Country Joe McDonald, frontman of Country Joe and the Fish, died Saturday. He was 84. According to Variety, McDonald died of Parkinson’s in Berkley.
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Born Joseph Allen McDonald in 1942, McDonald served in the Navy from 1959-1962. After getting out of the military, McDonald moved to the Bay Area and founded Country Joe and the Fish. According to McDonald, he was not the titular Country Joe. “It was suggested that the group be called Country Mao and the Fish because Mao Tse-tung said that the revolutionaries move like fish through the sea, and I said that was stupid,” he told the website Classic Bands. “It was suggested that we call it Country Joe and the Fish after Joseph Stalin.”
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Country Joe and the Fish became a staple of San Francisco’s “Summer of Love.” Their most famous song was the “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” which the band eventually played at Woodstock. McDonald said the song was innovative because it “did not blame soldiers for war. It just blamed the politicians and it blamed the manufacturers of weapons. It didn’t blame the soldiers. Someone who was in the military could sing the song, and the attitude is, ‘Whoopee, we’re all going to die.’ Most peace songs of the era blamed the soldiers for the war.”
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Country Joe and the Fish disbanded in 1971, but McDonald kept writing music and performing through the decades. He wrote protest songs about the environment, civil rights, and against nuclear proliferation. “I grew up in a family of radical socialists, and quite honestly, I really get bored with the theory and speechifying of various movements and philosophies from the left,” McDonald said in 2016. “It doesn’t mean I don’t support them. But as an entertainer, I know that you can lose your audience. I’ve been doing this for a long, long time, and I consider myself a morale-booster for these causes.”
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