Country Joe McDonald: Woodstock revisited

Language Level: Intermediate

Source: Speak Up

Standard: British accent

Woodstock Revisited

Country Joe McDonald became a key figure in counter-culture in 1969 when, at the Woodstock Festival, he took the stage and chanted the “Fish Cheer.” Fish, in addition to being the name of Country Joe’s band, was a euphemism for another four-letter world that begins with F. Country Joe, with the help of the 400.000 crowd, spell out the world, before launching into the “I-Feel-Like-I’m Fixing-to-Die Rag,” a song against the Vietnam War. It was what historian would call “a definition moment.”

Nearly four decades have passed since then and today Country Joe McDonald believes that we need the values of the 1960s more than ever. When he met with Speak Up, we asked him to talk about this:

Country Joe McDonald:

(Standard American accent)

We are still, in America and globally, fighting the culture wars of the ‘60s today, that the new fundamentalists of the Muslim world and the Christian world still hate the morality of the ‘60s and the culture of the ‘60s, the music of the ‘60s, the recreational drug lifestyle, the sexual lifestyle. Sometimes I equate it with when it was discovered the world wasn’t flat and some people were in the business of making maps of the world, flat world maps, and when the news came back that the world was around, you know, all the souvenir flat-world mugs, T-shirts, maps, were completely worthless, but they had warehouses full of this shit, and they had to keep merchandising it, you know and that’s like the news of the fundamentalists today.

They try to merchandise this same shit, even though, you know, they’re saying things like Aids is not true, people don’t have sex, loud music causes insanity, marijuana use will cause people to commit murder. And this battle is still going on today and it’s manifested itself in a new generation of punks like Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush, who want to harken back to 200 fucking years ago and believe that they’re being modern when that do that, but they’re losing, they’re doomed, just like old-fashioned communism was doomed, and old fascism is doomed and racism is doomed and sexism is doomed and …you know, in a sense, classical music is…doomed, you know! Time marches on and there’s nothing we can do about it.

In conclusion we asked Country Joe whether the ‘60s were fun:

Country Joe McDonald:

Were the ‘60s fun? Oh, yeah, you had to live through the ‘50s to know what hell was like, in order to really appreciate the ‘60s! I think it was like maybe for people coming out of  the disco era and finally confronting punk rock, you know, it was like “Woah, my…thank God!” you know. Yeah, it was fun.

The Man (no audio)

Country Joe McDonald (the nickname “Country Joe” was a reference to that of Joseph Stalin) was born in Washington, D.C. in 1942, but grew up near Los Angeles. In the early1960s he headed to Berkeley, in order to attend university, but got more involved in music and politics. He formed a group, Country Joe & the Fish which, along with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother & Holding Company, was to dominate San Francisco’s vibrant flower power scene immortality when it played at Woodstock. For more on Country Joe’s activities today, visit: http://www.countryjoe.com