Country Joe And The Fish: Discography 1967 - 1970 ("Country Joe" McDonald (January 1, 1942 – March 7, 2026) | URBANASPIRINES: A KOSTAS SPECIAL

 Country Joe And The Fish: Discography 1967 - 1970 

("Country Joe" McDonald (January 1, 1942 – March 7, 2026)

Didn’t think it would take Kostas long . . . . here with his usual exceptional standard of profiles one for Country Joe MacDonald who passed away this week and after his health complications took him at a youthful 84 we shall not see his like again. At once a polemicist and romantic his FISH cheer may have resonated with the crowd at Woodstock but he and The Fish were so much more the that. Electric Music for the Mind and Body you might  say! I loved that band and thank a neighbour Alan Bateman who introduced me when but a mere school boy as he did so much other SF and counter culture musics!

Kostas reminds us

Joseph Allen "Country Joe" McDonald (January 1, 1942 – March 7, 2026) was an American singer, songwriter, musician and film composer, who was the lead singer and co-founder of the 1960s psychedelic folk-rock group Country Joe and the Fish. He wrote some of the group's most well-known songs, including "Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine" and "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag", the latter a protest song against US involvement in the Vietnam War.  One of the original and most popular of the San Francisco Bay Area psychedelic bands, they were also probably the most enigmatic. Joe McDonald may have written the most in-your-face anti-war, anti-military song to come out of the '60s, but he was also one of the very few musicians on the San Francisco scene who'd served in uniform. 

                                          

 The band's name, Country Joe & the Fish, was a compromise proposed by ED Denson, an early member and the group's manager. He quoted Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong's metaphor about a revolutionary who resembled "the fish who swim in the sea of the people." There was also some thought given to the name "Country Mao & the Fish." Instead, they used "Country Joe" as a reference to McDonald, who was their singer and, as much as there was any organization to it at all, the organizer of the group, and also a reference to Joseph Stalin -- "Country Joe" was a nickname for the Soviet dictator. 

For Kostas . . . .

Still relevant; despite buying the first two Fish albums when they came out, I stuck with his solo stuff too and this alongside Quiet Days In Clichy I mentioned t’other day which we showed at college (it WAS an Art school?!) this was my pride and joy from the race vinyl sections and this little ditty still rings true today

Ain’t that the Daymned TROOTH MERKINS?