#Country Joe & The Fish #psychedelic rock #folk rock #psychedelic folk rock #psychedelic blues rock #acid rock #singer-songwriter #1960s

Although Country Joe and the Fish were together only four short years, the band’s political stance and eclectic rock left an important legacy. “Largely forgotten as one of the giants of psychedelic rock,” wrote Joel Selvin of MusicHound Rock, “Country Joe and the Fish towered over their contemporaries….” The band’s 1967 debut, Electric Music for the Mind and Body, remains one of the definitive psychedelic albums of the era, while “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” inspired thousands to protest the Vietnam War. The band received equal billing with San Francisco groups like the Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, and Jefferson Airplane in the late 1960s, headlining at the Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore Auditorium. Country Joe and the Fish received their greatest attention and are most remembered for their pivotal performance at Woodstock in 1969 and inclusion in the film, Woodstock. With songs that included references to politics and drugs, the band represented a perfect marriage between the radicals of Berkley and the hippies of San Francisco.
Joe McDonald’s parents were Communist workers who named their son after Russian Communist dictator Joseph Stalin. Born in 1942 in Washington, D.C., he grew up in the Los Angeles suburb of El Monte, California. McDonald learned to play the guitar and joined local folk groups, but later ran away from home and joined the Navy for three years. After his discharge, he moved to Berkley where he played guitar and harmonica in the Berkeley String Quartet and Instant Action Jug Band. “Country Joe and the Fish,” noted Bill Belmont on the Well website, “came about as part political device, part necessity, and part entertainment.”
At the end of 1965 McDonald gathered Barry Melton, Richard Saunders, and Carl Shrager from the Instant Action Jug Band, then added Bob Steele to form the first version of Country Joe and the Fish. This acoustic lineup cut two tracks, “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag,” an anti-Vietnam song, and “Superbird,” a political satire. McDonald and Melton then played for a short time as a folk duo before putting together a second, electric version of the band with Paul Armstrong, Bruce Barthol, David Cohen, and John Francis Gunning. “Bass Strings,” from their “white EP,” received radio play, and the group’s manager, Ed Denson, secured a record deal with Vanguard at the end of 1966.
When Country Joe and the Fish released Electric Music for the Mind and Body in 1967, it quickly became one of the definitive psychedelic rock albums of the era. “The record documented perfectly their unique conglomeration of folk, blues, country and rock,” wrote Marianne Ebertowski in the Marshall Cavendish History of Popular Music. “It also gave evidence of their involvement with the San Francisco drug and hippie scene on the one hand and the radical political movement on the other.” “Bass Strings” and “Flying High” contained overt references to drug use, while the aforementioned “Superbird” included a barbed attack on President Lyndon Johnson. “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” was left off the album at the request of Vanguard’s Maynard Solomon. “An unusual move,” wrote Bill Belmont, “by the company that staged the Weavers’ reunion concert at Carnegie Hall during the height of the anti-left sentiment in the United States.”
Country Joe and the Fish played at the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium throughout 1967. They performed at “The Human Be-In” at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, made an appearance at the Monterey Pop International Festival, and even visited the United Kingdom where they played at the Roundhouse in Camden Town. They released their second album, I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die, seven months after their debut. Many critics viewed the album as overindulgent, or as Richie Unterberger described it in All Music Guide, “the kind of San Francisco psychedelia that Frank Zappa skewered on his classic We’re Only in It for the Money.” Nonetheless, the title track was a keeper, noted Unterberger, “a classic antiwar satire that became one of the decade’s most famous protest songs, and the group’s most famous track.” While 1968’s Together received a warmer critical response, it would be the last album by the group’s classic lineup.  From: https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/country-joe-and-fish