COUNTRY JOE & THE
FISH
 Country
Joe and the Fish came about as part political device, part necessity,
and part entertainment. In the Fall of 1965, the remnants of the FSM
(Free Speech Movement) on the Berkeley Campus were organizing a series
of demonstrations against the war in Vietnam at the Oakland Induction
Center. Drawing on the experience of the Civil Rights Movement, the
anti-war organizers always provided entertainment either before or after
the march -- to hold people's attention. This was the era of the folk
revival starting to turn into the San Francisco rock scene and
"bands" were starting to appear all over the place. Joe
McDonald had been editing a magazine he had founded, Rag Baby, and, as
the story goes, ran out of material. He got the idea of doing a talking
issue and through various devices and favors wound up having an EP
pressed; it was an extended-play disc with four songs on it: two by a
group called Country Joe and the Fish and two by another local folk
singer, Peter Krug. This disc is considered to be the first
self-produced recording to be used by a band as a form of promotion. It
contained the original recorded version of the so-called anthem of the
sixties "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die Rag" and Joe's satire
of President Lyndon Johnson, "Superbird." The group was a
loose collection of friends and acquaintances, performing mostly jug
band-flavored material, most of it Joe's. After a brief period of what
could be called indecision, Joe and Barry Melton earnestly put together
a rock band, called it Country Joe and the Fish and started working at
music on a rather full-time basis.
The origin of the name appears
to have come from the band's manager, ED Denson, who coined the phrase
drawing from Mao's saying about "the fish who swim in the sea of
the people;" the Country Joe part has numerous variants, the most
oft-told refers to Joe's parents having named Joe for Joseph Stalin,
whose nickname during World War II was "Country Joe."
The band worked regularly in
Berkeley at the Jabberwock coffee house on Telegraph, and became
familiar faces at the two San Francisco ballrooms, the Avalon and the
Fillmore Auditorium. They also had a penchant for self-promotion and
printed up posters and calendars using the style of the times. Tom
Weller, "artist in residence," created these images. ED, who
also wrote for the weekly Berkeley Barb, concocted with Joe the idea of
letting the audience know what was happening at all times; so they took
out a 52 week 1/4 page ad in the Barb informing their audience where
they were going to be in the coming week -- even if it was in Canada.
The band's popularity was further enhanced by the release in the summer
of that year of a second EP -- called the "white EP" -- which
contained three songs: "Bass Strings," "Section 43"
and "(Thing Called) Love." "Bass Strings" became one
of the most popular songs played on the new up-and-coming radio format
then simply called "progressive" radio. Billboard magazine in
1967 referred to the Country Joe EP as "unique," and the
airplay it received brought them to the attention of New York City in
general and the music business in particular.
Joe and his band had signed a
recording contract with Vanguard Records in December of '66 and, having
recorded it at Sierra Sound in
Berkeley, were unaware of and more or less free from the watchful eyes
of a record company. Sam Charters, noted blues writer, producer and
poet, was in charge of the record which was entitled Electric Music For
The Mind and Body. It was to have contained Joe's most topical song
"Fixin' to Die Rag" but it was left off at the urging of the
Vanguard's president Maynard Solomon who felt that it would become a
"thorn in their side and prevent the band from getting any single
play on the radio." An unusual move by the company that staged the
Weavers' reunion concert at Carnegie hall during the height of anti-left
sentiment in the United States. "Not So Sweet Martha
Lorraine," released as the band's first 45, only made it to #98 on
Billboard's "Top 100," but became a staple of American college
radio. It, along with "Masked Marauder" and the other
instrumental added to the album "Section 43," were notable in
that they were instrumentals and were not only played on the radio, but
played in performance as well. This was unusual in an era of short
three-minute singles. Radio and the way music was performed was changing
and the band was helping to change it.
Electric Music and the
follow-up LP, I Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die, remained on Billboard's
album charts around #32 for about two years, while the group
increasingly toured the "ballroom" circuit and colleges around
America. They appeared at and in the film of the Monterey Pop Festival
and the film Revolution. In the summer of 1967, they were offered a
series of gigs on the East Coast. They accepted and took with them a
"light show," that curious by-product of the ballroom scene.
It consisted of rear-screen projections of images, slides and liquids,
containing colors swirled in water and oil producing paisley patterns on
a screen suspended behind the band and creating a uniquely
"psychedelic" experience. The New York City show, at the Cafe
Au Go-Go was the first time a light show had been brought to New York.
By 1968 they had released a third album Together and were touring
successfully around the world. They toured Europe in the fall of 1968
and recorded a fourth LP, Here We Are Again, in the late spring of 1969.
The "we" included performances by Jack Casady of the Jefferson
Airplane and David Getz and Peter Albin from Big Brother and the Holding
Company. Both LPs contained novel approaches to music -- the first,
"Rock and Soul Music" Joe's paean to James Brown and the
second, a dry, cutting, almost minstrel-show-like song about Harlem,
"The Harlem Song." The second broke new ground in its use of
horns and strings as "sweetening," a common device in standard
pop, but until this record, not used at all in new
"progressive" rock. Ironically two records released later that
year -- The Doors' 45, "Touch Me," and the Rolling Stones' LP
Let It Bleed, also made use of horns and strings.
 An
event at the end of the summer of 1969, the Woodstock Festival in upstate
New York, became a milestone that forever changed Joe's career and to a
certain extent the direction it then took. After much haggling due to
last minute cancellations, Country Joe and Fish were scheduled to play
the festival. As is now common knowledge, the roads were clogged, the
weather was terrible and due to the estimated 500,000 souls in
attendance, it was almost impossible for the artists to get to the site,
let alone appear at their intended time. The first show day, Friday,
found most performers either trapped at their hotel in a surrounding
village, or trying to get to the stage area. Joe, who had come down to
see what was going on, happened to be onstage at the exact moment Richie
Havens was finishing his set. A guitar was found, a set was organized
and after four or five songs, he decided to "do the Rag,"
which he had intended to perform with the band later in the festival.
Now, as a piece of background, it is necessary to add that as an
introduction to the "Rag" on the second LP, the band shouts in
high school cheerleader fashion, "Gimmie an F, gimmie an I
..." then "What's that spell? What's that spell?" etc.
and the audience yells "FISH." All very innocent; but in the
Summer of 1968, at the Shaefer Summer Festival in Woilman Rink in New
York's Central Park before about 10,000 people inside and about 10,000
people outside the fence, drummer Chicken Hirsh suggested altering the
cheer to "gimmie an F-U-C-K". Some writers have claimed that
this act was one of true defiance, outrage toward the system and
statement of how youth felt at the time; no one, so far as we know ever
asked "why" the Cheer was changed -- it just was and it stuck.
Also at Central Park that night were a number of executives from the Ed
Sullivan Show; they had asked the band to appear near Christmas time
that year. The following week they signed the contract, and sent in the
agreed upon performance payment in full with a request: please don't
appear on the show -- keep the money. They were also never invited back
to the Shaefer Beer Festival. Back at Woodstock, when Joe yelled
"Gimme an F!" at the end of the cheer the sound of all these
people yelling "fuck" was astounding or better yet, hard to
believe; it was as if a rather large cross-section of America's youth
was telling the world "get stuffed." Things were never the
same, in more ways than one.
Joe had signed with Vanguard as
a solo performer and went to Nashville with Sam Charters to record an
album of Woody Guthrie songs. Since the players on the session made few
mistakes and worked at this all the time, the recording was over very
quickly; there was time left over so some country standards were tracked
and both albums released the following year as Thinking Of Woody Guthrie
and Tonight I'm Singing Just For You. The second featuring on the cover
a picture of Joe and his wife of a year Robin and his daughter Seven
Ann. The Guthrie album won him critical acclaim and a spot the following
year at the Hollywood Bowl celebration in honor of Guthrie featuring
Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie and many who had worked with him while he was
alive.
The film of the Woodstock
Festival was prepared for release in the spring of 1970, and almost
coincided with the Fish's last LP for Vanguard C. J. Fish which with a
new keyboard player and rhythm section was produced by Tom Wilson. They
also appeared in and performed music for underground cult film Zachariah
where Joe is the leader of a band of outlaws in the old west, carrying
amplifiers on their horses and calling themselves "The
Crackers."
When Woodstock, the movie hit
the theaters, "Fixin' To Die Rag" was in the middle of the
film, with its lyrics spelled out, highlighted with a bouncing ball,
including the "Cheer" and copious remarks about how many
people seemed to be in the audience. So what a recording, some airplay
and countless performance could not do, the film did instantly. It
brought the band's anti-war message and the "get stuffed,"
we-don't-like-what-you're-doing-ness of the "Cheer" into movie
theaters all over the world. In short, all of a sudden 5 years after its
debut at a demonstration in Oakland it became an anthem.
Joe's
career took a new turn at this juncture. He went out as a solo performer
with just his guitar and played countless festivals and halls
throughout Europe, his appearance at the Bath and Bickershaw Festivals
in England in the summer of '70 having been written about recently by
writers updating the sixties. The response to his performances was
overwhelming. A concert in Paris was liberated by the gauchistes who
while crowding around him on the stage insisted they had done it for
"him" for "freedom of expression" and
"art." While in London he recorded a new LP for Vanguard,
featuring Peter Green and other English players entitled Hold On I'm
Coming. This album produced by road manager and friend Bill Belmont
(with help from then-wife Robin Menken) got extremely good radio
reception and airplay, but it did contain serious political statements
expressed in songs like "Mr. Big Pig" and "Air
Algiers" which personified Joe's generation's disapproval of police
tactics (a current complaint from today's avant garde youth much the
same as then) and the harassment by the Nixon administration of dissent
and direct political action.
DISCOGRAPHY
Albums
Electric Music for the Mind and Body, Vanguard (September 1967)
I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die, Vanguard (1967) Together, Vanguard (1968)
Here We Are Again, Vanguard (1969) CJ Fish, Vanguard (1970) Reunion,
Vanguard (1977) Live! Fillmore West 1969, Vanguard (1996)
Singles
Talking Issue #1, Rag Baby (1965) Country Joe and the Fish, Rag Baby
(1966)
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