Joe McDonald, the 1960s hippie rock star whose song “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag” was a four-letter rebuke to the Vietnam War that became an anthem for protesters and a highlight of the Woodstock music festival, died Sunday. He was 84 years old.
McDonald, who performed with his band Country Joe and the Fish, died in Berkeley, California. Cathy MacDonald, his wife of 43 years, announced his death from complications of Parkinson’s disease, in a statement issued by his publicist.
MacDonald was a long-time presence in the Bay Area music scene, where his peers included the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and his former girlfriend, Janis Joplin. He has written or co-written hundreds of songs, from psychedelic to soul-influenced rock, and released dozens of albums. But he’s best known for the talking blues songs he completed in less than an hour in 1965 — the year President Lyndon Johnson began sending ground troops to Vietnam — and recorded at the Berkeley home of Arhoolie Records founder Chris Strachwitz.
In the deadpan style of McDonald’s hero Woody Guthrie, “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag” was a mock celebration of war and senseless premature death, with a chorus of concertgoers and others memorizing it by heart:
“And it’s 1, 2, 3 / What are we fighting for? / Don’t ask me, I don’t care / Next stop is Vietnam / And it’s 5, 6, 7 / Open the pearly gates / Well, there’s no time to wonder why / Whoop! / We’re all going to die.”
At the time he wrote “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag,” McDonald was co-leader of the newly formed band Country Joe and the Fish, and added a special “FISH” chant before the song: “Give me an F, give me an I, give me an S, give me an H.” By the time his group appeared at Woodstock in 1969, Phish was on the verge of disbanding, the chant was a different four-letter word beginning with the letter “F” and McDowell was performing in front of hundreds of thousands. Many were standing and singing, a moment captured in the Woodstock documentary released the following year. (For the film, the song’s lyrics appeared as a translation, with a bouncy ball on top.)
“Some people alluded to peace and other things (at Woodstock), but I was talking about Vietnam,” MacDonald told The Associated Press in 2019. He described the opening chant as “an expression of our anger and frustration about the Vietnam War, which was killing us, literally killing us.”
The song helped make him famous, but it brought him legal and professional consequences. In 1968, Ed Sullivan canceled a planned appearance by Country Joe and the Fish on his variety show when he learned of the new opening cheer. Shortly after Woodstock, MacDonald was arrested and fined for using cheer at a show in Worcester, Massachusetts, an ordeal that helped hasten the band’s demise.
McDonald even performed the song in court. His friendships with political radicals such as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin led to him being called as a witness in the “Chicago Eight (or Seven)” trial against organizers of anti-war protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He explained on the stand how he met Hoffman and others and told them about “I Feel Like I’m Fit to Die as a Rag.” When he started performing it, the judge interrupted him and told him: “It is not permissible to sing in the courtroom.”
MacDonald recited the words instead.
In 2001, the daughter of the late jazz musician Edward “Kid” Urie filed a lawsuit against MacDonald, alleging that the melody of his song closely resembled Urie’s 1920s jazz hit “Liquor Blues.” A US District Judge in California ruled in favor of McDonald’s, citing in part the “unreasonable” delay between the song’s release and the filing of the lawsuit.
A man from the sixties
MacDonald continued touring and recording for decades after Woodstock, but remained well-known in the late 1960s, a time period he publicly longed for in the “Bring Back the Sixties, Man” rockers of the late 1970s. His albums included nation, carry, Time passes quickly and 50He continued to write protest songs, notably 1982’s “Save the Whales.”
Although identified with his anti-war activism, MacDonald admitted to having mixed feelings about Vietnam. He served in the Navy in Japan in the late 1950s, and found himself identifying with protesters and those serving overseas. In the 1990s, he helped organize the construction of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Berkeley, which was officially unveiled in 1995.
MacDonald later wrote of the party: “Many remembered the ugly confrontations that had taken place during the war years in the city.” “However, the atmosphere proved to be one of conciliation, not confrontation.”
MacDonald has been married four times, most recently to Cathy MacDonald, and they have five children and four grandchildren. He was intermittently involved with Joplin during the second half of the 1960s, two young hippies whose careers and temperaments drove them apart. When MacDonald told her he thought they should break up, she asked him to write a song, which became “Janis”:
“Even though I know you and I / We could never find the kind of love we wanted together / Alone, I find myself missing you and me, you and me.”
He grew up on politics and music
Country Joe MacDonald did not come from “the country.” He was born on January 1, 1942, in Washington, D.C., and grew up in El Monte, California. He was the son of former communists who named him Joseph Stalin and encouraged him to love music and identify with the working class. He was still in his teens when he began writing songs, and played the trombone well enough to lead a high school band and teach himself folk, country, and blues songs on the guitar.
After returning from the Navy in the early 1960s, he enrolled at Los Angeles State College, but soon transferred to Berkeley and immersed himself in popular music and political activism. He founded an underground magazine, Rag Baby, for which “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag” was written to help popularize it, and helped start local groups such as the Instant Action Jug Band and the Berkeley String Quartet.
In 1965, he formed the band Country Joe and the Fish with fellow singer and guitarist Barry “The Fish” Milton, later adding Bruce Barthol on bass, organist David Bennett Cohen and Gary “Chicken” Hirsch on drums. The name was suggested by magazine publisher Eugene “E.D.” Denson, who cited Mao Zedong’s quote that revolutionaries are “the fish that swim in the sea of the people.” MacDonald was nicknamed “Country Joe” because Denson heard that Stalin was known as “Country Joe” during World War II.
Like Jefferson Airplane, the Byrds, and other bands, Fish evolved from folk rock to folk rock to acid rock. Electro music for mind and bodyTheir debut album was released in May 1967 and included the song “Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine” as well as several longer songs. A month after the album’s release, they appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival, the first major rock gathering and highlight of the so-called Summer of Love.
“I think the ‘Summer of Love’ thing was manufactured by the media or something, because I don’t remember us thinking, ‘Wow, this is the ‘Summer of Love,'” he told aquariandrunkard.com in 2018. “(But) I was thrilled to be part of this new counterculture and new tribe because I never felt comfortable in the other tribes I was a part of growing up and in the Navy. My parents were actually Jewish communists. I never felt like I was a part of it, but I was happy and really happy being a hippie.
