Country Joe McDonald

It’s well nigh impossible to properly convey the lasting importance of what Joe McDonald brought to not just the American scene but the world stage as an exemplar of the use of music to protest injustice. For more than six decades, his strident, folk-soaked tenor and well-scrubbed acoustic guitar has remained synonymous with the causes that he got behind, specifically an unflagging advocacy for military veterans. From the musical Free The Army to Save The Whales, or his campaign to keep Woody Guthrie in the public eye, or his crusade to properly recognize Florence Nightingale, McDonald would always walk it like he talked it, even if this meant that eventually in later years he got conveniently wheeled out whenever someone wanted to talk about “the Sixties.” But there was so very much more to the craft of Joe McDonald than the enduring tie-dyed stereotype of “Country Joe,” the rancourous politico, suggests.

Joe McDonald grew up in El Monte in southern California and had as much of an all-American, apple pie rock’n’roll childhood as one could expect for the son of left-leaning parents. After a full tour of duty in the navy, Joe moved north to Berkeley and got involved with the folk scene. Whilst his earliest studio date was Goodbye Blues, a 1964 folk session with Blair Hardiman that Joe had pressed up as a Christmas gift in 1970, it was not until he formed the Instant Action Jug Band in 1965 with guitarist Barry Melton that McDonald truly began to blend politics with music. Country Joe & The Fish was created by the duo to record an audio component for Rag Baby, a folk-protest periodical, and the song on display was an anti-war pasquinade that would become the enduring trademark of McDonald’s newly minted “Country Joe” persona: ‘I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag.’

The notoriety of ‘Fixin’ To Die’ would of course increase exponentially as the decade and the Vietnam war continued, but in the meantime, fired by Dylan’s folk-rock experiments, Joe and Barry formed an electric band with David Cohen on guitar and organ, Bruce Barthol on bass and drummer John Francis Gunning. The latter would be replaced by Chicken Hirsh in November 1966 but not before the aggregate had recorded a second Rag Baby EP that June that included the signature pieces ‘Bass Strings’ and ‘Section 43.’ The disc went through several pressings and had sold 15000 copies by the time Sam Charters signed the band on behalf of New York’s Vanguard label. Ascendant on the stages of the San Francisco ballrooms, Country Joe & The Fish resided at the cutting edge of the region’s rock renaissance.

Charters would produce four albums on the group, including the trailblazing debut Electric Music For The Mind & Body, all dominated by McDonalds compositions whilst band manager ED Denson guided the group as they toured beyond the Bay Area, cutting a remarkable swathe as agents of a new, knowing blend of rock laced with dark satire and anti-establishment themes. At this far juncture, it is difficult to convey just how dangerous Country Joe & The Fish were considered by the powers-that-be in the United States of the late 1960s. Compared to empty gesturing and pseudo-defiance of artists today, McDonald, like Frank Zappa or Jim Morrison, spoke with an articulation that proved far more threatening, and led to his getting branded a “troublemaker.”

When their music is disengaged from its implied messaging, there is a major case to be made for Country Joe & The Fish to be considered the true advance guard of the avant-garde, chemically stimulated and globally influential rock’n’roll of the San Francisco Bay Area, well ahead of schedule of the Dead, Airplane and others who traditionally get the credit. For certain, starting with that second EP, the Fish were the first in the region whose records actually sounded psychedelic, and arrived at in a distinctive, untutored manner. It was largely McDonald’s own idiosyncratic writing, dripping with imagery, allusion and dark humour, that showed the way. Any quasi-blues progressions, such as the outrageous - for the time - ode to self-medication that is ‘Bass Strings’ are invariably in minor keys. There was erotic verse in ‘Porpoise Mouth’ and pensive poetry in ‘Thought Dream.’ The shifting movements of ‘Masked Marauder’ and ‘Pat’s Song’ had a firm, almost symphonic structure in defiance of the extended, interminable improvisation that went on to become the order of the day.  And tunes like ‘Janis’ and ‘Who Am I’ impart a warm and personal touch quite different to the totally surreal ‘Grace’ and ‘Magoo,’ both of which count amongst the very first examples of purely psychedelic songcraft.

The Vanguard albums sold respectably, but even by late 1967 the band was suffering fractious personnel issues. The infamous “Fish cheer” was a device they had used in performance for some time, but it was an unexpected opportunity for McDonald to perform solo at the Woodstock Festival of 1969 that sealed the fate of Country Joe & The Fish. The hugely successful movie and soundtrack would forever stereotype their frontman as the foremost rabble-rouser of his generation.  Joe would dedicate a lot of his subsequent career to championing causes connected to the late 1960s and early 1970s, a profile that always tended to overshadow his music making. “They say I am political, and I think that’s flattering, but it makes me inaccessible,” he once lamented.

After the dissolution of the Fish at the beginning of the decade, in-between numerous activist pursuits, McDonald recorded a string of solo albums for Vanguard, Fantasy and his own label Rag Baby, run by steadfast partner Bill Belmont. They showcased a smorgasbord of styles that encompassed pure folk, blues, country - Tonight I’m Singing Just For You, recorded with the cream of Nashville sessioneers – AOR, and even yacht rock. In an unexpected but not inappropriate twist, in 1976 his catchy ‘Here I Go Again’ became a UK hit in the hands of former model, Twiggy.

Whilst McDonald dug the punk and new wave of the late 1970s, he wisely avoided embarrassing himself by dipping a toe in that pond, having more than enough rama-lama under his belt. Songs like ‘Kiss My Ass’ and ‘Sexist Pig’ had always kept things spiky, whilst the full-length statements War War War and Vietnam Experience articulated enduring concerns, but McDonald’s mantra was still, as he was to sing, ‘Entertainment Is My Business.’ In the 1980s in particular, he spent a lot of time in Europe where he had long been appreciated as much for his art as his message. “I had a problem in America,” he once told me, “specifically with the fuck cheer, but I also had a problem of credibility there because people believed in Country Joe the myth but Country Joe the entertainer made them very nervous. The reputation eclipsed the person.”

I’d known Joe McDonald since the early 1990s. At that time, he was still very much politically active, although I also remember him noting the rise of Green Day, for example, with an air of knowing recognition. There had been a couple of brief reunions of the original Country Joe & The Fish, the most recent in 1995 falling foul of the sibling rivalries that had dogged the group through the years, but otherwise he had continued to tour and record. We worked together on various projects that included a solo career anthology, Something Borrowed, Something New and, most satisfyingly, deluxe reissues on Ace/Big Beat of Electric Music and Fixin’ To Die. Naturally, when told the former had been nominated for a Grammy in 2014, Joe just shrugged, oh yeah? Even if his profligacy over the years suggested otherwise, he was similarly nonchalant about record success, for as he mused, “if I had been totally accepted and sold a million albums, my life could have easily been ruined. I feel pretty secure in the identity of Country Joe, but it has an almost mythical quality to it.”

Not long afterwards, Joe got me involved with an exhibit that the Berkeley Historical Society planned, devoted to the local music scene of the 1960s. In its early stages, a benefit was proposed to raise funds, and he suggested one of my bands perform. Instead, I countered that I put together an ensemble for him, performing the songs, and sound, that Country Joe first became known for in Berkeley. Thus 2017 proved a year of memorable northern California shows where the Electric Music Band, with my friend Matt Piucci from Rain Parade and Thin White Rope’s Joe Becker, ran down the entirety of that epochal first Country Joe & The Fish album, along with a selection of tunes from elsewhere in the Country Joe catalogue. I insisted we did ‘Silver & Gold’ and ‘She’s A Bird’ from the underrated C.J. Fish album; had we’d been undertaking this a few years earlier, I would have probably also lobbied for the intricate and exceedingly hard-to-pull-off ‘Colors For Susan.’ Seriously, on a personal level, it was an unprecedented opportunity to get inside his songs and recognize once again that for all its deceptive simplicity, this was music of incredible nuance and depth.

Despite back problems that meant he remained seated the duration of the two lengthy sets, Joe beamed beatifically as we played and truly seemed to appreciate this unexpected immersion in his early repertoire, admitting “I never thought I’d get to perform this music again.” Indeed, the final show in Berkeley announced his imminent “retirement,” as Parkinson’s began to strengthen its slow but incipient grip upon his health.

In a countercultural milieu that remains populated by any number of self-important windbags, Joe McDonald was the real deal, with the talent and ability to convey his message and his empathy. But that he also created some of the most entrancing, significant and timeless music of the rock era is to my mind the hugest feather in his cap. The world shall never know his like again.