Country Joe McDonald (born Joseph Allen McDonald; January 1, 1942) is an American musician who was the lead singer of the 1960s psychedelic rock group Country Joe and the Fish.
McDonald was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in El Monte, California, where he was student conductor and President of his high school marching band. At the age of 17, he enlisted in the United States Navy for three years and was stationed in Japan. After his enlistment, he attended Los Angeles City College for a year. In the early 1960s, he began busking on the famous Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, California.
McDonald has recorded 33 albums and has written hundreds of songs over a career spanning 40 years. He and Barry Melton co-founded Country Joe & the Fish which became a pioneer psychedelic rock band with their eclectic performances at The Avalon Ballroom, The Fillmore, Monterey Pop Festival and both the original and the reunion Woodstock Festivals.
Their best known song is his “The “Fish” Cheer/I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” a black comedy novelty song about the Vietnam War, whose familiar chorus (“One, two, three, what are we fighting for?”) is well known to the Woodstock generation and Vietnam veterans of the 1960s and 1970s. McDonald wrote the song in twenty minutes, for an anti-Vietnam War play. The “Fish Cheer” was the band performing a call-and-response with the audience, spelling the word “fish”, followed by Country Joe yelling, “What’s that spell?” twice, with the audience responding, and then, the third time, “What’s that spell?”, followed immediately by the song. The “Fish Cheer” evolved into the “Fuck Cheer” after the Berkeley free speech movement. The cheer was on the original recording of the I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag, being played right before the song on the LP of the same name. The cheer became popular and the crowd would spell out F-I-S-H when the band performed live.
During the summer of 1968 the band played on the Schaefer Music Festival tour. Gary “Chicken” Hirsh suggested before one of the shows to spell the word “fuck” instead of “fish.” Although the crowd loved it, the management of the Schaefer Beer Festival did not and kicked the band off the tour for life. The Ed Sullivan Show then canceled a previously scheduled appearance by the band, telling them to keep the money they had already been paid in exchange for never playing on the show. The modified cheer continued at most of the band’s live shows throughout the years, including Woodstock and elsewhere. In Massachusetts, McDonald was fined $500 for uttering “fuck” in public.
In 2003 McDonald was sued for copyright infringement over his signature song, specifically the “One, two, three, what are we fighting for?” chorus part, as derived from the 1926 early jazz classic “Muskrat Ramble”, co-written by Kid Ory. The suit was brought by Ory’s daughter Babette, who held the copyright at the time. Since decades had already passed from the time McDonald composed his song in 1965, Ory based her suit on a new version of it recorded by McDonald in 1999. The court however upheld McDonald’s laches defense, noting that Ory and her father were aware of the original version of the song, with the same questionable section, for some three decades without bringing a suit. In 2006, Ory was ordered to pay McDonald $395,000 for attorney fees and had to sell her copyrights to do so.
In 2004, Country Joe regrouped with some of the original members of Country Joe and The Fish as the Country Joe Band – Bruce Barthol, David Bennett Cohen, and Gary “Chicken” Hirsh. The band toured the United States and the United Kingdom. In the spring of 2005, McDonald joined a larger protest against California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed budget cuts at the California State Capitol Building.
In the fall of 2005, political commentator Bill O’Reilly compared McDonald to Cuban President Fidel Castro, remarking on McDonald’s involvement in Cindy Sheehan’s protests against the Iraq War. (bettyloumusic.com)
With Peace on Earth (1984) McDonald continued to campaign for nature conservation and environmental protection and and in doing so he used different styles of music and also made use of well-known other musicians:
“Live In Peace” sounds like a mixture between “When A Man Loves A Womand” and “A Whiter Shade Of Pale”, “Sunshine” could be a Dire Straits song, we hear influences of Sting (“You Can Get It If You Really Want”) or Santana (“Feeling Better”),
All in all it´s really another good album by Country Joe McDonald.
Personnel:
John Allair (keyboards)
John Blakely (guitar)
Tom Coster (keyboards)
Tom Donlinger (drums)
Greg Douglass (guitar)
Larry Dunlap (keyboards)
Mickey Hart (percussion)
David Hayes (bass, background vocals)
Chris Kovacs (keyboards)
Jack Lancaster (saxophone)
Phil Marsh (guitar)
Country Joe McDonald (vocals, guitar)
Peter Milio (drums)
Raul Rekow (percussion)
Gene Stuart (saxophone)
Bob Weir (percussion)
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background vocals:
Bianca Thornton – Mark Springer – Pauline Lozano
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Maria Muldaur (vocals on 09.)
Tracklist:
01. Live In Peace (McDonald) 3.03
02. Sunshine (McDonald) 3.39
03. Let It Rain (McDonald) 4.38
04. You Can Get It If You Really Want (Chambers) 3.00
05. War Hero (v.Ronk/McDonald) 2.35
06. Feeling Better (McDonald) 3.37
07. The Girl Next Door (McDonald) 3.43
08. Darlin’ Dan (The Rocket Man) (McDonald) 5.40
09. Pledging My Love (Robey/Washington) 2.35
10. Garden Of Eden (McDonald) 4.11
11. Space Lovin’ (McDonald) 3.29
12. Peace On Earth (McDonald) 3.52
Live in Peace:
Today may seem hopeless filled with war and fear
But we can change the darkness if we but persevere
And if we seize this moment and cling to our belief
Then I know that we can live in peace
This world is such a wonder filled with so much life
The land the air the ocean could be paradise
And if we open up our hearts the truth is plain to see
That we can all live together in peace
Care for all the animals they need our help
Care for all the children stop thinking of ourselves
And if we work together to try for harmony
Someday we will live in peace.
More from Country Joe McDonald:
The official website:
In April of 1971, Country Joe McDonald agreed to take part in coast-to-coast anti war demonstrations. On Saturday April 23rd he played at Kezar stadium in San Francisco and on Sunday, on the steps of the Capitol building in Washington, DC. This demonstration, the beginning of what was to be a week of protests throughout the Capitol, proved to be one of the pivotal popular manifestations of disenchantment with the Nixon administration’s conduct of the war. It was certainly the biggest. Joe’s participation was crucial as during the afternoon at least 250,000 people sang along to “Fixin’ To Die Rag” and yelled the famous “cheer”. By the next year Joe and his wife Robin had agreed to take part in an agit-prop theater group The F.T.A. Show, led by then Berkeley neighbor Jane Fonda. The group organized by Fonda and actor Donald Sutherland featured theater skits created by Ann and Roger Bowen, alumnae of the famed Chicago improvisation group “Second City”. This troupe performed at alternative coffee house near military installations, catering to GIs who were disenchanted with the military but had no formal mode of expressing it. It was haunted by military intelligence and the FBI though curiously not to the point of actually disrupting its activities — just a subtle presence, and one which rewarded Joe with a spot on President Richard Nixon’s enemies list. Joe left the troupe in late 1971 feeling that Fonda had missed the point; she did not seem to understand the problems the GIs and the returning Vietnam veterans were going through, and perhaps never would. The show went on to make a film of a Far Eastern tour, F.T.A., released theatrically in ’72, then withdrawn. Also during this period a third Rag Baby EP was released. Mostly as a vehicle for raising money for Vietnam Veterans Against The War, it featured members of local band Grootna and pointed political songs included the anti-draft “Kiss My Ass.” While appearing in New York, Vanguard recorded a series of shows at the Bitter End nightclub in Greenwich Village. This was later released in 1972 as Incredible Live. It features liner notes by Studs Terkel and Joe’s parody of Nixon “Tricky Dicky” (by Country Joe McDonald)
Country Joe was a legendary agit-prop performer in the heydays of Berkeley’s student riots. If his beginnings were political, he soon discovered San Francisco’s hippies and LSD and managed to web his political stance to acid-rock’s visionary format. (Translated by Ornella C. Grannis)
sound effects and atypical instruments distributed between the grooves) and the sound is crisper. The three ring circus fanfare that gives its name to the album, and even more so the irreverence of the “Fish Cheer”, is one of the everlasting examples of political song, the target obviously being Vietnam, and also the best introduction to the work of these jester/acrobats of rock. The rest of the album is not expressed in such a surreal mode, the best mode for this artist. Instead, it fluctuates, soft and tranquil, in benevolent melancholy. It’s subdued by ballads: Who Am I, ecstatically suspended in one of McDonald’s slow-motion vocals, Pat’s Song, an imitation of Donovan adapted to Cohen’s ceremonial organ, and Janis, a tender serenade with a harpsichord that fuses waltz, rag, country and western.
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