Movies Guide

   
Artist: Country Joe and the Fish
   Genre(s): 
Rock: Pop-Rock
   Rock
   Other
   

   
 Together
   Year: 1992   
Tracks: 11

   
 Electric Music for the Mind and Body
   Year: 1990   
Tracks: 11

   
 Reunion
   Year:    
Tracks: 11

   
 Feels like im fixing to die
   Year:    
Tracks: 10

Born on January 1, 1942, to a very leftist-oriented folk, Joe McDonald was named in honour of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. (In the context of use of World War II, Stalin was regarded by many on the leftfield — and even some unpolitical observers — in the United States and elsewhere as grand, for beingness Hitler and Nazi Germany’s superlative curse, at a metre when the governments of England, France, and the United States were given to waffling and dithering over what to do some German militarism; the millions of deaths within the Soviet Union for which Stalin is now blame were not yet known.) McDonald was raised in the Los Angeles suburban area of El Monte, where he grew up surrounded by all fashion of political activity, in support of labor unions and other leftist and progressive causes. He was likewise uncovered to a massive amount of music, ranging from R&B to Dixieland jazz. Between the El Monte Legion Stadium and the Lighthouse Club at Hermosa Beach, McDonald got a wide melodic didactics — his have early gigs were as a trombone player in jazz outfits and a guitar player in ethnic music groups. He exhausted most of the early ’60s serving a hitch in the United States Navy, in which he enlisted at eld 18.

On reversive to civilian life in 1964, McDonald resumed acting music and slew his low gear record album, in collaboration with Blair Hardman in 1964, entitled The Goodbye Blues, and likewise started redaction a radical clip called Et Tu. Soon afterwards, McDonald headed for Berkeley, CA — his official purpose was to assist college, but he quickly became a part of the city’s burgeoning folk music setting, which took up half of his fourth dimension. He for the most part worked solo, playing songs by Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Woody Guthrie, interspersed with a slowly growing trunk of his have compositions. The other half was devoted to politics — the city’s political sympathies, especially the campus of the University of California, was already freehanded, but as the sixties progressed, the left began exerting an ever so louder voice on the campus, through the Free Speech Movement and other objection campaigns, initially to catch Reserve Officer Training Corps recruiters blockaded from the campus and after to receptive up the university’s speech and political surroundings; Vietnam wasn’t still a central military issue, merely issues such as civil rights, the economic embargo of Cuba, the working condition of migrant farm laborers, the American function in decades of repressive politics of the Dominican Republic, and a Kennedy-era foreign policy initiative called Food for Peace were all on the agendum at diverse multiplication.

McDonald was a innate check, and after some solo performances he formed his two groups: one — more exactly organized — called the Berkeley String Quartet in conjunction with Bob Cooper on 12-string, Tom Lightjheiser on bass, and Carl Shrager acting splashboard and doubling on guitar; and the other, the Instant Action Jug Band. The latter, by its selfsame nature, had a floating rank of as many as a xII musicians, non all of whom would necessarily seem at every gig — they were sort of care musical minutemen of the left, intended to show up up on a moment’s bill at whatsoever rally or street demonstration power be announced or bound up, on or off the campus. The jugful band’s ranks included Barry Melton, a prodigiously gifted Brooklyn-born, Los Angeles-raised guitar player and isaac Bashevis Singer world Health Organization, in his mid-teens, had already amassed some serious acting credits at venues such as The Ash Grove ahead his family stirred to Berkeley.

Out of their contact and the Instant Action Jug Band grew Country Joe & the Fish, ab initio as a recording alias. Among McDonald’s other activities in 1965, he was publishing a radical journal called Rag Baby. Accounts vary on the matter of how the music side of Rag Baby came around — some allege that at some point, McDonald set up himself with more music than articles on hand and decided to put out a “talking return” of the magazine; other accounts say that he saw the pauperization for the music to assist support the journal and the causal agent, and thought they could sell copies of their records at demonstrations. Assuming the latter is true, it would make Country Joe & the Fish among the identical low — if not the first — medicine play to habit self-produced records to promote themselves right away. He’d already cut an album severally and knew a small bit about getting records made and pressed, and the resolution was the Rag Baby EP, with four songs, two by Country Joe & the Fish and two by a isaac Bashevis Singer named Peter Krug, which adage the promiscuous of day in October of 1965. That lineup for Country Joe & the Fish, in addition to McDonald on mouth organ, acoustic guitar, and vocals, included Melton on vocals and electrical guitar, asset Shrager on splashboard and kazoo, Bill Steele on washtub bass, and Mike Beardslee on vocals.

Country Joe & the Fish was a compromise name, proposed by ED Denson, an early penis and the group’s director — he quoted Chinese commie drawing card Mao Zedong around a revolutionary resembling “the fish wHO swim in the sea of the people”; there was also some thinking given to the nominate “Country Mao & the Fish.” Instead, they used “Country Joe” as a citation to McDonald, wHO was their isaac Bashevis Singer and, as much as thither was whatsoever organisation to it at all, the organizer of the group, and too a reference work to Joseph Stalin — “Country Joe” was a nickname for the Soviet dictator. Ultimately, the call proven a stroke of genius, at formerly funny to the altogether uninformed and provocative to those few world Health Organization picked up the references, and also a jackass on the typical, pop-oriented band names in an geological era filled with acts like Paul Revere & the Raiders, Barry & the Remains, Mouse & the Traps, et al. It was such a good option on so many levels, that it was nearly subversive, and what’s more, subversive on levels that all of those parents world Health Organization disquieted over rock’n'roll & wheel never even dreamt of. And given McDonald’s and Melton’s politics, the name was even punter than general psychoanalysis would lede one to believe — in 1965, scarcely a decade subsequently the acme of the McCarthy era and the Red Scare, and with California already the home of the John Birch Society (a right organisation whose instauration credo included the notion that President [and late General of the Army] Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist stooge), the meanings that went into the group’s name were readily placeable to any rightist ideologist.

The membership floated for a few months, and the reasoned was largely ethnic music and jug band-based, as they built up an hearing with performances at coffeehouses such as the Jabberwock, and too after played shows at the Avalon Ballroom and the original Fillmore Auditorium. They evolved in this period into a rock candy chemical group, performing electric instruments and, more to the point, real instruments. A second gear self-generated EP followed in June of 1966 — by this metre, McDonald and Melton were both playing electric guitars, Bruce Barthol, a 16-year-old booster of Melton’s from high schooltime, was in the lineup performing an electric bass; New York-born, formally trained David Cohen had joined on electric guitar and keyboards; Paul Armstrong, an alumna of the Instant Action Jug Band, was in that respect played guitar, bass voice, tambourine, and maracas; and jazz musician John Francis Gunning had joined on drums. The record was good enough to fetch the chemical group gigs in San Francisco, at the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium, and it was reviewed in Billboard powder store and even played on the wireless as far off as New York City — it seems to get circulated as far as London. Five months after its press release, the chemical group sign-language a contract with Vanguard Records, a New York-based record label (headquartered on twenty-third Street), which had previously been known primarily for its releases of pre-Baroque and Baroque-era classical music and folk recordings.

Go by Maynard and Seymour Solomon, the caller had stuck its neck out before by sign language the reunited folk group the Weavers, who’d been blacklisted into previous retirement, only Country Joe & the Fish presented new problems — aside from organism an galvanising band with a louder legal than anything they’d previously recorded, they had a repertory of dare, challenging sounds that made them a potential difference West Coast answer to the Blues Project, mayhap even rivals to the Doors, the electric foursome just sign-language by Vanguard’s indie label competition Elektra Records. But they too had this political side, which Vanguard had faced in front with artists such as the Weavers and Joan Baez (world Health Organization was already becoming a lightning rod for the right with her anti-Vietnam and pro-civil rights activities). The difference was that Country Joe & the Fish weren’t remotely reverential in their political songs; they mixed rock music & roll’s youthful, rebellious attitude with an sentience stratum at least equivalent of a poli-sci M.A., and the mingle was brace only as well a slight terrorization in the setting of the multiplication. Lyndon Johnson was still a popular president in nearly of the country away of the Deep South, and in early 1967 the only public figures who’d paid whatsoever price over the Vietnam War were a handful of Democrats who’d been defeated for opponent it.

Maynard Solomon heard the results of their recording roger Huntington Sessions, held at Sierra Sound in Berkeley under the guidance of Sam Charters, and he rent “Super Bird” — a savage swipe at Lyndon Johnson — onto the group’s debut album, merely insisted that “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” be left off, despite its popularity at the group’s bouncy shows. Electric Music for the Mind and Body was released in February of 1967, and it was embraced as a work of genius by those world Health Organization heard it, a sheer, potent ruffle of blues, jazz, classic, folk music, and sway elements, all with a mesmerizing psychedelic lambency; listening to it was as close to a psychedelic, hallucinogenic feel as unrivaled could become through music in 1967, and if one affected in finisher on the songs and the playing, nonpareil got to luxuriate in Cohen’s exceeding electric organ act upon, Melton’s, Cohen’s, and MacDonald’s alternately lyrical and slashing guitars, McDonald’s pleasing light tribe tenor, and the liquid rhythm section of Barthol and young drummer Gary “Gallus gallus” Hirsh. The only thing it didn’t have got was a hit single to catch the band some exposure on AM wireless — “Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine” was issued as a 45 merely ailing at issue 98 across the nation, though it got enough airplay on college stations so that, conjugated with the play received by the non-single tracks “Section 43″ and “Masked Marauder,” and splendid password of mouthpiece most the LP, Galvanising Music for the Mind and Body managed to make the Top 40 and stay there. It still holds up even today, aboard Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Van Dyke Parks’ Song dynasty Cycle, the Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow and After Bathing at Baxter’s (which owed a fortune to Electric Music), and Blood, Sweat & Tears’ Kid Is Father to the Man as one of the abiding turning point albums of that year.

Cutting edge, emboldened by the reaction to the first album (and sticking that “Super Bird” hadn’t gotten it prohibited), had the group go back into the studio in the summer of 1967. This time out, the label rent the band lead with its left, “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” preeminent off the new album and service of process as the title sung, when it was released in September of 1967. The sky didn’t fall in and, indeed, the album sold well for over a year, charting in the Top 40 and becoming a staple of many collections — unrivalled of the underappreciated incentive features, which showed how much the label was acquiring in on the spirit of the playfulness, was the inclusion in the early pressings of “the Fish Game,” a highly satirical insert (which, in the eighties and 1990s, would turn a five-dollar secondhand copy of the LP into a $40 point). If the rest of the music wasn’t quite as established or sheer as the message of the originally album, it was more accessible, oblation McDonald more of a probability to show off his telling voice (which rivaled the Jefferson Airplane’s Marty Balin), and together the two LPs delineate the group’s aesthetic and commercial bill. The mathematical group was soon touring across the nation, and it was among the low gear acts to become known for its role of a idle show at its concerts. An show at the Monterey Pop Festival in June of 1967 (and in the subsequent movie, doing “Department 43″) utilizing the light evince only enhanced the band’s repute musically.

And presently, “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” took on a life of its have. The band had number one recorded it ahead they were on Vanguard, as a common people routine, and the adaptation on the Vanguard record album showed the to the highest degree expand production in time. In the summertime of 1968, the band was appearance in New York City at the Shaefer Summer Music Festival, sponsored by the beer company, at the Wollman Skating Rink in Central Park. By that time, the humour of the area had darkened substantially from 1967 — the Democrats were split up betwixt professional and antiwar factions, piece the Republicans were capitalizing on the forces of reaction among e. B. White voters in the South, in the number one national election since the passage of the watershed civil rights and voting rights legislating of the mid-’60s. And everybody seemed to either hatred — or were just plain shady of — the motives of college students of the militant variety show, world Health Organization were a big chunk of Country Joe & the Fish’s audience. Amid a portion of headshaking and hand-wringing, many over-forties, tied those with sons wHO could be drafted, seemed to wish that the majority of those “kids” would just act like unforced cannon cannon fodder and shut up. And the troop commitments stayed in the six-figure range, spell three and four-star generals whose lives and careers were inextricably fastened to the military plant goals and strategies that politicians endorsed and recognized and continued to roll in their budgets.

In a moment that could be filed under “It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time” (and it was), at that special Shaefer concert, the grouping was planning on doing “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” when drummer Chicken Hirsh suggested that the opening, high school-style exhort (”Gimme an ‘F,’ gimme an ‘I’”) be changed to something a caboodle more than…expressive. The cheer up became an oath, the herd in those comparatively devoid but blackening multiplication devoured it, and the newfangled cheer stuck — the birdcall, as originally recorded, got onto AM wireless one time once more in its wake, and of a sudden 12 and 13-year-olds (wish this writer at the time) from places like Whitestone, Queens (Archie Bunker territory in New York City), 3,D miles from Berkeley, who’d ne’er even heard of the venues in Manhattan where the band had played, knew world Health Organization Country Joe & the Fish were. The intelligence paste as though by jungle telegraphy, and the LP and the vocal were passed about like some secret code and pleasure that alone people under 26 (the upper demarcation line of draft eld) could understand and appreciate, openly on school buses and in secret on private school campuses (like the nonpareil this writer attended) behind the backs of the administration.

To understand just now what a deep, angry brand of smuggled sense of humor McDonald and troupe had tapped into, one had to be thither — if you byword fourth-year classmates registering for the draft, or older brothers or cousins or friends, or your neighbors’ sons, or your school bus driver (or his word), or whoever get called up, you were keenly aware of the war. And if you were male and 14 or 15 or senior, you also knew that you’d be registering shortly sufficiency, and as the warfare had already lasted trey age and there was no progress, it was hard to see wherefore it wouldn’t static be departure on trinity years hence from 1968 — and it was. Lyndon Johnson, who’d seemed overly popular for “sizeable” people to onrush o’er the war in late 1966, had announced 18 months later that he was leaving office, in near-disgrace politically; but to a fault many voters glad to learn him go smooth felt the war was worth combat (by person else — male citizens 18 through 20 years old, though fully draftable, still couldn’t vote) if it could be north Korean won (once more, with someone else’s stemma).

At some point, “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” became a prism through which ane could take apart the times and the mood of the nation and its audience, by the way it was presented. Something interchangeable had happened with some other figure associated with the American left, Paul Robeson, and his performances of the Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein II song “Ol’ Man River” from Showboat. Although he wasn’t the first military man to play the persona of Joe (the character wHO sang the song dynasty) in the musical, the song became inextricably associated with him, onstage and later on on record. As primitively written and performed, the song dynasty had the opening line “Niggers all knead on the Mississippi,” in guardianship with the jargon that a pitch-black jack in a border state in the post-Civil War era might easily make used; across the decades, however, Robeson altered the words in that line, and other elements of the song, pickings a funny possession of it and turning it, in his custody, into a mirror of the particular clock time in which he performed it — so shortly it was “Darkies all work on the Mississippi” for the motion-picture show, and later still it was “non-white folks,” and by the 1950s he’d altered the words sufficiency to turn it into an anthem of discharge. Similarly, McDonald and ship’s company, in the changes in words, scene, and tone of their antiwar strain, mirrored the multiplication and sensibilities of their audience, and a modification of intention by the performers. By the prison term of Woodstock, with McDonald appearance solo, the producers had no qualms some recording the uncensored reading of “the Fish Cheer,” much less McDonald (there by himself, awaiting the arrival of the striation) telling it in front of hundreds of thousands of people.

By that time, however, the best years of the band were over. In the fall of 1967, somebody managed to win over McDonald that he was the real “star” of the mathematical group. Amid the ensuing turmoil, the Fish split up. It didn’t final long, and they were eventually reassembled into a whole band, just the hiatus cost them in a heartfelt way — their third record album, In concert, was a product of the interruption, with MacDonald most unseeable on well-nigh of the album and Melton and Hirsh the dominant personalities and performers. They silent managed to spell Europe and saw more than demand for their performances crossways the United States as well, and the continued arguing o’er and decline in quality prosecution of the Vietnam War helped keep their popularity high, and the growing resistance enthusiasm for “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” free burning them.

Unluckily, the lineup began coming apart at that percentage point — Bruce Barthol was dismissed in mid-1968, and Chicken Hirsh was gone by the end of the year. The adjacent record album, Here We Are Again, released in the spring of 1969, was the debut of the new lineup of the mathematical group which, apart from the Airplane’s Jack Casady sitting in on bass, had David Getz, late of Big Brother & the Holding Company, on drums. David Cohen’s release lED to an all-star pack (including Jerry Garcia and Steve Miller) credited to the banding at the Fillmore West, which was recorded and afterward released as a Country Joe & the Fish live record album. The lineup stabilised around McDonald, Melton, Getz, and Peter S. Albin of Big Brother for six-spot months in 1969. MacDonald reassembled the band for its appearance at Woodstock, and the final batting order of Melton, Mark Kapner on keyboards, Doug Metzner on basso, and Greg Dewey on drums was the one that took reward of the momentum advent turned of that performance.

In the spring following the festival, McDonald embarked on a solo vocation, reversive to his roots with an record album of Woody Guthrie songs, and followed it up a year later with the electrical blues record album Have On It’s Coming. He remained committed to bringing the Vietnam War to an end, participating in demonstrations and appearance onstage with The F.T.A. (F*ck the Army) Show, a satiric anti-military review, which yielded a flick of the same distinguish and finally earned a place on President Richard M. Nixon’s infamous “enemies list.” Melton continued in euphony into the 1970s, merely later on coupled the legal profession.

Over the decades since, McDonald has cut legion solo albums and performed extensively, as good as reanimated Rag Baby. He has periodically reunited with Melton — whose presence is essential for the official manipulation of the “Rural area Joe & the Fish” nominate — and Cohen, Barthol, and Hirsh, nearly lately in the ignite of the war in Iraq. He’s become well-nigh a mythological number in agitprop music since the former ’80s, when he resumed his peace-activist work — like some Tom Joad-like fiber, wheresoever the American government seems hell-bent on turn military personnel loose to kill people, he’s at that place with his music, trying to answer the call to weaponry with something else. There ar at least two extant best-of compilations devoted to the isthmus, and in 1994 the Rag Baby EPs were reissued on compact disc.