pianist who performed into his 90s, talked about the pain of rehearsing and practicing, and that’s a reality. One enormous part of it for me is that I haven’t hit the lottery, and in certain professions you don’t have a pension plan. But I’m lucky to have an occupation that I can continue doing.” 

      And we’re lucky that Joe McDonald kept performing for so many years and for so many fans. His most famous song contains the wry and mordant line “Don’t ask me/I don’t give a damn.” But he really did.  

Bruce Dancis spent 18 years as the Arts & Entertainment Editor of the Sacramento Bee, where he also wrote a syndicated column about DVDs. During a long career in journalism, he served as an editor at the Daily Californian, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Mother Jones, M.I. (Musicians’ Industry) Magazine and the Oakland Tribune. He also wrote about politics, history, movies and rock music for these publications, as well as for Rolling Stone’s Record, In These Times, Guitar Player, Keyboard, the East Bay Voice and San Francisco magazine. In the late ‘60s, he was the lead singer in the Ithaca, New York-based rock band Titanic, and was the editor of the SDS-affiliated magazine, The First Issue.

He is the author of “Resister: A Story of Protest and Prison during the Vietnam War” (2014, Cornell University Press) and appears in the documentary film “The Boys Who Said No! Draft Resistance and the Vietnam War” (2020).

He lives in Cardiff, CA, and Putnam Valley, NY.