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. Accounts vary as to how the music side of Rag Baby came about - some say that 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 he could sell copies of their records at demonstrations. Among McDonald's other activities in 1965, he was publishing a radical journal called Rag Baby. Out of their contact and the Instant Action Jug Band grew Country Joe & the Fish, initially as a recording alias.

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.

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, on or off the campus. McDonald was a natural fit, and after some solo performances he formed two groups: one 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. Vietnam wasn't yet a central issue, but civil rights, the economic embargo of Cuba, the working conditions of migrant farm laborers, America's 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. He mostly worked solo, playing songs by Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Woody Guthrie interspersed with some of his own compositions, and was devoted to politics. Soon after, McDonald headed for Berkeley, California - his official purpose was to attend college, but he quickly became a part of the city's burgeoning folk music scene. On returning to civilian life in 1964, McDonald resumed playing music and cut his first album in collaboration with Blair Hardman in 1964, titled The Goodbye Blues he'd also started editing a radical magazine called Et Tu. He spent most of the early '60s serving in the Navy, in which he enlisted at age 18. His own early gigs were as a trombonist in jazz outfits and a guitarist in folk groups. He was also exposed to a massive amount of music, ranging from R&B to Dixieland jazz. 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. (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 waffling and dithering over what to do about German militarism). Joe McDonald may have written the most in-your-face anti-war, anti-military song to come out of the '60s, but he was also one of the very few musicians on the San Francisco scene who'd served in uniform.īorn on Januto a leftist-oriented family, McDonald was named in honor of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

One of the original and most popular of the San Francisco Bay Area psychedelic bands, they were also probably the most enigmatic. If you mention the name Country Joe & the Fish to Americans born before 1955, 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 and what they were about.

Who sang fish heads