It had been a long time since I had thought about Country Joe and the Fish, until I saw Joe McDonald’s obituary in the New York Times. McDonald died recently at age 84, having pursued an obscure career as a solo artist after the breakup of the Fish.
Country Joe and the Fish were associated with the anti-Vietnam War movement, with their best-known song being “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’to Die Rag”:
And it’s one, two, three,
What are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam;
And it’s five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! we’re all gonna die.
Country Joe was one of the big acts at Woodstock, but the band didn’t last too long after that, as Joe and the Fish didn’t get along.
That much I knew, but the Times obituary fills in the backstory:
Joseph Allen McDonald was born on Jan. 1, 1942, in Washington to Worden McDonald, who worked for the phone company, and Florence (Plotnik) McDonald, a political activist who later became prominent in Berkeley politics. Both his parents were members of the Communist Party, and they named him after Joseph Stalin.
More:
Mr. McDonald started a small underground magazine called Rag Baby before forming an early version of Country Joe and the Fish with the 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.”
The antiwar movement, notwithstanding the Times’ sympathetic attitude, looks quite different from the perspective of history. As I have said once or twice before, it seems to me that everything that was said by the conservatives of the 1960s, who were mocked then and have since been largely forgotten, was true.
