‘Country’ Joe McDonald, Vietnam War protest icon, highlight of Woodstock, dies at 84

AP
 — 

“Country” Joe McDonald, a hippie rock star of the 1960s whose “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag” was a four-lettered rebuke to the Vietnam War that became an anthem for protesters and a highlight of the Woodstock music festival, died Sunday. He was 84.

McDonald, who performed with his band, Country Joe and the Fish, died in Berkeley, California. His death from complications of Parkinson’s disease was reported by Kathy McDonald, his wife of 43 years, in a statement issued by his publicist.

McDonald was a longtime presence in the Bay Area music scene, where peers included the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane and his onetime girlfriend, Janis Joplin. He wrote or co-wrote hundreds of songs, from psychedelic jams to soul-influenced rockers, and released dozens of albums. But he was known best for a talking blues he completed in less than an hour in 1965 – the year President Lyndon Johnson began sending ground forces to Vietnam – and recorded in the Berkeley home of Arhoolie Records founder Chris Strachwitz.

In the deadpan style of McDonald’s hero, Woody Guthrie, “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag” was a mock celebration of war and early, senseless death, with a chorus concertgoers and others would learn by heart:

And its 1, 2, 3 what are we fighting for? Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn, Next stop is Vietnam, And its 5, 6, 7 open up the pearly gates, Well there ain’t no time to wonder why, WHOOPEE we’re all gonna die

At the time he wrote “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag,” McDonald was co-leader of the newly formed Country Joe and the Fish and he added a special “F-I-S-H” chant before the song: “Give me an F, give me an I, give me an S, give me an H.” By the time his group appeared at Woodstock in 1969, the Fish were on the verge of breaking up, the chant was a different four-letter word beginning in “F” and McDonald was performing before hundreds of thousands. Many would stand and sing along, a moment captured in the Woodstock documentary released the following year. (For the film, the song’s lyrics appeared as subtitles, a bouncing ball on top).

“Some people alluded to peace and stuff (at Woodstock), but I was talking about Vietnam,” McDonald told The Associated Press in 2019. He called the opening chant “an expression of our anger and frustration over the Vietnam War, which was killing us, literally killing us.”

The song helped make him famous, but brought legal and professional consequences. In 1968, Ed Sullivan canceled a planned appearance by Country Joe and the Fish on his variety show when he learned of the new opening cheer. Soon after Woodstock, McDonald was arrested and fined for using the cheer at a show in Worcester, Massachusetts, an ordeal which helped hasten the band’s demise.

McDonald even performed the song in court. His friendships with such political radicals as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin led to his being called in as a witness in the “Chicago Eight (or Seven)” trial against organizers of anti-war protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. On the stand, he explained how he had met with Hoffman and others and told them about “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag.” When he began performing it, the judge interrupted and told him “No singing is permitted in the courtroom.”

McDonald recited the words instead.

In 2001, the daughter of the late jazz musician Edward “Kid” Ory sued McDonald, alleging that his song’s melody closely resembled Ory’s 1920s jazz instrumental “Muskrat Blues.” A US district judge in California ruled in McDonald’s favor, citing in part the “unreasonable” delay between the song’s release and the suit being filed.

McDonald continued touring and recording for decades after Woodstock, but remained defined by the late 1960s, a time period he openly longed for in the late 1970s rocker “Bring Back the Sixties, Man.” His albums included “Country,” “Carry On,” “Time Flies By” and “50,” and he would continue writing protest songs, notably the 1975 release “Save the Whales.”

Although defined by his anti-war activism, McDonald would acknowledge conflicted feelings about Vietnam. He had served in the Navy, in Japan, in the late 1950s, and found himself identifying with both the protesters and those serving overseas. In the 1990s, he helped organize the construction of a Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Berkeley, formally unveiled in 1995.

“Many remembered the ugly confrontations that had happened during the war years in the city,” McDonald later wrote of the ceremony. “Yet the atmosphere proved to be one of reconciliation, not confrontation.”

McDonald was married four times, most recently to Kathy McDonald, and had five children and four grandchildren. He was involved off and on with Joplin over the second half of the 1960s, two young hippies whose careers and temperaments drove them apart. When McDonald told her he thought they should break up, she asked him to write a song, which became the ballad “Janis”:

Even though I know that you and I

Could never find the kind of love we wanted

Together, alone, I find myself

Missing you and I

You and I

Raised on politics, and music

Country Joe McDonald did not come from the “country.” He was born on Jan. 1, 1942 in Washington, D.C., and grew up in El Monte, California. He was the son of onetime Communists who named him for Josef Stalin and otherwise encouraged him to love music and identify with the working class. He was still in his teens when he began writing songs, playing trombone well enough to lead his high school marching band and teaching himself folk, country and blues songs on guitar.

After returning from the Navy, in the early 1960s, he attended Los Angeles State College, but soon moved to Berkeley and became immersed in folk music and political activism. He founded an underground magazine, Rag Baby, for which “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag” was written to help promote, and helped start such local groups as the Instant Action Jug Band and the Berkeley String Quartet.

In 1965, he formed Country Joe and the Fish with fellow singer-guitarist Barry “The Fish” Melton, later adding Bruce Barthol on bass, organ player David Bennett Cohen and Gary “Chicken” Hirsh on drums. The name was suggested by magazine publisher Eugene “ED” Denson, who cited a quote from Mao Zedong that revolutionaries are “the fish who swim in the sea of the people.” McDonald was dubbed “Country Joe” because Denson had heard that Stalin was known as “Country Joe” during World War II.

Like the Jefferson Airplane, the Byrds and other bands, the Fish evolved from folk to folk-rock to acid rock. “Electric Music for the Mind and Body,” their debut album, was released in May 1967 and featured a minor hit, “Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine,” along with numerous long jams. A month after the album came out, they appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival, the first major rock gathering and a highlight of the so-called Summer of Love.

“I think the ‘Summer of Love’ thing was manufactured by the media or something, because I don’t remember us thinking, ‘Wow, this is the “Summer of Love,′ ” he told aquariandrunkard.com in 2018. “(But) I was just thrilled to be a part of this new counterculture and new tribe because I had never really felt comfortable in the other tribes that I was a part of growing up and in the Navy. My parents were actually Jewish Communists. I never felt a part of it, but I was really thrilled and happy to be a hippie.”