Woodstock legend Country Joe McDonald dies aged 84

Woodstock legend, Country Joe McDonald, an icon of the 1960s anti-war cultural movement, has died in his home in Berkeley, California, aged 84.

McDonald died of Parkinson’s disease, according to his wife, Kathy. The New York Times reported the passing of the founder of the 1960s psychedelic rock band Country Joe and the Fish early on Monday morning (AEDT).

Born Joseph Allen McDonald, “Country Joe”, the singer rose to prominence for his Vietnam War protest anthem I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag, which he performed at the 1969 Woodstock Festival.

The performance included the infamous “Fish Cheer”, a call-and-response where an audience of 400,000 spelt out the F-word at McDonald’s behest.

“The important thing about the Fixin’ to Die Rag was that it had a new point of view that did not blame soldiers for war. It just blamed the politicians, and it blamed the manufacturers of weapons. It didn’t blame the soldiers,” McDonald told Street Spirit in 2016.

“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.”

Hailing from California, McDonald led Country Joe and the Fish through the rock scene of the 1960s. The band eventually wound down by the end of the 1970s, when McDonald began releasing scores of solo albums exploring a different range of genres until the 2010s.

McDonald was born on January 1, 1942, in Washington, DC, but grew up in El Monte, California. He played trombone with dance bands on weekends, according to The New York Times, before joining the Navy as a teenager. He served between 1959 and 1962.

He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1965, where he co-founded Country Joe and the Fish with guitarist Barry Melton in Berkeley.

“It was suggested that the group be called Country Mao and the Fish because Mao Zedong said that the revolutionaries move like fish through the sea, and I said that was stupid,” McDonald told Classic Bands, according to Variety. “It was suggested that we call it Country Joe and the Fish after Joseph Stalin.”

When the band released its debut 1967 album, Electric Music for the Mind and Body, it did not reportedly include the hit song I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag nor the “Fish Cheer” due to fears of censorship, according to Variety. Although it did include protest songs such as Superbird, which satirised the US president Lyndon Johnson.

Two of the band’s albums broke the Billboard Top 40. However, their successes stalled while other Bay Area groups, such as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, defined much of the psychedelic rock sound.

McDonald’s solo career also never reached the heights of the late 1960s while a band member of The Fish, but he remained true to his political and musical themes. He continued to create music that explored the effects of the Vietnam War, particularly in his 1986 album Vietnam Experience.

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