Country Joe McDonald

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"Country" Joe McDonald

"Country" Joe McDonald (born Joseph McDonald, on January 1, 1942 in El Monte, California) was the leader and lead singer of the 1960s rock & roll group Country Joe and the Fish. He started his career busking on Berkeley, California's famous Telegraph Avenue in the early 1960's.^[1]

Country Joe has recorded 33 albums and has written hundreds of songs over a career spanning 40 years. He and Barry Melton co-founded Country Joe and The Fish which became a pioneer psychedelic band with their eclectic performances at The Avalon Ballroom, Fillmore, Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock. Their best-known song is his "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag", a black comedy novelty song about the Vietnam War, whose familiar chorus ("One, two, three, what are we fighting for?") is well known to the Woodstock generation and Vietnam Vets of the 1960s and 1970s. He is also known for "The Fish Cheer" which was a cheerleader-style call-and-response with the audience where Joe spelled out "fish". ("Give me an F!") At Woodstock, he altered the cheer to spell out the word "fuck" instead.

Joe went on to have a long solo career with key albums including:

Thinking of Woody Guthrie (1969) – recorded in Nashville, which at the time was a very odd-choice of location for a hippie songster to make an album of leftist anthems.
War War War (1971) – another tribute to a landmark American radical, the World War I anti-war poems of Robert W Service set to music.
Hold On It's Coming – songs about the West Coast hippie movement.
Superstitious Blues – with Jerry Garcia playing guitar on some tracks.
Paradise With an Ocean View (1977) – included the landmark environmental protest song "Save the Whales".
Paris Sessions – landmark feminism, with a female band, singing songs, written by Joe, including "Sexist Pig".

In 2004, Country Joe re-formed some original members of Country Joe and The Fish as the Country Joe Band – Bruce Barthol, David Bennett Cohen, and Gary "Chicken" Hirsh. The band toured Los Angeles, Berkeley, Bolinas, Sebastopol, Grants Pass, Eugene, Portland and Seattle. They then made a 10-stop tour of the United Kingdom and played at the Isle of Wight and London. Following that came the New York tour which included a Woodstock reunion performance followed by an appearance at the New York State Museum in Albany. Returning to the West Coast the band played in Marin and Mendocino Counties, the World Peace Music Awards in San Francisco and at the Oakland Museum as part of an exhibit on the Vietnam War.

In the spring of 2005, McDonald joined a larger protest against California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposed budget cuts at the California state capital.

In the fall of 2005, political commentator Bill O'Reilly compared McDonald, a Navy veteran, [1] to Cuban president Fidel Castro, remarking on McDonald's involvement in Cindy Sheehan's protests against the Iraq War. [2]