Country Joe McDonald: No ordinary Joe

Country Joe McDonald infamously led 500,000 people in the 'Fish Cheer' at the Woodstock Festival. But his fondest Sixties memories belong to more intimate times in the hippie idyll of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, he tells Robert Sandall

There's little about the small, stocky frame of the 60-year-old Country Joe McDonald that would lead one to pinpoint him as a firebrand political activist of Berkeley's radical campus set and one of the pioneers of Sixties acid rock. Yet Country Joe is a legend, one of the leading lights of the psychedelic San Francisco music scene.

McDonald arrived in the Bay area from LA in 1965 and began performing protest songs in a folk club in Berkeley where he fell in with a group of musicians who, following the example of Bob Dylan, were keen to go electric. Along with the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish swiftly became the darlings of a small utopian youth community based across the bay in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. In 1966, McDonald moved into a house off Haight Street with his then girlfriend, a blues singer called Janis Joplin. In January 1967, he appeared at a festival of poetry and music, the Human Be-In, in Golden Gate Park, which effectively inaugurated the hippie movement and which led to Country Joe and the Fish becoming internationally famous. Two years later, McDonald's solo performance at Woodstock of the band's best known song, the anti-war anthem "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die-Rag", was one of the highpoints of the festival and the film. The band broke up in 1970, but McDonald, who still lives in Berkeley, went on to a successful solo career, which now sees him performing solo acoustic shows.

"When I started going with Janis Joplin and living in her apartment in the Haight, I felt very comfortable there," he says. "The Haight was right next to the Panhandle, which is part of Golden Gate Park, where the Dead used to play. I think there might have been a hundred or so hippies then living in Haight-Ashbury and maybe one head shop. When Janis and I would walk around with her dog George, we would say hello to just about everybody. We were all into doing things differently, which is why if you wanted to get stoned, you wouldn't get drunk, which is what our parents did. I don't remember anybody in the Haight ever drinking beer. There was an urge to get high by smoking this stuff called marijuana. It was just a social thing.

"The Be-In marked the beginning of unusual things happening. Augustus Owsley [San Francisco's noted LSD supplier and one-time Svengali figure behind the Grateful Dead] dropped out of a plane by parachute, though he landed a little way away. That was unusual. It was very unusual to have a stage and a portable generator and rock bands playing in a park. This was the beginning of loudness in all its forms – loud clothing, loud actions, loud sounds. Though if you heard that sound today, you'd say it wasn't loud at all. I can hear myself getting into argument with my kids about it.

"The 'San Francisco Sound' was not so much invented by us as defined by the realities of the equipment we were using. We were in unknown territory. Part of it was feedback; hardly anybody pushed the amps' volume up to 10 before, but we did, because we wanted to push the envelope.

"I tell kids now, if you want to get that Sixties sound, just get stoned and get into a tiny room, because we never had rehearsal rooms, we always used to jam in somebody's bedroom – and above all, throw away your tuner. When you listen to the Eagles, which was the defining Californian sound of the 1970s, they were perfectly in tune. The electronic tuner had been perfected. In our day, nobody had tuners. Well, the Dead had what they called a strobe tuner, a huge thing the size of fridge. But we didn't and we would fight non-stop about who was in and out of tune, and the in-tuneness would only last for a hot minute before our guitarist Barry Melton hit the joystick on his guitar and the moment he did that, it went out of tune again.

"We had a Farfisa organ with buttons saying 'piccolo' and 'violin' and so on, but it didn't sound like any goddamn thing you heard before. It had two sounds and both were a total failure at resembling what they were supposed to. And that's the so-called brilliant Country Joe and the Fish organ sound. It was a mistake. It was all mistakes. We'd try to play a country song, and we couldn't, or an old blues tune, which we didn't know how to, or we'd play for a long, long time like the Dead and the audience didn't care because whatever it was, it sounded different. It was a genre built on mistakes.

"The San Francisco ballrooms such as the Fillmore and the Avalon brought about a big change. Nowadays, the mosh pit is taken for granted, but before the Haight-Ashbury period people would go to concerts in these places and there would be chairs set up. To take the chairs away was just a cheap way of putting on a show. And in the beginning these were like private parties, attended by very few people with 20 or so of them working the light show. The scene was so small then that couples would be lying on the floor making out, with a load of space around them.

"Soon after the Be-In, the known bands like us left town to tour. Suddenly Haight-Ashbury was full of people we didn't know and audiences were huge. But the world back then did not love the Aquarian Age. The Bay area's always been a place where you could be unusual, but from there we would run to Denver, Colorado, where you were safe. Then you'd make a mad dash to Chicago, then to New York and parts of New England, where you could relax. The rest was a wasteland that hated hippies.

"It happened so quick. We were a band with dreams, then those dreams came true and then we got pushed about. It's time to have your photograph taken, time to be interviewed, time to make another record, time to go to Philadelphia. You've got money, but you'd want people to get out of your face, and go back to Haight-Ashbury when it was just a few people. But there was no way back.

"My appearance at Woodstock in 1969 was as a solo artist playing a protest song in a style that Bob Dylan had given up. From the moment I yelled 'Give us an F...', it became a folk-punk moment. There was a certain in-yer-face Kurt Cobain-ness about it that matched the attitude of the time pretty well. But it wasn't planned that way. There was nobody to go on stage after Richie Havens came off and they forced me to go on just to fill a time slot, and so I pulled 'Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die' out of my cap and did it. It was another of those things that happened totally by mistake."

You can hear more of Country Joe McDonald's recollections in the first part of 'Love and Haight', presented by Robert Sandall on BBC Radio 4 at 10.30am tomorrow