Country Joe and The Fish Ringtones

If you mention the name Country Joe & the Fish to Americans born in 1955 or earlier, chances are that they'll know the band you're talking about, at least to the degree that they know their most widely played and quoted song, "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag." The problem is, that particular song captured only the smallest sliver of who Country Joe & the Fish were or what they were about. One of the original and most popular of the San Francisco Bay Area psychedelic bands, they were also probably the most enigmatic, in terms of who they actually were, and had the longest and strangest gestation into becoming a rock band. And Joe McDonald may have written the most in-your-face antiwar, anti-military song to come out of the 1960s, but he was also one of the very few musicians on the San Francisco scene who'd served in uniform.

Born on January 1, 1942, to a very leftist-oriented family, Joe McDonald was named in honor of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. (In the context of World War II, Stalin was regarded by many on the left -- and even some apolitical observers -- in the United States and elsewhere as heroic, for being Hitler and Nazi Germany's greatest nemesis, at a time when the governments of England, France, and the United States were given to waffling and dithering over what to do about German militarism; the millions of deaths within the Soviet Union for which Stalin is now blamed were not yet known.) McDonald was raised in the Los Angeles suburb of El Monte, where he grew up surrounded by all manner of political activity, in support of labor unions and other leftist and progressive causes. He was also exposed 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 musical education -- his own early gigs were as a trombonist in jazz outfits and a guitarist in folk groups. He spent most of the early '60s serving a hitch in the United States Navy, in which he enlisted at age 18.

On returning to civilian life in 1964, McDonald resumed playing music and cut his first album, in collaboration with Blair Hardman in 1964, entitled The Goodbye Blues, and also started editing a radical magazine called Et Tu. Soon after, McDonald headed for Berkeley, CA -- his official purpose was to attend college, but he quickly became a part of the city's burgeoning folk music scene, which took up half of his time. He mostly worked solo, playing songs by Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Woody Guthrie, interspersed with a slowly growing body of his own compositions. The other half was devoted to politics -- the city's politics, especially the campus of the University of California, was already liberal, but as the 1960s progressed, the left began exerting an ever louder voice on the campus, through the Free Speech Movement and other protest campaigns, initially to get Reserve Officer Training Corps recruiters barred from the campus and later to open up the university's speech and political environment; Vietnam wasn't yet a central issue, but issues such as civil rights, the economic embargo of Cuba, the working condition of migrant farm laborers, the American role in decades of repressive politics of the Dominican Republic, and a Kennedy-era foreign policy initiative called Food for Peace were all on the agenda at various times.

McDonald was a natural fit, and after some solo performances he formed his two groups: one -- more precisely organized -- called the Berkeley String Quartet in conjunction with Bob Cooper on 12-string, Tom Lightjheiser on bass, and Carl Shrager playing washboard and doubling on guitar; and the other, the Instant Action Jug Band. The latter, by its very nature, had a floating membership of as many as a dozen musicians, not all of whom would necessarily appear at every gig -- they were sort of like musical minutemen of the left, intended to show up on a moment's notice at whatever rally or street demonstration might be announced or spring up, on or off the campus. The jug band's ranks included Barry Melton, a prodigiously talented Brooklyn-born, Los Angeles-raised guitarist and singer who, in his mid-teens, had already amassed some serious performing credits at venues such as The Ash Grove before his family moved to Berkeley.

Out of their contact and the Instant Action Jug Band grew Country Joe & the Fish, initially 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 about -- some say that at some point, McDonald found himself with more music than articles on hand and decided to put out a "talking issue" of the magazine; other accounts say that he saw the need for the music to help support the journal and the cause, 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 very first -- if not the first -- music act to use self-produced records to promote themselves directly. He'd already cut an album independently and knew a little bit about getting records made and pressed, and the result was the Rag Baby EP, with four songs, two by Country Joe & the Fish and two by a singer named Peter Krug, which saw the light of day in October of 1965. That lineup for Country Joe & the Fish, in addition to McDonald on harmonica, acoustic guitar, and vocals, included Melton on vocals and electric guitar, plus Shrager on washboard 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 member and the group's manager -- he quoted Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong about a revolutionary resembling "the fish who swim in the sea of the people"; there was also some thought given to the name "Country Mao & the Fish." Instead, they used "Country Joe" as a reference to McDonald, who was their singer and, as much as there was any organization to it at all, the organizer of the group, and also a reference to Joseph Stalin -- "Country Joe" was a nickname for the Soviet dictator. Ultimately, the name proved a stroke of genius, at once funny to the totally uninformed and provocative to those few who picked up the references, and also a goof on the typical, pop-oriented band names in an era filled with acts like Paul Revere & the Raiders, Barry & the Remains, Mouse & the Traps, et al. It was such a good choice on so many levels, that it was almost subversive, and what's more, subversive on levels that all of those parents who worried over rock & roll never even dreamt of. And given McDonald's and Melton's politics, the name was even better than general analysis would lead one to believe -- in 1965, barely a decade after the peak of the McCarthy era and the Red Scare, and with California already the home of the John Birch Society (a right-wing organization whose founding credo included the notion that President [and former General of the Army] Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist stooge), the meanings that went into the group's name were readily recognizable to any rightist ideologue.

The membership floated for a few months, and the sound was mostly folk and jug band-based, as they built up an audience with performances at coffeehouses such as the Jabberwock, and also later played shows at the Avalon Ballroom and the original Fillmore Auditorium. They evolved in this period into a rock group, playing electric instruments and, more to the point, real instruments. A second self-produced EP followed in June of 1966 -- by this time, McDonald and Melton were both playing electric guitars, Bruce Barthol, a 16-year-old friend of Melton's from high school, was in the lineup playing an electric bass; New York-born, formally trained David Cohen had joined on electric guitar and keyboards; Paul Armstrong, an alumnus of the Instant Action Jug Band, was there played guitar, bass, tambourine, and maracas; and jazzman John Francis Gunning had joined on drums. The record was good enough to get the group gigs in San Francisco, at the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium, and it was reviewed in Billboard magazine and even played on the radio as far away as New York City -- it seems to have circulated as far as London. Five months after its release, the group signed a contract with Vanguard Records, a New York-based record label (headquartered on 23rd Street), which had previously been known primarily for its releases of pre-Baroque and Baroque-era classical music and folk recordings.

Run by Maynard and Seymour Solomon, the company had stuck its neck out before by signing the reunited folk group the Weavers, who'd been blacklisted into premature retirement, but Country Joe & the Fish presented new problems -- apart from being an electric band with a louder sound than anything they'd previously recorded, they had a repertoire of daring, challenging sounds that made them a potential West Coast answer to the Blues Project, perhaps even rivals to the Doors, the electric quartet just signed by Vanguard's indie label competitor Elektra Records. But they also had this political side, which Vanguard had faced before with artists such as the Weavers and Joan Baez (who 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 respectful in their political songs; they mixed rock & roll's youthful, rebellious attitude with an awareness level at least equivalent of a poli-sci M.A., and the mix was bracing but also a little frightening in the context of the times. Lyndon Johnson was still a popular president in most of the country outside of the Deep South, and in early 1967 the only public figures who'd paid any price over the Vietnam War were a handful of Democrats who'd been defeated for opposing it.

Maynard Solomon heard the results of their recording sessions, held at Sierra Sound in Berkeley under the direction of Sam Charters, and he let "Super Bird" -- a savage swipe at Lyndon Johnson -- onto the group's debut album, but insisted that "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag" be left off, despite its popularity at the group's live 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 who heard...read more