Veterans and Joan Baez

                                                  VETERANS AND JOAN BAEZ

         During the Vietnam War, I always thought that the group that made the most sense was the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). After all, they actually had been to Vietnam and participated in the fighting. They spoke from personal experience. Most people in the Peace Movement or supporting the war had no experience in the war and had never been to Vietnam.  

            Because I felt my family had been betrayed by the left wing, which never offered us support during the Un-American investigation and when my father lost his job, I had no love of the left.

            I was also at this time a U. S. Navy veteran, having served three years in the Navy Air Force. I enlisted after graduation from Arroyo High School in l959 in El Monte, California. I was walking by a Navy recruitment office and saw a poster that I liked. It was a picture of a sailor standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier holding a flag in each hand. The wind blew through his hair and whipped around the flags and his uniform. I thought I would look very good doing this and that girls would really like me. I was 17 years old.

            I think that I also was interested in proving that my family was patriotic. The whole FBI-congressional investigation into my family and their left-wing sympathies and the local publicity when my father pleaded the 5^th Amendment and refused to cooperate had left a bad taste in my mouth.

            I did accomplish this: I served three years in the U.S. Navy Air Force. I did boot camp in San Diego, played in the Drum and Bugle Corps there, learned Air Traffic Control in the Navy School at Olathe, Kansas, served one and one half years at Naval Air Station Atsugi Japan in flight operations and six months on a gunnery range in Ibaraki Prefecture at a little village called Mito, and received an honorable discharge as a third class petty officer just before my 21^st birthday in 1962.

            I didn’t hate the Vietnamese Communists or the American soldiers fighting the war. They were all just people fighting for their lives who had very little control over their lives. I hated the brass, the leaders of all sides who sat in comfortable offices and gave orders to workers. I hated the bosses in and out of uniform who really cared more for theory and philosophy than the rank and file, government officials of the left and right. I felt very comfortable with the working class Vietnam Veterans while most of the Peace Movement did not. I always helped them when I could and paid my own expenses to do so.

            In 1971 I gathered with a small group of people in a living room in Berkeley to watch a just-finished 16mm black and white film documenting an event where Vietnam Veterans confessed to what they felt were “war crimes.”  The event was called the Winter Soldier Investigation and the film was called the Winter Soldier Film. There were expenses from the making of the film that needed to be paid off. It was decided that Joan Baez and I would give a concert in San Francisco at the Cow Palace to help pay off these expenses and finish the film.

            I had never met Joan Baez before the concert. My family had attended a concert in Pasadena once to hear her sing. My father fell asleep and later said she “had a screechy voice.” He said the same thing about a relative of his who would sing at family events during his growing-up years. My sister and her husband Charles Montgomery had Joan’s first Vanguard folk albums when I lived with them after I got out of the Navy. I had listened to them many, many times. I liked those albums a lot. I later saw her perform at Big Sur at Esalon Institute. I wrote about that in a very angry way in my little magazine Rag Baby. But I had never had a conversation with her.

            The Cow Palace was full that day, probably due more to Joan than me, to say the least, as she was a big star. The setup was that we both were onstage together and took turns singing. We were both solo with acoustic guitars. She did some of her songs and then said to the audience, “I know you have heard some bad things about him but he is a nice guy so please give him a chance,” and then I got my turn to sing. Then we had an intermission.

            During the show I could hear some Vietnam Veterans in the stands yelling stuff. At intermission a Nam vet, Mike Oliver, came into my dressing room very upset because no one had announced what the benefit was for and that there was an upcoming demonstration against the war right there in San Francisco. He pleaded with me to tell the people. I agreed.

            After the intermission, back onstage, when it came time for my turn to sing, I told the audience about the Winter Soldier Film and the upcoming demonstration against the war. As I was talking Joan walked across the stage smiling and stood beside me as I talked and ground her boot into mine so that it actually hurt. To the audience it looked like a friendly gesture. Then she walked back to her microphone.

            At the end of the show the promoter Barry Olivier brought an enormous bouquet of flowers up onstage and gave them to Joan. The crowd cheered. She bowed and walked across the stage past me and threw the whole thing into my arms and went to her dressing room.

            Days later Michael Olivier called me to tell me the benefit showed no profit at all due to lots of expenses. I called up Joan and asked her how it could be that we filled the Cow Palace and made no money for the Winter Soldier Film. She yelled something to me about being condescending and hung up the phone. I called Michael and told him what happened. A few days later he called to tell me that Joan had given them $30 thousand, which paid for the production of the film. Joan never mentioned the incident to me.

            This passive-aggressive technique seemed to be her style. Years and years later, at the Bread and Roses Benefit Concert at the Greek Theatre on the University of California Berkeley campus to benefit her sister Mimi Fariña’s organization that brought music to those who could not get out, she drew blood.

        We were all in the dressing room area below the main level. There was a little room used as a dressing room. It was the only place you could get privacy. About 20 minutes before my set, Joan locked herself in that room and put on her “Bob Dylan” costume. I tried to get in to get ready for my set ...but no luck. Then she of course made a surprise appearance as Bob Dylan.

            After the show we all gathered for a group shot for Newsweek magazine. I was behind her in the group and put up two fingers in the old devil horns trick. Joan just reached up and grabbed my hand and dug her fingernails into my palm. To the camera it seemed again a loving gesture between old friends. When it was over I looked and she had drawn blood.

            I don’t mean to go on and on about the woman but I think my interaction with her was startling to me and memorable because I thought we had such a lot in common. At the Hollywood Bowl Woody Guthrie concert, Pete Seeger was lobbying to have the ensemble close the show singing I Feel Like I’m Fixing to Die Rag. During rehearsal I asked Joan if that happened if she might join in and do the “Fuck” cheer with me, as she had just been sharing some amazing facts with me about her sex life. “No,” she replied. “Joe, that would ruin my image.”

            Joan was a pacifist and married David Harris who went to jail for years rather than accept military service and kill. I was not a pacifist but did not feel that the killing in Vietnam was accomplishing anything. Joan and her sisters had a poster out with the words “Girls say no to boys who say yes,” implying that girls should not have sex with men who go into military service.

            I was ex-military and in fact did like having sex with girls at the time of the concert. I was married to Robin Menken and had a two-year-old daughter, Seven Ann. These issues seem trivial today but were quite emotional then. I do feel to this day that the Vietnam War America fought was wrong and that the soldiers who fought it were not to blame. I still feel that the Peace Movement was wrong to not embrace military personnel back then and today also. Many pacifists supported military personnel and also many military personnel were homosexual. Joan herself was to come out as a bisexual later on so the whole don’t-have-sex-with-boys thing seems a bit off now.

            But the fact is Joan did something. She was one of the only visible women who took a stand on the war and that is to her credit. It was such a divisive time that it is hard for us to imagine now.

Janis Joplin

JANIS JOPLIN        I was in Santiago, Chile, producing the music to a left-wing movie directed by Saul Landau, Nina Serrano and Raúl Ruiz. I got the news: Janis Joplin was dead! She was found in a motel room in Los Angeles choked on her own vomit while high on heroin. She was not yet 30 years old. She was recording with her new band and on top of the world: becoming rich, famous and a "super star." Like the upcoming elections in Chile it seemed as though it was the beginning of a brand new day ... but it wasn’t. A few days later in the remote copper mining town of Copiapó I burned a candle at a small religious shrine in memory of my old girl friend. Then I walked over to the town square where the film crew had sent the stage for a political rally. But problems had delayed the shoot. So I was asked if I could entertain the crowd ... and stall for time. I strapped on my brand new deluxe Martin guitar.        A few nights before I had asked if I could visit a población, one of the squatters settlements in Santiago set up by the revolutionary Miristas for the homeless of the city. I was told that they were waiting for me. I brought my guitar and went. That evening in the central building I was taken into an almost empty room except for a mattress on a bed frame. In the bed was a young man and a young woman.        The man was a wanted fugitive revolutionary. He asked through an interpreter if I would sing a song. I took out my guitar. He asked how much it cost. I said 1500 dollars. He said," I could buy a machine gun for that." I sang the song "Mr. Big Pig," which had a driving beat to a chorus of: You don’t have to be a man, to be the man and verse lyrics like: Mr Big Pig likes to be safe, he always brings tear gas And a little bit of mace With all his equipment he feels pretty big But it takes more than guns to make more than a pig Shot guns, squad cars, walky talky too Mr Big Pig you just look like a fool        When I finished he said, "That is your machine gun."      So here I was in the little Chilean town of Copiapó with my "machine gun" standing on a small wooden stage erected for a fictional political rally with a group of several hundred copper miners and their families staring at me with bemused interest. They did not speak English. I sang my song "Janis." Into my life on waves of electrical sound And flashing light she came Into my life with the twist of a dial The wave of her hand The warmth of her smile        Years before in the San Francisco public park known as the "panhandle" I had announced to Janis Joplin that I thought we should break up. I said it was too difficult with our band schedules and my hitch hiking back and forth across the Bay from Berkeley to San Francisco. She asked me to write her a song "before you get too far away from me." I agreed and a few weeks later in a hotel room in Canada I wrote: Even though I know that you and I Could never find the kind of love we wanted Together, alone, I find myself Missing you and I You and I       So in memory of her that day I sang that song to those people in the little square. As I was singing a young man and woman who had driven all the way from Berkeley, California in a Volkswagen van pulled into the town. They got out and in an LSD fog walked over to one of the film crew and asked "what’s going on?" They were told and looked up and saw me singing the song for Janis. They had seen me many times in Berkeley singing the song. The were amazed at the timing of it all. They got back in their van and drove off. I finished the song and the movie filming went on. Afterwards at the top of a mountain later that night I thought about the last time I had seen Janis … alive.       In a drunken and stoned rage she had cursed me and my wife Robin and daughter Seven Ann. We had just returned from Europe where I had toured solo and recorded the album Hold On It’s Coming. I was to be part of a huge Shea Stadium anti-Vietnam War concert . The concert was organized by Peter Yarrow of the folk group Peter Paul and Mary. I never saw Peter that day and I was not included in the show because it was too full of other stars wanting to protest the war. I remember John Fogerty jamming with Santana, or so I was told, as I never got to see the stage.         We had cut short our stay to rush home and be a part of the event. A limo had brought us from the NYC airport. We checked in at Shea Stadium, got passes and were making our way to the area where the stage was when we saw Janis coming from the stage area. Why she was there was a puzzle to me as we had fought many times when we were going together about "protesting" anything. She thought politics were stupid and she did not need to ask anybody any "fucking thing" about anything. I could tell she was in a bad mood.      The only difference this time was she was incomprehensible. I could not understand what she was talking about. But she was mad as hell. She was mad that I was with Robin. She was mad that I was not with her. She was hella pissed off ... and she was in bad shape. She stomped off to go ravage someone else. It was a relief. She was making the scene in New York City now. Free from the advice of her friends in Big Brother and the Holding Company. And loaded with money and fair weather friends like San Francisco Digger, Emmitt Grogan who I had heard was back on heroin and had convinced Janis to start using again.       I did not think much of Emmitt Grogan. He was so loved by the counter culture. He was often referred to as a revolutionary and a very creative person. He was part of the group called the Diggers who started in San Francisco. They modeled themselves so I understood after the European Provos and Diggers of hundreds of years before. The old school ones were anti-materialistic and in for sharing property and stuff like that. The San Francisco Diggers had a "free store" where they gave away food and clothes and stuff they got as donations or stole      I remember back in the days of the Haight Ashbury being in a Victorian flat off of the panhandle. I was in the kitchen with a bunch of women. The Diggers were in the front room talking about their daily successes and plans for the future and getting high and stuff. The women were putting them down. They were complaining about having to cook another dinner and never having any help from the men who were too busy fighting the revolution to help in the kitchen. I thought "yes, this is typical". So I was not a worshiper of Emmitt Grogan or the Diggers. But perhaps I just had a bad attitude. But the NYC heroin thing with Janis and Emmitt just fed into my attitude. Emmitt was found on a bench in the NYC subway dead of an overdose.      I knew Janis was shooting drugs again because of my encounter with her in the motel in Woodstock at the Festival I had been with her in her room when she wanted me to watch her shoot up heroin and got pissed off when I left the room and would not stay.       I went to NY on Thursday the day before the Festival because I really wanted to see all the bands perform and be a part of the whole event. I was quite excited about it. I don’t remember how but I got checked into the Holiday Inn that lots of people were staying at. It was not a problem, I guess because I got there a day early. I was told that when the band, Country Joe and The Fish arrived a few days later they had to fight to get rooms.       I checked in and was hanging out in the lobby. There were no stars there that I remember just a bunch of regular folks. Then Janis showed up. She had a room. I guess Peggy Casserta and her were sharing a room but I don’t know. I did not see Peggy. I can’t remember if Peggy and I traveled from the airport in NYC to the festival. I don’t know why I can’t remember but I think I would remember if we had. I was not really getting stoned and drinking lots then so that is not the reason.     Janis and I talked then she asked me to come to her room. We got there and right away she decided I needed to have sex. She gave me a blow job much to my surprise. Then sitting on her bed she reached over and got out her stuff to shoot up drugs. It was all quite casual and natural for her. It wasn’t for me. I could not stand needles and watching someone shoot up was sure not my idea of fun. I told her if she was going to do that I was leaving.      "Shit man I helped you do your thing why won’t you stay with me while I do my thing?!" I told her her idea of what I wanted was her idea not mine and I was not going to watch her kill herself. I left her room and did not see her the rest of the festival. It was starting to get late and I decided to try and go out to the festival site. Out back of the hotel was a place that a helicopter was taking off and landing from. Bobby Newerth was out there hanging out. I think he had just come in on the last flight for the day. It was too dark to fly. I was an air traffic controller in the Navy before becoming a hippy and knew that you did not want to argue with the pilot about safety. Too bad Bill Graham did not know that or he would be with us here today. I remember we stood around a pickup truck. There was a young girl there with a bandage on her finger. She said she had been in an accident the day before ... or maybe that day. She had her hand over the side of the pickup truck bed and it had brushed against something and taken off the tip of her finger. Yikes! She seemed quite resigned to it. I went to my room and went to sleep.       I rode out to the Woodstock Festival on a plane that also carried Janis’s girlfriend at the time, Peggy Casserta. I knew Peggy from the Haight Ashbury days when I lived with Janis in her apartment on Lyon Street. I did not care that Janis was bisexual or that her and Peggy were lovers. That did not enter our conversations on the plane that day. I don’t know if Peggy knew of my liaison with Janis in the hotel. It never came up. Peggy has told the press and said in her book that I stood Janis up one day and that is why we broke up ... not true. We just broke up.       I remember that day as if it was just a few weeks ago. Both our bands were playing for free in the panhandle of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. After the show I told her I thought we should break up. I was tired of hitchhiking back and forth to my apartment in Berkeley. I had to go back and forth to practice with my band. Both our bands practiced a lot. Just about every day as a matter of fact. Then there was the gigs. We hardly ever played together on the same show. I did not have a car so it was hitchhike here and hitchhike there. I was tired of it. We were not fighting or anything like that. She said "If you leave now you can never come back." I thought that was a bit extreme. A bit stunned I said OK. I thought she should have left it open but that was not her style.      A few months later, after the Monterey Pop Festival, I took up with Robin Menken. I met Janis on Mt. Tamalpais at the Mt Tamalpais Rock Festival. The Country Joe and The Fish band had been flown from the San Francisco Airport to the heliport in Sausalito. There the Hell’s Angels rode us on their motorcycles up the mountain. Janis said "You have started going with a woman I do not have much respect for." I did not understand what she meant. I was probably too immature for Janis. We were both slow learners. Too bad she did not get more time.       I think Janis was pissed off that day in NYC because of what she called the "Saturday Night Burn." It went like this: When she was young she wanted to go out with the big kids and adults on Saturday night and have fun and stay out late and drink and stuff. Later when she got old enough to do it she found out that nothing happened. That it did not live up to her expectations. She was bummed. Maybe she found life without the Big Brother band and her San Francisco scene to be empty and a bummer also. She was always just a little Texas home girl in her heart and being a star probably just made her mad.     It was just a few years before that I was in the audience when Chet Helms, the boss of The Family Dog concert production company at the San Francisco Avalon Ballroom dance hall, brought Janis on stage and introduced her. "Here is my friend from Texas, Janis. She is going to sing with the Big Brother and The Holding Company band." She then rocked the place with a few of her soon to be classic tunes. I always liked Big Brother, especially an instrumental called "Hall of the Mountain King." I thought she was a good addition to the band.        I liked Janis. She had good energy and focus. I thought she was cute. She had a little girl quality about her. She was not full of grown up curves. She did not have large breasts or hips and wore typical hippy second hand shop mix and match clothes. But it was her spirit of life that was so entertaining. People would go on to call her the best blues singer since Billie Holiday. I always thought that was crap. She was a good rock and roll singer but no Billie Holiday. Both women could not resist the lure of drugs and would fall victim to drugs in the end.       Just a few months after the Avalon concert Country Joe and The Fish and Big Brother and The Holding Company played together in Berkeley. It was a production company called Golden Sheaf Bakery, named after a real bakery that had been in Berkeley in the old days. My mother, father and little brother came up from Los Angeles to see the show. My brother and I took LSD together and we all went to the show. There was one dressing room and the three bands (another band was also on the bill) shared the dressing room. Janis and I started talking and really seem to enjoy each other’s company. We were laughing and carrying on. It always seemed like that with us. We were both Capricorns and kinda leaders of the bands we were in and both we both enjoyed just being regular people while aspiring to be entertainers also.     The evening climaxed with jam between all three bands. But Janis did not participate. She never liked to jam. She liked to know exactly what was going on and although at times in her career she did get pretty loose on stage and jam ... in general she did not.      We played together again at the Avalon and this time we wound up dancing together. Which seems so weird to me now as we both never danced. I guess we were just caught up in flirting and being attracted to each other. That night I went home with her to her the flat she shared in the Haight. It was totally furnished with victorian fru fru. I can’t remember the person who lived with Janis but I got the feeling it was her flat and Janis rented a room. There was always herbal tea on the stove and it was very warm and cozy.       We would stay up late and listen to Larry Miller on KMPX radio, the world’s first "free form" radio station. We would call up and ask him to play a song from our then just released EPs ... and he would and we were so happy about that. She was very likable and it seemed to me very clean from drugs. There was no drug scene going on that I could see and I don’t remember us even drinking a beer.       Soon afterwards she got her own apartment on Lyon Street in the Haight. I lived there with her for several months until we broke up. Bob Sideman had just taken this photo of her nude with all those beads around her neck hanging down across her breasts. She loved making necklaces and her and Linda Gravenites used to make necklaces all the time. She also did leather work. She gave me some beautiful necklaces and a leather pouch that I wore on my waist. I also had shirts that were designed by my ex girl friend Lyndall Erb. She later became tight with Janis and designed clothes for her. That was the stuff I had on at Monterey Pop Festival: Lyndall’s shirt with beaded work on it, a brown leather pouch at my waist with bead work and a bunch of necklaces Janis had made.      We took those posters of her nude and put them up in her apartment all over one wall. It was my idea. I also put candles in the overhead lamp hanging from the ceiling. It was a bit pushy of me to do that to the decor of her apartment. It was her place not mine.     She was so proud of that. Her mother was coming to town to visit and she just didn’t know what to make for dinner. She wanted to make "chow mein." I don’t remember what we ate. In the morning we would walk down Haight Street with her dog George. George was like a small collie type dog. Same markings as a collie but with some other mix. He was a very nice dog. She loved that dog. One day she called me crying, she cried a lot then, like a woman, very natural just upset crying. "George got hit by a car. I can’t find him anywhere. What will I do. I am so upset." I told her that he would turn up. He did, and had to have if my memory is right a bit of his tail taken off. But he was OK and recovered quickly.       We would walk along. She would stop in and get a bottle of Thunderbird to drink on the way. We would meet Peggy and Peggy’s girlfriend at the time whose name I can’t remember. Freewheeling Frank the Hell’s Angel who wrote poetry with Michael McClure and other folks. We would go to Hippy Hill in the park and just enjoy the community. She was so happy then.       Sometime back then we were in a sauna together in Santa Cruz high on LSD. Our bands were in the main house, which was in the woods, jamming and partying. We were doing what you can imagine boy friend and girl friend might do in that situation. All of a sudden her right hand froze and she could not move it. It started to freak me out. She said not to worry about it. That ever since she had done a lot of speed in Texas with somebody while living in a garage it happens sometimes. A few minutes later she got back movement in the hand. It was a part of her I did not share ... her life with speed and heroin.      I went one afternoon over to see an event at the Fillmore that Allen Ginsberg was at. Afterwards I asked him if I could talk to him sometime about life and such. He said sure his name was in the phone book. It wasn’t so for some reason I decided to go to Berkley and talk with Mario Savio about life. I was confused about being a "hero," a rock "star." I never have figured that out. I went over and talked with Mario. He was dead set against being a hero of any kind. I argued that we needed new heroes ones that were down with the people. I enjoyed him and his wife. Janis was dead set against it. We had a big fight then. I remember her turning into someone else. She was yelling "I don’t need to ask any fucking body about nothing. I don’t need any advice from anybody".        When she was living on Lyon Street I remember her playing a tape for me with that "ba ba ba ba baby" stuff in the vocal she used to do. She was so excited. She said "Joe I just made that up. Isn’t it groovy." She said she was trying to do something like Otis Redding did. She loved Otis Redding after Monterey and wanted to be "just like him." I miss Janis. She would really have enjoyed the years that have passed by. She would have been a real hero of the people in my mind. She always was a very good person she just hadn’t gotten it together yet when she died. I miss the person. I don’t miss the "superstar". Copyright © 2004 by Joe McDonald. May not be reproduced in any form without express permission.

H  O  M  E

Beginnings

                                         BEGINNINGS

            I was born on January first, in a Washington, DC hospital, in the year of 1942. I was not the first child of the year but I was the first child of my parents, Worden Calhoun McDonald and Florence Plotnick. I was to learn many decades later that they were not legally married, a fact confirmed by the records kept by the FBI on my parents’ lives. My mother once growled at me, “We planned every child,” and I assumed that was the case, but my father confessed one day after I was grown that his mother had come to visit and see the new one-and-a-half-year-old grandbaby and so they “got married then.”

    All that aside, I was loved and my parents stayed married and were together almost every day for the rest of their lives. My mother lived into her seventies and my father into his eighties, and they died a year apart, both from cancer.

    Less than three years after my birth, my sister Nancy Victoria was born. These were troubled times for Eastern European emigrants and socialists, and my parents followed my mother’s parents’ lead and moved to Los Angeles County where my grandfather Harry Plotnick had a dry cleaning and tailor shop. My dad put in for a transfer from his Bell Telephone Company job and got work in the L.A. office. We settled in Culver City where I went to kindergarten and got my first guitar lessons.

    The family took the train across the country and my dad proudly told the story of how I would order breakfast of “sausage and eggs” in the train dining car. He was probably remembering when he “rode the rails” during the Great Depression as a hobo either on the top of the cars or in a box car with many, many other hungry unemployed hobos.
    After our stay of not quite two years in Culver City, my folks found a house to buy in the sleepy little San Gabriel Valley town of El Monte, where I remained until I enlisted in the Navy at the age of 17, after graduation from Arroyo High School.
    As a full-grown man after my father’s death, I went with my cousin Bob McDonald to the little Oklahoma town of Sallisaw, where my father had grown up. I realized how similar El Monte and Sallisaw were. Little wonder that my father had chosen to settle in that place on a quarter-acre lot with a two-story house and immediately planted fruit trees and a vegetable garden and acquired chickens, rabbits, and even several horses. He was reliving some aspect of his childhood on McDonald Hill in Sallisaw, growing up on Old McDonald’s Farm.
    In El Monte, when I was ten, my brother Billy, William Patton McDonald, was born, and it was the three children and Mom and Dad for the rest of our lives.
    At the age of ten I was taken to a music store and asked to blow into several instruments, and it was decided I should play the trombone in the elementary school orchestra. Thus began my musical career. 

                    We often saw my grandparents, my mother’s parents Harry and Bessie, and Bessie’s sister Aunt Rose and Uncle Louie Zelman. The two sisters had come over together from Russia, got married on the East Coast, and moved to the West Coast at about the same time. My mother said they always wanted to be together. My grandfather Harry, I am told, was a Zionist and my grandmother Bessie a Communist. They fought over politics their whole life. Bessie had red hair and the conservative Plotnicks of Richmond, Virginia called her “Bessie the Red.”

    A family story was that sometimes customers would ask Harry if he had a wife and he would reply, “Oye, do I have a wife?!” in typical Jewish joke style with his Russian accent. Bessie took my mother to Communist Party meetings in Washington, DC from a very early age, and both women seemed to love meetings and socialism their whole lives. My mother late in her life became a political driving force in our hometown of Berkeley, California. She was the most elected politician ever, they say, holding office of Rent Control Board, City Council, and City Auditor. My father hated meetings.
    On the other side of the family, my grandmother Emma had happily married a Presbyterian minister, James Angus McDonald, who had four children from a previous marriage. She was young, and a friend said at the time “Poor Emma has had her last peaceful day.” She went on to have five children with my grandfather, two of whom died. She played the piano in the church and held the farm and the family together for decades with a smile and loving attitude. She always lived a life of Christian grace.

    After the Depression and early death of my grandfather, Emma moved to Fullerton, California and lived with my Aunt Beatrice, my father’s older sister, and her husband Ralph. She passed away at 93. She always stayed on the sunny side of life and my father was the youngest and her baby. Both grandmothers, besides being very different politically and socially, were a strong positive force.
               But that was the end of family in my life for some reason I have never understood. Probably it was politics. But even my father’s brother Angus told my cousin Henry to “go around Oklahoma, it is not worth seeing.” I don’t know about the estrangement of the Plotnicks but my mom always said, “We don’t believe blood is thicker than water.”

    It is a fact that there were terrible wars in Oklahoma over communism. It’s something we don’t hear about in books and school. But people shot each other over politics. And of course my mother married a non-Jewish person, which was reason to disown someone in an Orthodox family.
    Although we were loved and well taken care of as children, ours was not a very affectionate home. The Great Depression, the Russian and German pogroms, the Holocaust, World War II, the struggle for equal rights for African Americans, the struggle for the right to have unions for working people, and later the Un-American Communist witch hunts of the 50s took their toll on Mom and Dad. There was little to none of hugging and kissing and open affection and a kind of starkness and spareness to our lives as far as the home life was concerned.

     
      
My father turned our yard into a beautiful place of greenery. He planted fruit trees that bloomed and bore fruit and corn and other vegetables and we had dogs and rabbits and chickens and a horse and a donkey once and goats and pigs. He taught me how to be a farmer on our little piece of property there in L.A. County, and we even broke a horse together – that is, to teach a horse how to be comfortable with a rider on it and obey commands of turn left, turn right, and stop and go and stuff.




    Our town had a mostly dry river bed running through it. Perhaps it was the San Gabriel River? I would ride Rebel, the horse my dad and I had broken, in the river bed, bareback at times (without a saddle). I was so small that if I fell off I would have to find a rock or something to climb up on to get back on him. He was a gelding, “cut proud” as my father used to say. A gelding is a male horse that has been castrated. “Cut proud”: I guess meant that he still had spirit. He was a pinto, brown and white. I have an old family shot of Rebel with his front feet up on a wooden platform, doing a kind of trick, with my sister on his back.
    I would gallop him through the dry river bed with my BB gun. It was a Red Ryder BB rifle model. My dad had taught me that if you whistled, a running rabbit would stop and listen and then you could get a “bead,” or take aim at it and shoot. That is what I did. I don’t remember ever hitting one. 
   

        There were lots of adventures there in that river bed. It was large. It had a rock crusher in it – a big bunch of machinery that crushed up rocks into gravel. It also had a “skeet shoot.” A place that fired clay Frisbee-like things up into the air and people shot them with rifles out of the air to practice shooting. Funny thing is, I have no memory of ever seeing anyone using the rock crusher of the “skeet shoot.” But I would pick up the broken skeets as souvenirs. I don’t remember anyone else riding with me in the river bed. I would pretend to be a cowboy and go up and down grades of sand with that Southern California landscape of brush and stuff. 
    Dad used to sometimes take Rebel, or other horses we sometimes had, and make them run in the sand. It wore them out, he said, so that they were less inclined to misbehave. A horse that has too much energy or wants to misbehave can be a problem. It can throw you off by bucking or shying, moving suddenly to the side or even bite you or kick you. My dad said that a hand-fed colt that is treated like a pet can be a real pest later in life as it will just come into the house like a dog or cat. I like that image.
   
            After Dad and I broke Rebel to the saddle he was very gentle but he was young and full of energy. One day as I was riding around the backyard bareback, he took off in a canter in that small space and I slid off his back and fell in front of him lying on my back. I remember looking up into those big round intelligent eyes and seeing that enormous hoof coming down on my face. Our eyes made contact and he lifted his hoof and I was not even scratched. Horses are amazing animals.

    Dad was good at understanding the boundaries of animals with people but I don’t think he understood the boundaries of normal relationships between people. He said he always go along better with animals than people. My dad always said whenever I was thrown off a horse, “You have to get back on the horse if it throws you, otherwise the horse will think you are afraid of it and you will think you are afraid.”

    In his autobiography An Old Guy Who Feels Good, he said he discovered early on when he was a traveling cowboy that if he could back a horse into a corner and get a good look into its eyes, he and the horse could come to an agreement and could work together. 
    I think that his advice about getting back on the horse is good in moderation. Both he and I seemed to be a bit obsessive-compulsive about this. I remember in the 60s Barry Melton and I would take LSD together and sit with the Timothy Leary Tibetan Book of the Dead and light candles and read and read and read, trying to understand the bardo thing. First bardo, second bardo, and lining up your chakras and all that. We would start laughing because we just could not get what the heck he was talking about. Maybe he was talking about nothing, I don’t know, but we did that many times. Too many times. It started to be nonsense.
   

        I got into reading the I Ching, Chinese Book of Changes, in the 60s and the Tarot Cards. I did the same thing with them. I would read the cards many times in a row and toss the coins over and over until the oracle, like a good sponsor, would get sick of my behavior and tell me to go do something else and stop thinking about myself and my future.

             I remember that when the rains would come to El Monte, the river bed would fill with water and we would take inner tubes and float down the river. It was great fun, one of the few things I did with other children. Us guys would start somewhere and float as long as we could without having to hike back too far. I also remember having BB gun pretend-war fights in the river bed with other kids.

    Things changed when I was twelve years old. That was the year that the California Un- American Activities Committee served my father with a subpoena to appear before it and testify as to his knowledge of communist activities. He was working for the Los Angeles Bell Telephone Company and no longer a member of the Communist Party. My parents were in the Progressive Party then. They tried to serve my mother with papers but never did. My sister Nancy tells me that Mom sent her to the door to tell the FBI guys that she was not home.

    But my father testified. He took the Fifth Amendment. He refused to tell them anything on grounds that it might incriminate him. He was then given the choice of getting fired from his job or quitting. He quit. He was very close to having a vested pension plan. He had worked nineteen years for the telephone company. He got nothing. It makes sense that my father would quit. He was proud. He was a strong, silent, farm-boy type – an easy type to take advantage of. He would not argue and defend himself with a lawyer and stuff like a city person might have done. It was hard after that. He said one day that he remembered that when he would go into a store as an employee of the telephone company the ladies “would treat you with such respect.”  Well, they sure did not treat him as a suspected communist enemy of the country with respect. And we began a downward social and financial decline.


Chelsea Hotel


                                                        CHELSEA HOTEL

     

      I started staying in the Chelsea Hotel in NYC because the Vanguard Record Company’s studio was on 23rd Street and so was the Chelsea Hotel. I had no experience at all with New York City before 1967 when Country Joe and The Fish, the electric version, began to record albums in the Vanguard studio. Well perhaps I did, although the first album was recorded in Berkeley at Bob DeSousa’s studio. Soon afterwards we did get a job playing at the Cafe Au Go Go in the Village, in NYC, and perhaps that was the first time I stayed at the Chelsea. But no matter, it became pretty much the hotel of choice for over several decades for me playing with various configurations musically of rock bands, duets, and solo.

           The man who wrote “Tubby The Tuba” a story that involved a talking tuba that was quite popular when I was a kid, lived in the Chelsea. His daughter used to hang out with my bass player Peter Albin, during the All Star Band period. We always stayed at the Chelsea. My second wife and mother of my daughter Seven Anne, Robin Menken, threw some really dramatic scenes at the Chelsea. She had come on tour with me when we were boy friend, girl friend and we fought so much at the Chelsea that I sent her home. She was in the lobby crying and crying with our manager Ed Denson and her film magazine collection. As they waited for the cab to take her away to the airport. That of course was not the last I saw of her as we got married and the marriage is featured on the whole album cover of Country Joe and The Fish’s TOGETHER album.

    There was a period of time in the 1970s that Barry Melton and I toured as an acoustic duo. We were billed as Country Joe and The Fish sometimes. Though that always seemed to me to be stretching the truth, Barry seemed quite pleased with it as he had taken to calling himself Barry “The Fish” Melton. But never mind that bullocks.

    I remember Barry and I sharing a room at the Chelsea. I had been working out with free weights and also running or jogging you might say. I was following Franco Columbu’s weight exercise program, something that I still do today. I was in very good shape. I convinced Barry that we should take weights with us on the road. I had a special box with barbells in them. It seems so totally stupid now but I have always been anxious about leaving my routine home and going on the road, and so this seemed a way to take a bit of my home routine with me. We of course did not have roadies to carry the stuff around so we had to.

    I remember one time getting onto a small plane to take us to Uncertain, Texas for a gig for some dope dealers out in the boonies and the look on the pilot’s face as he lifted up this very heavy metal box and me telling him it had our weights in it. Anyway Barry was in not so good shape and I convinced him to try an exercise routine. He had a bad leg from a motorcycle accident years before Country Joe and The Fish so running was not possible, but the free-weight thing just might work.

    There in that room I worked my routine and ran the streets of NYC. I have some nice pictures that a guy named Sidney took of me back then running and looking very fit....nice. Barry had been game up to one day in the Chelsea when he was lying on his back doing Franco Columbu’s arm extensions with the dumb bells and smacked himself in the forehead with the weight. He lost interest after that. So he would go out and do stuff and I would stay and work out. This was the reverse of what we sometimes did later when he was studying for the bar, to become a lawyer, with a mail order study course, and I would go out and party and he would stay back at the hotel and study and say, “McDonald, you live on the material plane.”

    So while he was out one day I decided to shave my body like the guys in the Pumping Iron book and film. So I did. It took a bit of time and I washed all that hair down the drain of the Chelsea Hotel shower. It sure does work though on your body like when you shave off facial hair you always look younger. When Barry came back and he saw me in my shorts without my shirt on he said, “You know Joe, this working out has you looking years younger.”

    Tucky Bailey played flute and alto sax with the All Star Band. Before joining the band she had played background music for Toad the Mime who performed on the street in Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco. She had never been to NYC until we got some work there. It was the fashion to go to Max’s Kansas City and eat at the restaurant on the ground floor and see a show, or play our show in the club upstairs. They had chickpeas and a great salad with blue cheese dressing.

    The night I remember the three women in the band, Tucky Bailey, Anna Rizzo the drummer, and Dorothy Moskowitz the piano player, went upstairs to see Tim Hardin play. Tim had a problem with drugs and seemed very, very stoned that night. He was wearing what seemed to be a kimono and had a small group backing him. He seemed oblivious to the audience. The ladies got very drunk and kept yelling shit at Tim. It was pretty embarrassing to me but I could not stop them.

    At the end of the night we went back to the Chelsea Hotel and Tucky and I got into the elevator. She then threw up. I told her, “Wow Tucky, your first day in NYC and you ate at Max’s Kansas City, got drunk and yelled at Tim Hardin, and threw up in the Chelsea Hotel. You’ve had quite an introduction to New York City.

Live performances

I have started to work on an autobiography and will occasionally post some installments. LIVE PERFORMANCE        Live performance is always a challenge and you never know what will happen. The audience often does much more than just applaud or boo.       Of course me and the Country Joe and The Fish band were famous for both the Fish Cheer and the Fuck Cheer. I sometimes worried what would happen when I yelled "Gimme an F!" and the audience did nothing ... but that has not happened yet. But what did happen in New York City one night was worse. Barry Melton had written a song called New York City Goodbye which was a very definite put down of the city and he decided to put the song in our set at the Fillmore East which was the place to play rock and roll in New York City. The response was cool to say the least. At the end of our set it came time to sing "I Feel Like I’m Fixing To Die Rag" and we opened with the fuck cheer. We yelled out the letters and the audience responded but when it came time for the "What’s that spell?" part a guy in the front row yelled out after "What’s that spell" "FUCK YOU!"      Yikes! That was a shock and a bummer and, well, a show-stopper, but we could not stop, so we did it again, "What’s that spell?" and he answered again with "Fuck you!". Boy that was not good. We did it again, "What’s that spell?" and he answered very loud "Fuck you!" I looked at Barry Melton and he looked at me and then he looked down at the guy and said, "Fuck you". We played the song and left the stage and did not get an encore.         Jane Fonda’s anti-Vietnam War show called FTA Show or Free The Army or as the GI’s used to say, Fuck The Army, with Donald Sutherland, Ben Vereen and others involved my wife Robin Menken as a writer. Jane requested that I get involved in their plan to bring entertainment to military personnel by performing in GI coffee houses near military bases. The GI coffee houses were set up by various antiwar groups so that military personnel could come and hang out and find out different points of view on the war from those that they heard on the base and from the government. The show was a variety show with comedy and dramatic skits and satire about the government and the war.       I don’t think Jane had any live performance experience before the FTA Shows. I am pretty sure all her performance experience was in front of a TV camera. After a few shows Jane asked me "How do you do it, Joe?" She was asking how one gets a good response from the audience under the conditions we were working in. The conditions were less than first class but pretty regular for a traveling musician, coffee houses mostly. She had only done movie work up to that point and found it confusing. I tried to explain to her that we could not do any retakes and just had to go with it how ever it turned out. This demanded a lot of flexibility as the audience had a tendency to get involved in the act.       You just never knew how this would manifest itself, sometimes good sometimes bad. For instance when I was performing solo at the Fillmore East once. I had done most of my set without any unusual things happening . I had just released an album of Woody Guthrie songs so I sang his song about the Columbia River, "Roll On Columbia." The song is in waltz time, one of my favorite time signatures. But this time the audience began to clap along. This had only happened on other time to me and that was in Vienna Austria, the waltz capitol of the world, and there they clapped in 3/4 time to every song, even if it was not in waltz time, which most of my songs were not.        But at the Fillmore that night they began a 1, 2, 3, clap with nothing on the 1, and then a clap on the 3 and 4. This sounded like, silence, clap, clap, silence, clap, clap, you get the idea. Very unusual but it worked fine and was good clean fun. But towards the end of the song one of my guitar strings broke. I decided to stop and change the string but told the audience that they could continue clapping, so they did. I went off stage, got a new string, came back and while sitting on my stool and listening to them clap I changed the string. I tuned up my guitar and went right back into the song, sang a few verses and choruses to their clapping and ended it.        The audience gave me a round of applause followed by silence and I contemplated what do do next. Then of a sudden I heard a single person start the clapping thing again and soon the entire audience was clapping the waltz time thing again and looking at me with smiles on their faces! It was obvious that they were not about to stop so I did the whole song again much to their delight and my surprise. The ending was followed by huge applause and another silence. This silence was a bit tense as we stared at each other in the silence and wondered what would happen. And then one by one they started the clapping again! I played "Roll On Columbia" three times that night.        Woodstock was not the only huge festival to happen in the late 60s and early 70s. I had the honor to also play solo at both the Bickershaw Festival and the Bath Festival in England. Both festivals lasted several days, had lots of head line acts, hundreds of thousands of people and also rain and mud. I started to think brought the rain with me. At Bickershaw there was a steady drizzle during my set. At the end I closed with the "Fish Cheer" and "Fixing To Die Rag" just like at Woodstock and was called back for an encore. Being at a loss as to what to do asked the audience what they wanted to hear and they yelled back almost in unison "Do it again," so I did. I left the stage and to my surprise was called back for a second encore. I really did not know how to follow two "Fixing To Die Rags" and shared my thoughts with the audience, but no problem they yelled back "Do it again!", so I did! It was great fun. Almost everyone who speaks English loves to yell fuck in a large group and people of a certain age love to sing that song, perhaps "Fixing To Die Rag" is one of the only fun things about the Vietnam War.       Speaking of the Vietnam War, about 1990 I performed for the group Veterans For Peace, at their convention, in a hotel in San Francisco. A man named Phil Butler came up to me and asked if we could talk. I said sure. He told me he had spent about seven years as a prisoner of war in the famous secret Communist prison camp called Hanoi Hilton, during the Vietnam War. He had been a fighter pilot and was shot down, as most of the prisoners there were. He told me that the only entertainment the prisoners had was the Communist propaganda radio show with the DJ Hanoi Hanna. Hanoi Hanna played American pop and rock music and gave commentaries designed to depress the Americans and get the prisoners to confess to "war crimes" and turn against the American war effort and government.       Every now and then Hanoi Hanna would play "I Feel Like I’m FIxing To Die Rag." He told me that it was always a morale booster for the prisoners in the compound and that some even hummed and sang along. The prison camp officials could never understand why this song with it’s refrain "Whoopee we’re all gonna die" could be a morale booster. They were of course Vietnamese and many had been educated in Paris and learned English and about American democracy there. But American humor is not French humor -- it is something special the world over and a one of our great strengths. I have heard so many stories about this song from American soldiers who fought in Vietnam that always astound me but this story was the farthest out. Then Phil Butler, knowing that I was going to sing the song that day at the convention said to me, "I am just glad that I lived to hear you sing it in person." Upon which we both began crying and hugged each other.        Back to the Bickershaw Festival in the rain. I was amazed that I managed to hold that huge audiences attention when I sang a Robert W. Service poem I put to music, from the album War War War, titled "Jean Desprez." The ballad is almost ten minutes long. The English of course have strong feelings about the World Wars and that song is about World War I. There are still parts of England to this day that remain destroyed by WW II bombs. They love Robert W. Service’s story of the French resistance fighter; the Prussian Captain and the French peasant boy, with its dramatic surprise ending. I can still bring a picture to my mind of those audience members huddled under their tarps, tents and umbrellas listening intently to every word of that song and cheering at the end. A short time later I sang the song to another rain drenched English audience at the Bath Festival* under those same conditions and got the same reaction.      Thinking of the Bath Festival brings several memories to my mind. First I remember traveling to the Festival in a limousine with my road manager, Bill Belmont and my wife Robin Menken and our young daughter Seven Anne. I know this sound fabulous to all people who have dreamed of riding in a limousine. The trip out was fine but on the way back the limo broke down on the motor way and we sat at the side of the road for three hours in the cold weather waiting for the people to come and repair it.       When the Woodstock Music Festival movie showed for the first time in New York City the Country Joe and The Fish band were playing a concert a few hours away. The showing of the movie was early enough that we could just see it and then drive to the show. Someone provided a limousine for us to ride to the gig in. We were staying in New York City so it was no big deal to go to the opening and then drive to the gig. Of course we were excited about this. We saw the movie and then exited the theater to our limo. We had all come to see the movie, band members and road crew. There was three roadies and five band members and our manager ED Denson. We were many more people that could comfortably get into that car. I remember a horrible three hour drive that had people even sitting on the floor and we finally got to the gig in a terrible mood but happy to get out of that limo for sure and hesitant to take another offer of a free limo ride.       I did not have such a great success with the Jean Desprez song years later singing at an industrial college outside of London. The stage was just a riser about six inches off the ground and the audience of students sat on the floor in front of me. There were about 300 people there. Behind the audience there was a door leading from the hall to a corridor and another open door leading into a bar. I performed for about 45 minutes and everything was going fine. I decided to sing the long Jean Desprez ballad and started. About two or three minutes into the song I saw a young man leave the bar and start walking into the hall where the audience was and I was singing. He was looking right in my direction and I don’t know why but I thought to myself, "Here comes trouble"!         With the careful wobbly steps of a drunk person he made his was through the crowd, careful not to step on his fellow students. With a steady determined pace and his eye on me he made his way towards the stage. The song ran through its many dramatic verses building to the grand finale as he grew closer and closer to the stage and me. There was nothing I could do to stop him or the song. It has about fifteen verses and at the twelfth verse he reached the stage and at the thirteenth verse he stood my my side and bent over and asked very nicely: "Excuse me but who are you?!"       My brain was blown. I knew he would not go away nor would he stop asking me this question. I stopped playing and just looked at him in disbelief. We stared at each other. He asked me again "Who are you?" The local promoter was standing off to the side of the stage and now noticed what was happening and came over and led the young man away, hopefully explaining to him who I was. The audience stared at me trying to figure out what had happened. I returned to task at hand and not wanting to start the song over again decided to just sing the last verse, and that is what I did. Of course in the elapsed time most of the audience had forgotten what the song was about and the dramatic effect of course was severely lessened. But the show must go on!       Yes, God bless the audience, you just never know what they are going to do, but without them you are out of a job.        In the mid 1970s riding on the popularity of my Fantasy Records album Paradise with an Ocean View I got a job opening some shows with the original Santana band. This was great as I always thought they were one of the finest bands to come out of the 60s. We were playing Denver, Colorado venue called Mammoth Gardens. During the first part of my set a huge crowd outside that was refused admittance due to the place being full already pushed open the doors and crowded their way in. This created a joyous mood in the already happy audience.        I decided to sing the Jean Desprez song, a bad choice. About half way through the song noticed that the people pressed up against the front of the stage were smoking huge marijuana cigarettes and blowing the smoke up towards me. The top of the stage was about the height of their heads.          Once again, as I watched the cloud of smoke rise I thought, "Here comes trouble." Working my way through the verses of the song to its dramatic ending I watched the cloud of pot smoke rise from my feet, to my knees, to my waist, then to my chest and at last to my face. I then became totally disoriented as I tried to sing and as I sang inhaled pot smoke. I no longer had any idea where I was in the song or even what the song was. I stopped singing, looked down and the people blowing smoke at me and the audience cheered their victory. Once again they had worked their way into the act.        It was during that show that I got perhaps the best career advice I have ever received. I came off stage and Carlos Santana was standing in the hall outside the dressing rooms. The Santana Band was going on after me. the crowd was cheering and I was sweating and starting to come down from the excitement and tension of doing my set. We said hello and then I said to Carlos, "It is so weird doing this solo act!" Then he said, "It is a blessing Joe. There are not many people who can do it and you are one of them." Thank you, Carlos, that advice has helped me many times over the years.        Touring the country of West Germany in the 1970s I always had lots of American military personnel in the audience. They were of course lonesome for home and excited to see American rock and roll bands. Once I was playing a night club with my All Star Band about 1972. The place was packed so full that no one could really move, including us. We were stuck up on stage when the sound system broke down and we had nowhere to go. The dressing room was not accessible and we just had to wait up there for them to fix it. It was really hot and noisy in the place. I kept hearing a guy yelling, "I love you Country Joe! California! Woodstock!" over and over. It was really getting on my nerves.        I looked around and could see they guy, this young soldier right there in front of me in the crowd. Now I had been in the military myself and knew what it was like to be along way from home and drunk in a night club but it was hot and I was mad about the PA not working and not being able to play and trapped on stage and this guy yelling, "I love you Country Joe! California! Woodstock!" over and over was starting to drive me crazy. Of a sudden I yelled at him, "Shut the fuck up man or I will throw my guitar at you".        He smiled and looked at me and yelled, "I love you Country Joe! California! Woodstock!" and I realized that if I did he would save my guitar pieces and tell everyone back at the base later tonight how Country Joe yelled at him and threw his guitar at him and how much he loved me.       Fans, God love 'em! Without 'em I would be out of a job.        Sometimes the audience can turn against you. Barry Melton spent some early years growing up in New York City and I guess he did not like the town because he wrote a song called "New York City Goodbye" all about how terrible New York City was. Now New York City is probably the most important city in America and especially for show business. Country Joe and The Fish had played several times in New York City. First at the Whiskey Au Go Go when we brought the first light show to NY then at the Anderson Theater. I will never forget that opening, they pulled us out from behind the curtain on a rolling stage singing "Fixing To Die Rag" to a cheering audience. Very dramatic! And many times in Central Park for free and at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East.        At the release of Country Joe and The Fish’s third Vanguard album we were playing the world famous Fillmore East. Barry decided to sing his "New York City Goodbye" about how terrible New York City was. I did not think much about it at the time. Although I had had my own introduction to New York when we first came there. David Cohen and Barry had both grown up in New York but I grew up in California and knew nothing about New York, especially about cab drivers.        We all got into a cab one day and got to our destination and I handed the driver two dollars. The fare was one dollar and ninety cents. I told him to "keep the change," and got out of the cab. He threw the dime and me and yelled over and over "keep the change!" and a lot of other stuff. He went on for a good ten minutes like that. They guys just laughed and me and in the end told me never to tip a cab driver in New York less than twenty five cents. But novices beware, this was in the 1960s when a quarter was something, today I am sure the driver would throw it back at you.         Anyway at the Fillmore East we did Barry’s song and the vibe got very unfriendly. We finished our set with the "Fish Cheer" and "Fixing To Die Rag." After spelling out the letters Barry yelled out, "What’s that spell" and after the crowd yelled back "FUCK" a guy right in the front row said very loudly, "YOU!". Well Barry was stunned. He paused and then went on again and yelled, "What’s that spell?" to which the crowd yelled "FUCK" and the guy said again, "YOU!". Barry looked at me and I just shook my head not knowing what to do. So he yelled again "What’s that spell?" and the guy answered "YOU!" a third time. Barry looked at him and said "Fuck you too!" and we left the stage. This was the beginning of the end for Country Joe and The Fish in New York City.         At the Woodstock Festival as almost everybody knows the audience was huge, some say 500,000, and the promoters had not planned for such a big audience. On the day the Country Joe and The Fish played Barry and I were back stage, it was a hot, muggy New York day and I noticed several cases of sodas and beer back stage for the performers. I thought it would be a good idea to pass some out to the audience. I brought them up on stage and started passing them over the barrier separating the stage from the audience. The audience got excited about this and so did Barry. In his excitement he decided to throw cans of beer to the people who were far away from us, meaning well I am sure, but I watched with horror as people with outstretched hands got hit on the head. In a matter of a minutes they began throwing them back at us. We beat a quick, hasty retreat back stage.        At the Albert Hall in London Barry invited the people up in the "Gods," the very very high cheap seats, down to the ground floor, the very best expensive seats. They came pouring down. The place had been decorated for us flower power hippies with tons of flowers in the isles and on stage. The audience danced in the isles and climbed up on stage and threw flowers every where. We were banned from the Albert Hall forever. There was a young man in the Gods named Nick Saloman who had come that night with his girlfriend to see us. He came down and had a great time dancing around. He lost his girlfriend that night but became a big fan. Almost 30 years later I was to play the Queen Elizabeth Hall with him and his band Bevis Frond, playing a set of great old Country Joe and The Fish standards. At that concert I of course did the Fuck Cheer getting banned from the Queen Elizabeth Hall forever. Speaking of getting banned forever: Country Joe and The Fish were the only band paid to stay off of the old Ed Sullivan Show. This is how it happened.        We were paid in advance to be on the show. Then we were hired by the Shaffer Beer Company to perform in their New York City summer series the Shaffer Beer Festival held in Waltham Rink Arena in Central Park. On that day Chicken Hirsh said he figured out that fuck was a four letter word beginning with F just like Fish so why not change the Fish cheer to the fuck cheer. It was 1968 and the mood in the country and in the band was getting very grumpy wumpy what with the war and everything going on and on, so we thought it was a great idea Well the audience really loved it! But after the show the Shaffer Beer representative stuck his head in the dressing room and said "You will never be on the Shaffer Beer Festival again".        Then a few moments later the Ed Sullivan Show representative who had been there to  check out the act they had bought (the Ed Sullivan Show was filmed out of New York City), said "You can keep the money but you will never be on the Ed Sullivan Show." That is how we became the only band paid to stay off their show. * BATH FESTIVAL: The Bath Festival Of Blues And Progressive Music took place at Shepton Mallet on June 26-27 1970. First day was Formerly Fat Harry, Keef Hartley, Maynard Ferguson’s Big Band, Fairport Convention, Colosseum, It’s A Beautiful Day , Steppenwolf, Johnny Winter and Pink Floyd. On the Sunday, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers did the early-morning shift, followed by Canned Heat, Joe Jammer (who fitted in everywhere when bands failed to show on time), Donovan, Frank Zappa And The Mothers Of Invention, Santana, Flock, Led Zeppelin, Hot Tuna, Country Joe McDonald (solo), Jefferson Airplane, whose act was curtailed by rain, The Byrds, who played an acoustic set in order not to chance electrocution, and Dr John.The Moody Blues should have played but were prevented from doing so by the downpour. According to reliable reports, the event was documented on 35mm film, though no one has ever seen the results apart from a Fairport snippet which seemingly formed part of an educational program in the early 70s.There were 200,000 people. The promoter was Fred Bannister. Copyright © 2004 by Joe McDonald. May not be reproduced in any form without express permission.

H  O  M  E

matrix

 

 

 

 

 

 

Country Joe and The FishandThe New AgeAt the Matrix Club San Francisco 1966

LSD AND THE TAPE RECORDER         Country Joe and The Fish, the very early version with John Francis Gunning playing drums, got a job playing the Matrix club in San Francisco. We had just put out our legendary EP with "Bass Strings," "Section 43" and "Love" on it. Paul Armstrong was also in the group playing tambourine and sometimes rhythm guitar. He was working for Goodwill as alternative military service because he was a pacifist. It is his Goodwill truck that we are leaning against in the photo EP cover shot. Paul had caught the clap, gonorrhea, as I remember it and I got mad at him and fired him because he said he could not play the gig because he had the clap.

      We found out that you had to be eighteen years old to play the Matrix because they served booze. The gig was already booked and we did not know what to do. We had recorded our first electric EP at a small studio on the edge of Berkeley named Sierra Sound. It was owned and operated by a guy named Bob DeSousa. I got this great idea to record Barry and Bruce’s parts on tape and play with the tape recorder at the gigs. Now Barry played lead guitar and Bruce played bass. We had the early repertoire of the Electric Music For The Mind And Body LP. They were both still seventeen years old. So according to the law they could not play in a club that served alcohol.

        We worked all day in the little studio. It was a four track studio and the technology was reel to reel tapes. But since we only recorded two things, bass and guitar we had enough tracks. But of course the whole band had to play the tunes and we had to take the bass and guitar direct and listen to everything on the ear phones. This is pretty heady stuff for 1966, understand! So we were tired at the end of the day and a bit stressed. As I remember it this was also the day that I got into the fight with Paul Armstrong about him having the clap and he left and so the sound was a bit different as it did not have the tambourine and whatever parts Paul played extra rhythm guitar on. At the end of the day we were talking about how we still had to load up the stuff, drive over to San Francisco to the Matrix, set up and play and how tired we were. John Francis Gunning the drummer said, "You know I have a tab of acid [LSD], at home why don’t we split that tab? It will not get us too high and give us enough energy to play the gig?" We said, "Sounds like a great idea!"

        So we went over to his house and did that. Then we drove over to the club. Well by that time we were getting pretty damn high from that acid. Much higher that we had thought we would get. Our manager Banana Ed Denson was there waiting for us and when he saw us come in acting all silly and stuff I could tell from his "here comes trouble" look on his face we probably should not have taken the acid. But it was too late to stop.

       We set up and Ed had the tape from the studio on a small reel and he had this little like Magnavox home tape recorder sitting by the stage with a microphone up to it. Barry and Bruce were in the back room and could not come out. We set up the stuff, just drums, keyboard (Farfisa organ) and amps for David and my guitars and got on stage. I looked down at ED and told him to start. So he turned on the tape recorder and we waited. Then this sound came out. It was the lead guitar part and the bass. But we had not counted the songs in nor made a list telling us what songs we were listening to. So we had to try in figure it out. I decided that the first song was "Bass Strings." I told John Francis and David.

       About this time my guitar neck was turning bright green and writhing like a snake. I knew this was an hallucination but it made playing hard. There was this other problem of trying to play at the same time at the tape and figure out where in the song Bruce and Barry were. I remember being too slow and speeding up and catching up with them but then passing them up. I looked back and John Francis and he was starting to sweat. David was hunched over his organ trying to find out where we were with a very serious look on his face. I tried to sing something but nothing made sense.

        I stopped after about five minutes and told Ed to stop and advance to the next song. So he did that. The tape made that funny squeaky sound it makes like mice or something as it sped ahead to the next song. He found it and started it. Well we had no idea at all what the hell song that was. We tried a couple of things but nothing worked. I told him to stop and go to the next one. He did that. Same thing John Francis looked like he came out of a sauna, he was covered with sweat. David was very depressed and I was starting to realize that this would never work.

         Then one of those stupid LSD moments hit me. A moment of profound thought. I stopped everything and announced to the audience, "this proves that man cannot work with machines. If I was you I would ask for my money back." We left the stage. Many people did ask for their money back. The manager was mad as hell. We still had one more day left to play.

         The next day we arranged to have chicken wire wrapped around the stage to keep Bruce and Barry away from the bar area and the audience. This somehow satisfied the police. The chicken wire created a path from the back room to the stage. We played behind that chicken wire that night. A University of California Berkeley sociology professor had sent his entire class to see us that night and write papers about the new hippie band culture thing. After the show he gave us copies of the papers and many of them said, "Country Joe and The Fish enhance their country image by putting chicken wire around the stage."

GAS, SPEED AND POT          When I first moved into the apartment house with Bruce and Barry in Berkeley I was driving around with Barry in my car. He said "pull into Simas Brothers." Simas Brothers was a cheap gas station on the corner of Ashby and Shattuck. It was late at night. He stuck his head out of the window and asked the attendant, "What ya got?" The guy said, "Some weed and bennies." Barry said I’ll take an ounce of weed and a dozen bennies." The guy gave it to him. I got some gas and thought, "Wow, talk about full service!"

Copyright © 2004 by Joe McDonald. May not be reproduced in any form without express permission.

Morning Glory Seeds

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morning_glory

  MORNING GLORY        In the summer of 1966. Barry Melton (guitar player with Country Joe and The Fish)  and I decided to hitch hike to New York City and talk to Albert Grossman about managing us and making us famous. He was the manager of Bob Dylan and Peter Paul and Mary and had made them famous so we figured we had lots in common with those people and he was the man to do it for us. We told the band that we were leaving putting the whole band thing on hold. Ed Denson, our manager, was actually there in New York being the roadie for the band The Blues Project. I had never hitchhiked across the country or been to New York. After the Navy I had driven all the way to Alaska and hitched part of the way back and rode a fishing boat part of the way but never across the country and never to New York City. So I was ready.

     We took guitars and a few bucks and small bags of change of clothes and set off. We had pretty typical adventures. I remember sleeping beside the road and waking up in the morning bitten by bugs. The going got pretty slow in the midwest, we were going Route 66 I think. We got no rides and walked into a tiny town. We saw a General Feed Store and Barry said, "Joe, you know we can get high if we eat Heavenly Blue morning glory seeds. They are cheap and I bet they have them in here." So we went in and sure enough had them and it was only a few cents for a pack of them. It must have seemed a bit strange to the workers that two hippies come in and buy one pack of Heavenly Blue morning glory seeds. But we got em and left.

       Then Barry explains that we need to wash off the pesticide and we went into the rest room of a gas station and used that gravelly Borax soap to wash the seeds. We left and walked out to the edge of town to a diner out there that had like a dirt road leading up to it from the highway. We ate the seeds and sat down to wait for a ride. There was like no traffic at all and we had to wait for someone who would pull off the road. We got very stoned. A weird kind of drunk psychedelic high. Hard to explain. Sloppy and stupid with bright colors. So hours passed and then a car with some hippies pulls up.
"Hey it’s Country Joe and The Fish," they yell out. "Do you guys want a ride?"

         I mean what are the odds of some Berkeley hippies pulling up and recognizing us and asking us if we want a ride. It was a miracle! But we were in the troughs of Heavenly Blue morning glory seed stupidness and we just stared at them for a while and then shook our heads and said, "No thanks." They said, "Are you sure?" We nodded our heads yes. They said, "OK, goodbye," and our ride drove off!
Then it hit us how stupid we had been. It was hours before we finally got a ride from a guy in a small sports car and it was dark. Barry went to sleep in the back and I remember being there cramped in the front seat while the colors in my head just kept flashing on and on and on. We finally reached New York City. We then realized that we had no idea how to contact Albert Grossman. We looked in the phone book and of course did not find his name. I can’t remember where we stayed but we stayed somewhere and we were broke. I remember panhandling in Greenwich Village. It was the only time in my life I ever panhandled but I remember being very grateful when someone gave me some money. I try now to always give out money to people panhandling on the streets if I can.

       New York City can be overwhelming to someone who has not really lived in a big city. When I was in the Navy I was stationed in small towns. I went on liberty to Yokohama a few times but never to Tokyo. When I was a kid my mom took us to downtown Los Angeles but it is very spread out not like New York of other big American cities. I remember going to the section of New York called the Bowery where all the homeless, alcoholics live on the streets. I started out on the first block giving out some quarters and thinking that there were a lot of bums. On the second block I thought that this was more homeless bums than I had seen. On the third block I thought, "Wow there is a real problem here." On the fourth block I could only think that, "there sure is a lot of fucking bums all over." In the fifth block I called for a cab and got the hell out of there. There was just more than I could deal with. New York was that way for me ... more than I could deal with.

       Barry and I finally gave up on the idea of finding Albert Grossman. We had made contact with Ed Denson and he was driving the Blues Project’s amps back to the west coast in a Volkswagen bus and for some reason the Berkeley based Tacoma recording artist and 12 string guitar composer Robbie Basho was to travel also in the bus. We all piled in and took off. What I remember about the trip is that we went really really slow in that Volkswagen. Especially because it was chock full of band equipment and weighted down. It went about thirty five miles an hour on an upgrade.

      There was not much room in the van so three people could be up front but one person had to lie in the back on top of the amps. I remember thinking as the wind in the midwest whipped the van back and forth that it would flip over and I would be crushed to death by a Standell Amplifier.

     As we neared the Rocky Mountains and started to climb over Robbie Basho began to get all kinds of physical symptoms or illness. He was you might say a hypochondriac. We stopped in a few emergency rooms but they never could find anything wrong. At the top of the mountains Barry, ED and I got out to look around the forest and commune with nature. I remember Robbie just kept honking the horn because he thought he was dying and wanted to go to another hospital. We eventually made it back without being made famous and got on with our modest careers that at least got us food money and paid the rent on the apartment, playing music as a rock and roll band.