Music career
McDonald recorded over 30 albums and wrote or co-wrote hundreds of songs in a career spanning the early 1960s to the mid-2010s. Country Joe & the Fish were a pioneer psychedelic rock band known for their eclectic performances at the Avalon Ballroom, the Fillmore Auditorium, the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, the 1969 original Woodstock Festival, and the Woodstock '79 show at Madison Square Garden, along with the Woodstock Reunion 1979 at Parr Meadows racetrack near Brookhaven, Long Island.
By 1966, Country Joe & The Fish were signed to Vanguard Records and quickly released a series of albums produced by Sam Charters. Their debut album, Electric Music for the Mind and Body (May 1967), spent 38 weeks on the Billboard charts and is regarded as a seminal work of psychedelic rock. It was followed by the album I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die (November 1967), the title track of which spent 28 weeks on the Billboard chart and firmly established the band as key figures in the anti-war movement.
The band played numerous Bay Area shows throughout 1966 at the Avalon Ballroom, Filmore Auditorium and the Matrix with the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Buffalo Springfield, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Their next album, Together (1968), featured "Rock & Soul Music", which they performed at the Woodstock concert. The album, whose cover displayed wedding photos of McDonald's marriage to his new wife Robin, reached No. 23 on the Billboard charts, though internal tensions with the band were beginning to surface.
In January 1967, McDonald appeared at San Francisco's Polo Field for the first Human Be-In. Throughout the rest of the year—during the explosion of the San Francisco music scene and the Summer of Love—the band played nearly every day, sharing bills with the Grateful Dead, Steve Miller, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Paul Butterfield, the Youngbloods, Moby Grape, the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Howlin' Wolf, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Canned Heat, Richie Havens, John Fahey, the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, James Cotton Blues Band, Sam & Dave, and poets and writers such as Richard Brautigan and Kenneth Patchen.
In April 1967, they performed at the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam alongside Eldridge Cleaver, Coretta Scott King, Judy Collins, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Robert Scheer. They also appeared at the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Festival on Mount Tamalpais with the Doors, the Byrds, Hugh Masekela, Tim Buckley, and Captain Beefheart. The band frequently played political events, including a benefit for the Delano grape strikers, and gave two performances at San Quentin Prison—once in 1967 with the Grateful Dead and again in 1969 with the Sons of Champlin.
In 1969, the band released Here We Are Again, which featured guest appearances by Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane and David Getz and Peter Albin of Big Brother & The Holding Company. The album spent 11 weeks on the Billboard charts and included Here I Go Again, later covered by Twiggy. Their final Vanguard album, CJ Fish (1970), was produced by Tom Wilson, renowned for his work with Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, and The Velvet Underground. Shortly after its release, the band disbanded.
His best known song,"The Fish Cheer/I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" (1965), is a black comedy novelty song about the Vietnam War, whose familiar chorus – "One, two, three, what are we fighting for?" – became widely known amongst the Woodstock generation and Vietnam veterans of the 1960s and '70s. McDonald wrote the song in about 20 minutes for an anti-Vietnam War play, and told The New York Times that he "was inspired to write a folk song about how soldiers have no choice in the matter but to follow orders, but with the irreverence of rock 'n' roll. It's essentially punk before punk existed."
The original Fish Cheer consisted of the band leading the audience in a call-and-response with the audience, spelling the word "F-I-S-H," with McDonald yelling out, "What's that spell?" twice, the audience responding, and then a third call immediately followed by the song. In the wake of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the cheer evolved into the "Fuck Cheer", in which he led the crowd at Woodstock in 1969. The F-I-S-H Cheer appeared on the original recording of "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag" on the LP I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die. It quickly became popular, with audiences enthusiastically joining in during live performances.
During the summer of 1968, while the band was playing the Schaefer Music Festival tour, drummer Gary "Chicken" Hirsh suggested to spell the word "fuck" instead of "fish". Although the audience embraced it, festival management did not and banned the band off the tour for life. The Ed Sullivan Show then canceled a scheduled appearance, telling them to keep the money they had already been paid in exchange for never playing on the show. The modified cheer remained a staple at most of the band's live shows throughout the years, including Woodstock.
In Worcester, Massachusetts, McDonald was arrested for obscenity and fined $500 for uttering "fuck" in public. Although the song could not be played on the radio, it went on to appear in such films and television, including Hamburger Hill, More American Graffiti, and HBO's Generation Kill, in which U.S. Marines sing it while on patrol.
