Country Joe flashes back to Summer of Love 

Fame, but little coin
Musing over lunch at the Magnolia Pub at Haight and Masonic (the Drugstore Café, Magnolia Thunderpussy’s and The Psalms in previous incarnations), Joe reflects a bit wistfully on the fact that he never cashed in on the order of many of his contemporaries.

After Woodstock and the F-cheer, Joe and the band were canceled from a previously scheduled TV appearance by Ed Sullivan, the pop-music kingmaker of his day. Meanwhile, Joe’s contemporaries like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Steve Miller were building huge fan bases and enormous bank accounts, their hits played on both the AM and FM airwaves and even selected as background music by the Post Office and mainstream politicians.

“The path that I took has made me a living legend but not wealthy,” Joe says. “It’ll never happen for me. I can’t imagine a politician ever using my music as their theme song. That’s the good news and the bad news.”

But political organizers in 1967 certainly wanted to use The Fish and other groups, he says. Revisiting the Panhandle section of Golden Gate Park, below the Haight, he finds the stretch of grass where Country Joe and the Fish and The Fugs played on the eve of the April 15, 1967, march against the Vietnam War, at that time probably the largest mass protest the West Coast had ever seen.

“The antiwar movement wanted to take advantage of the huge audience that seemed to be there for rock ’n’ roll, for psychedelic rock ’n’ roll, and wanted to see if there were people in that audience who wanted to protest the war also,” he recalls. So organizers of the march signed his band and others up to play at the main protest the next day in nearby Kezar Stadium, then the home of the 49ers.

‘They pulled the plug on us’
Instead, they used Joe and the band as electrified pied-pipers, playing from the back of a truck to draw the marchers down Market Street, through the city’s financial district and then to the stadium. Once the crowd of 75,000 was inside, the truck pulled outside, band still aboard, so speechifying by the likes of Julian Bond, Robert Scheer and Eldridge Cleaver could begin.

“We carried our equipment back in and demanded the right to play. We were told we could play two songs but they pulled the plug on us after one and then we went home,” Joe recalls. “… I don’t think it was ever their idea to have us play at the main part of that event.”

Joe was especially perturbed because his band was alone in those days in using music to send political messages. Their just-released album contained the caustic slam at LBJ titled “Superbird” and the “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag,” written in 1965, was hugely popular on the anti-war circuit. He remains fiercely proud of the tune – with its sarcastic refrain of “One, two three, what are we fightin’ for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn! Next stop is Vietnam!” – and whatever effect it had on mobilizing sentiment against the war.

A 25-year-old Navy veteran in 1967, Joe saw Vietnam as a war chiefly to protect U.S. economic interests. He sees the Iraq War in the same light. Also, “It's very similar in that you have young people who are fighting a war that was supposed to be over pretty quick, and it's dragging on,” he says.

In “Support the Troops,” a new song protesting the Iraq War, Joe turns from sarcasm to anger, personally attacking the president who ordered U.S. troops there with lines like: “You chicken-hawk, draft-dodging son of a Bush.”

A thread in the Berkeley tapestry
The angry political rhetoric is a perfect coda for the drive back across the Bay Bridge to Berkeley, the veritable cradle of U.S. civil disobedience in modern times and especially vibrant in 1967, when Jerry Rubin and his followers were marching and stopping troop trains.

The center of the action then was Sproul Plaza on the UC-Berkeley campus. This is where Mario Savio delivered his fiery speeches in the Free Speech Movement in ’64. It was the flashpoint for the People’s Park riots of ’69. And to this day, it is the spot where generations of students and activists have set up their card tables to promote such causes as civil rights, ending apartheid and saving the whales.

The northern terminus of Berkeley’s storied Telegraph Avenue is a very special place to Joe, where he played some of his first public gigs as a fledgling folksinger, where he met Barry Melton, who became the lead guitarist for the Fish, and where Joe sometimes gave impromptu free concerts in the late ’70s. In 1967, the band played often at local venues like the Jabberwock coffeehouse, the Pauley Ballroom and the Finnish Brotherhood Hall.

“I've always found that I'm a part of this city, not like a star of the city, but a part of it, just another citizen,” Joe says. “There's quite a few unique citizens who've lived here a long, long time and I'm fortunate to be here and be one of them.”

Time has been good to Joe as well. The late afternoon sun has finally warmed the day, streaming over the Golden Gate to light the East Bay hills like a Thomas McGlynn painting as he takes in his hometown. At 65, his hair is graying and thinner and a few tiny ruptured vessels etch the surface of his face, but the eyes still have the same piercing gaze they had when he penned lyrics that implored generals and politicians to think about what the hell they were doing.

“My goal will never be achieved in my lifetime, of peace and love on the Planet Earth,” he says, “but I'll do my bit to further it as long as I can and when I'm gone, someone else will pick it up and that's the way it will go.

“It will be known that I contributed my part, as to the music and the culture of my generation, not just politically, although I added a political, social, moral element when there wasn't one.”

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