Country Joe McDonald, whose performance at Woodstock struck a chord so deep it often obscured the variety and scope of his career, died on Saturday. He was 84.
The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, his band announced on social media. Their statement did not provide further details.
In his breakthrough years, McDonald led Country Joe and the Fish, one of the first and most adventurous bands to rise from the Bay Area psychedelic rock scene of the 1960s. After the band’s main run ended in 1970, he released scores of solo albums in a number of styles over many decades.
Yet, it was his showcase at Woodstock in 1969, immortalised by its film and soundtrack, that came to define him for many. At Woodstock, he spiked the main refrain of The Fish Cheer with a provocative F-word, before beginning his best-known anti-Vietnam War song.
“From the moment I yelled ‘Give us an f …’ it became a folk-protest moment,” McDonald told the Independent in 2002. “There was a certain in-your-face Kurt Cobain-ness about it that matched the attitude of the time pretty well.”
Likewise, McDonald’s albums with the Fish, for which he wrote and sang most of the material, perfectly mirrored the experimentalism and politics of the psychedelic scene that birthed them.
At the same time, the group’s work augmented the era’s usual guitar distortions and drug references with arcane melodies, leftfield lyrics and influences that also drew from ragtime, old-time folk and the avant-garde.
The Fish’s first single, Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine, centred on a death-obsessed woman who also had a yen for homicide, while another early song, Superbird, imagined US president Lyndon B Johnson as a lunatic cartoon character.
The tone of the politics and social commentary in McDonald’s songs could range from whimsical to snarky. In The Harlem Song, he satirised white people’s fetish for black culture, while in I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag, he sang in the voice of a TV pitchman selling parents on the chance to “be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box”. The song culminated in the ironic refrain, “Whoopee! We’re all gonna die!”
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While two of McDonald’s albums with the Fish broke Billboard’s top 40, the band never came close to achieving the success enjoyed by other acts from the San Francisco scene such as Jefferson Airplane or the Grateful Dead.
And none of McDonald’s solo works made Billboard’s album chart. Yet, he remained true to his musical instincts and lyrical themes. Long after the Vietnam War ended, he continued to write about its effects and legacy, captured best in his 1986 album Vietnam Experience, which features 12 of his songs on the subject.
Joseph Allen McDonald was born on January 1st, 1942, in Washington to Worden McDonald, who worked for the phone company, and Florence Plotnik, a political activist. His parents were members of the Communist Party and they named him after Josef Stalin.
When he was a child, the family moved to El Monte, California, near Los Angeles. “My family were the only communists in the entire area and we lived a very isolated life,” McDonald told Let It Rock magazine in 1974. “My parents never went dancing or drinking – typical communists.”
At the same time, his father had a Hawaiian guitar that he taught Joe to play when he was seven. When Joe was a teenager in the 1950s, his father was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, whose aim was to root out communists in the United States, and as a result he lost his job. (His parents later renounced the cause.) At 17, McDonald enlisted in the navy because, as he told Let It Rock, he wanted to “see the world and have sex”.
After serving a little over three years, he tried college for a few semesters before dropping out to move to Berkeley around the time of the Free Speech Movement. “I went to San Francisco to become a beatnik,” he told Let It Rock.
McDonald started a small underground magazine called Rag Baby before forming an early version of Country Joe and the Fish with guitarist Barry Melton in 1965. His stage name wryly reflected the fact that Stalin was sometimes referred to as “Country Joe” because of his rural background. The word “Fish” was taken from Mao Zedong, who wrote that revolutionaries “must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.”
In a “talking” version of the magazine, the band included the first version of Fixin’-to-Die, performed acoustically. “I was inspired to write a folk song – about how soldiers have no choice in the matter but to follow orders – but with the irreverence of rock ‘n’ roll,” McDonald told the New York Times in 2017.
The group later electrified their sound, moved to San Francisco and were signed by Vanguard Records, which released their debut album, Electric Music for the Mind and Body, in 1967. The album’s producer, Samuel Charters (best known as a blues historian), refused to let the band include Fixin’ or The Fish Cheer on the debut, fearing it would lead to a boycott by radio stations.
After performing the augmented Fish Cheer in Worcester, Massachusetts, McDonald was charged with inciting an audience to lewd behaviour, resulting in a $500 fine and lots of publicity. By the time he performed the provocative version of the song at Woodstock, listeners were primed for it.
At the festival, McDonald played two sets, one with the band and the other solo, a reflection of long-simmering internal tensions that brought the group to an end by the next year. By then McDonald had begun recording solo, having released a set under his own name in late 1969 titled Thinking of Woody Guthrie, which consisted entirely of songs associated with that folk legend.
McDonald had a son and a daughter, Ryan and Emily, with his fourth wife, Kathy Wright; another son and daughter, Devin and Tara, with his third wife, Janice Taylor; and a daughter, Seven Anne McDonald, with his second wife, Robin Menken.
– New York Times