The best-known performance of Country Joe McDonald’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag” is the captivating one recorded in Woodstock (1970), the brilliant documentary account of the pattern-breaking 1969 music festival of the same name. The festival had an antiwar feel to it—many of the artists performing had often appeared at antiwar rallies—and McDonald’s performance in particular gave the audience a chance to affirm their solidarity. “I don’t know how you expect to stop the war if you can’t sing any better than that,” he exhorted the 300,000 listeners assembled there; singing itself became antiwar action, and the particular character of the song, its adroit way of opposing war by impersonating, exaggerating, and caricaturing the views of war supporters, perhaps mattered less than the fact that so many sang together.
McDonald (b. 1942) grew up in Los Angeles, a “red diaper baby” in a town with a great concert hall, and went to hear everyone who performed there. He enlisted in the Army at seventeen, and was stationed in Japan. In the early sixties he moved to Berkeley, spending his time playing music with several ensembles, mostly ones he put together. Country Joe and the Fish came into being when McDonald was producing a recording of talk-songs and needed the help of friends, including Barry “The Fish” Melton, who borrowed his nickname from Chairman Mao. (“Guerillas are fish, and the people are the water in which they swim.”) The “Fixin’-To-Die Rag,” written in 1965, was on that first, privately produced recording, but was kept off the band’s first Vanguard recording by label president Maynard Solomon, who felt it would become “a thorn in their side and prevent the band from getting any single play on the radio.” In subsequent performances it usually began with the added “Fish Cheer.”
After Woodstock, McDonald turned to a solo career, often in Europe. He worked on a score for the 1970 film of Henry Miller’s Quiet Days in Clichy and for a film about the election of Salvador Allende. He continued singing and opposing war at venues large and small, earning himself a spot on President Nixon’s enemies list. His degree of political engagement has not decreased over time; he has been involved in protests against then–California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget cuts and, with Cindy Sheehan, against the Iraq War, and has been compared by right-wing political commentator Bill O’Reilly to Fidel Castro.
Come on all of you big strong men;
Uncle Sam needs your help again.
He’s got himself in a terrible jam;
Way down yonder in Vietnam.
So put down your books and pick up a gun;
We’re gonna have a whole lot a fun.
CHORUS: Cause, it’s a one, two, three, “What are we fightin’ for?”
“Don’t ask me. I don’t give a damn!” Next stop is Vietnam.
It’s a five, six, seven, open up the Pearly Gates.
There ain’t no time to wonder why. “Whoopie, we’re all gonna die!”
Come on wall street don’t be slow.
Why, Man, this is war a-Go-Go.
There’s plenty good money to be made
By supplyin’ the Army with the tools of its trade.
But just hope and pray that if they drop the bomb,
They drop it on the Viet Cong.
Come on Generals, let’s move fast;
Your big chance has come at last.
Now you can go out and get those Reds—
Cause the only good Commie is one that’s dead.
And you know that peace can only be won,
When we’ve blown ’em all to kingdom come.
Come on Mothers throughout the land,
Pack your boys off to Vietnam.
Come on Fathers, don’t hesitate,
Send your sons off before it’s too late.
And you can be the first ones in your block
To have your boy come home in a box.