Spring 1968. Morning inspection at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. Hundreds of my fellow students stood in uniformed rows below: Army, Navy, Air Force Marines.
A pretty good Russian student, I wasn’t really on board with the uniform stuff. Years later, my annual performance review noted, “Militarily, Hochanadel remains basically a civilian.”
On a second floor barracks balcony above that inspection, I placed speakers connected to a borrowed stereo inside.
I cranked it all the way up and dropped the needle. A rock band boomed and loud words drawled, “For it’s one, two, three; what are we fightin’ for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn. Next stop is Vietnam.”
Below me, angry shouts and rapid footsteps running up the stairs urged all due speed as I ran to the far end of the barracks, sped down the fire escape, slid fast down the slippery ice-plant slope and ran.
I got away clean, my laugh felt like a song.
I didn’t know music could do that, make The Man anger-scream and chase me.
Joe at 75. Photo by Steve Read, from the crew of the BBC documentary on the Summer of Love.
Years later, when Country Joe McDonald was headed east to play the Van Dyck, I told him how he and his band the Fish had protested morning inspection with their “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” and he laughed over the phone. A Navy vet, himself; he knew what that meant.
Country Joe McDonald went silent Saturday, March , dying of Parkinson’s at home in Berkeley at 84.
Country Joe and the Fish may have been the most overtly political of all the San Francisco bands that played the Monterey Pop Festival the previous June, and I enjoyed seeing them many times during my year-long language training.
Their sun-splashed mid-afternoon show in a beach-side Santa Cruz pavilion was maybe the most quintessentially California experience of that complicated, mostly wonderful time. But Joe didn’t remember the Berkeley Community Theater show where dancers on roller skates, wearing lights on their bodies in the dark behind a scrim, moved in sci-fi grace as he and the Fish played in front.
Joe came by his activism honestly, a “red diaper baby” raised by socialist parents who named him after Stalin, as the New York Times reported in his obituary, which provides other information noted here.
His rock-star status flowed directly from his activism as his first recordings were audio inserts in his political magazine Rag Baby. While his producer barred “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag” from the May 1967 Fish debut album “Electric Music for the Mind and Body” (source of my first music column title), he let slide “Super Bird,” lampooning LBJ.
He led the F-word Fish cheer solo before his biggest-ever crowd, at Woodstock; two years, later he led 250,000 protesters in the same cheer-and-song protest at the Capitol in Washington DC. This chant and “Rag” earned him a place on Richard Nixon*s enemies list, got him cancelled off the Ed Sullivan show and fined for obscenity onstage.
War was the obscenity to Joe, and he protested it all his life, supporting Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Swords to Plowshares, Vietnam Veterans of America and other organizations.
After the Fish disbanded in 1970, McDonald recorded a blues album with Jerry Garcia and paid tribute to protest-folksinger Woody Guthrie. And he continued protesting in “Vietnam Experience” (1986) and slammed the Iraq War in “Support the Troops.”
He sang both protests and love poems at the Van Dyck, the last time I saw him, as I reported in the Gazette.
There’s nothing nostalgic about his indignation. He updated “Yankee Doodle” into an anti-nuclear broadside on penny-whistle, followed “The Fish Cheer” and the anti-Vietnam-War tirade “I Feel Like I’m Fixin* To Die” with “Support the Troops,” which focused a similar outrage on the Iraq War. The same compassion for those fighting it and those who love them powered “Picks and Lasers,” a science fiction epic decrying the destructive waste of a war fought on Mars for mining resources. It sounded like a movie plot as folk murder ballad. Before launching into “Support the Troops,” which criticizes the Iraq War as being fought over oil, but “not in my name,” McDonald dedicated the spell-out-“Fish Cheer” – using another F-word – to George Bush.
The show wasn’t all billboards and broadsides, however.
“Janis” was genuinely tender, as was “Come With Me,” written for the first of his five children, named Seven Anne. He followed this with “All My Love In Vain” and “Waited in Vain,” paired lost-love songs of aching poignancy.
I think we all know what Country Joe McDonald would sing about the horrifying news today.
“Gimme an ‘F’…”
Hoke's Jukebox 