Country Joe McDonald Dies at 84

Country Joe McDonald's death was attributed to complications from Parkinson's disease. Born in Washington, D.C., his parents were once members of the Communist Party and named him after Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. He grew up in El Monte, California, immersed in his parents' working-class politics and a wide variety of music. Before becoming a counter-culture icon, McDonald enlisted in the U.S. Navy at age 17, spending three years stationed in Japan. This experience gave him a complex perspective on the military, and he would later express conflicted feelings about the Vietnam War, identifying with both the soldiers serving and the protesters at home. The band's name, Country Joe and the Fish, had political origins. "Country Joe" was a wartime nickname for Joseph Stalin, and "the Fish" was a reference to a saying by Mao Zedong about revolutionaries being "the fish who swim in the sea of the people." The group initially formed to record a "talking issue" EP for McDonald's underground magazine, *Rag Baby*. McDonald wrote "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" in less than an hour in 1965. The song's dark, sarcastic humor was aimed at politicians and corporations driving the war, not the soldiers themselves. The infamous "F-I-S-H" cheer that preceded the song evolved into a profane version at live shows, leading to an arrest in Massachusetts and getting the band banned from "The Ed Sullivan Show." His legendary solo performance at Woodstock was unplanned. On the festival's second day, organizers asked him to fill time on his own while the stage was being prepared for the next band, Santana. That impromptu acoustic set, captured in the 1970 documentary film, cemented the song as an anti-war anthem and launched his solo career. Throughout his life, McDonald was a dedicated advocate for veterans. In the 1990s, he was a key organizer in the effort to build a Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Berkeley, an act he hoped would bring reconciliation after the divisive war years.