RIP ‘Country’ Joe McDonald
So long and thanks for all ‘The Fish’
It was only a couple of months ago that I picked up a nicely priced copy of Country Joe & The Fish’s debut album, Electric Music for the Mind and Body, at one of my local digging spots.
I never listened to Country Joe & The Fish beyond their appearance at Woodstock when they did the “Fixin’-to-Die Rag” and gave all the future MAGA voters something to sing at protests when they were all flower power hippies.
And, sadly, it was that prejudice I held against Country Joe — who passed away on March 7 at 84 — for decades, since I was a kid in middle school forced to sit through Freedom Rock commercials so I could watch Remote Control and Tim Sommer on MTV News.
So earlier this year, I find this hard copy of the San Francisco band’s 1967 primary set — on CD, by the way — and upon my very first listen I was thoroughly blown away.
Recorded on four-track at Berkeley’s Sierra Sound Laboratories in February 1967 after woodshedding inside a barn in the Santa Cruz Mountains over the Christmas holidays, this album is unlike anything I’ve heard from the Summer of Love era.
Influenced by Japanese music, John Fahey and a liberal relationship with psychedelics, Country Joe and his partner-in-crime, guitarist Barry “The Fish” Melton, helped bring a darker, more mysterious tone to the San Francisco rock sound gestating at the time.
Yet, truth be told, I’m listening to songs like “Death Sound,” the LBJ-dissing “Super Bird” and the ominous “Bass Strings” and I’m getting the vibe that these cats had more in common with the Velvet Underground on the other side of the country than they did with the Grateful Dead or the Jefferson Airplane (though McDonald did write the album’s closing number “Grace” in honor of Grace Slick). Other tracks, like the swinging “Love” and opening track “Flying High,” really showcase Melton’s unsung skills on the six-string — why more people don’t revere him like they do Jorma Kaukonen and Jerry Garcia is something that needs to be remedied. Especially as this album approaches 60 in 2027 (hopefully a gourmet vinyl remaster is in the works).
“I am very sad, though not surprised, to see that Country Joe McDonald has passed away at the age of 84 in his home zone, Berkeley, California,” Robyn Hitchcock wrote on his socials. “Country Joe & The Fish were major heroes of mine when I was 15, and key figures in the counterculture. To me and my schoolmates, Joe epitomised the psychedelic warrior, freaky yet politicised.”
McDonald is predeceased by drummer Gary “Chicken” Hirsh in 2021 and bassist Bruce Barthol, who passed away in 2023.
That leaves The Fish as the last man standing from the ranks of this great American psychedelic band. Keep him close.
Give Electric Music for the Mind and Body a spin if you haven’t. Thanks for the vision, Joe.
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