Country Joe And The Fish

THE organ, dimly at first, begins to play a soft, floating melody. Then the drums pick up, and the bass quickly joins in with a muffled, steady beat. Finally, a fellow in a red-striped T-shirt, smiling but otherwise motionless, steps to the microphone, and, about as pleasantly as a human being can make a sound, begins to follow the organ with his voice. The lyrics are simple: "lalalalalalalala." But the meaning is clear.

Country Joe and the Fish live in a kind of superworld--a turned-on bastion of people together and peace and independence. "The time has come for us to create a world where nobody strongarms us," Joe MacDonald, the group's lead singer and spokesman, said last Friday night at a dirty, overprcied little dump in Boston called the Psychedelic Supermarket.

But even here, even with rotten acoustics, a small stage, and dungeon-like atmosphere, the message of the Fish comes through. It's an easy message--one of love and feeling.

From "Happiness is a Porpoise Mouth":

The white doves fly on past the sun

Their wings flash silver at the moon

While waters flush down water tongues

My organ plays a circus tune.

The Fish are as proficient musically as Joe is lyrically. Barry Nelson, the lead guitar player, who sings most of the group's boisterous songs, David Cohen, the organist, Bruce Barthol on bass, and Chicken Hirsch on the drums are all freaked out to various degrees, all, as Barry put it, "avoiding the draft" (presumably through mental or psychological deferments) and all superb musicians.

Drugs have played a part in the development of the group. There is little doubt that many of the group's songs concern experiences with pot and LSD. From "Bass Strings":

I believe I'll go out to the seashore

Let the waves wash my mind

Open up my head now

Just to see what I can find.

Just one more trip now

And then I'll stay high all the time.

JOE tends to put drugs down. "They're an escape trip," he said Friday night. "I don't think drugs revolutionize you--sometimes they really mess you up." Joe himself has had several bad experiences associated with drug use. "I've been practically insane three times," he said. "But I now get higher being straight than I ever did when I was high."

Joe doesn't feel that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's meditation program can succeed where drugs don't. "I think meditation is a bunch of crap," Joe said. "Anybody who says people are poor because they want to be doesn't know what's happening. And anybody who says you can solve the problems of the world through meditation is tripped out."

In their music, the Fish have fun with drugs. 'We're gonna make him drop some acid," someone mutters at the fadeout of "Superbird," a direct and bitter stab at President Johnson.

"The Acid Commercial" mocks the use of drugs. With background accompaniment of an acosutic guitar and a kazoo--certainly not psychedelic--David sings:

Now if you're tired and a bit rundown

Can't seem to get your feet off the ground

Maybe you ought to try a little bit of LSD

(Only if you want to).

Perhaps more than other musical groups, the Fish are very politically and socially oriented. Joe spent a good deal of time Friday night building up the planned "YIP" Convention--the Youth International Party--that he has been organizing along with Arlo Guthrie and other musicians. He views the convention as opposition to the "National Death Party." In Chicago, Joe said, from August 25 to August 30, "there's going to be something happening all the time."

WHETHER all this will change because of McCarthy's success in New Hampshire is uncertain. Friday night Joe did call McCarthy "a groovy guy. He's like a genius." There is no doubt, however, that Joe and the Fish are sincerely against President Johnson and the War. In their "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die Rag," the Fish decry the War with an alternating background of "sock it to me" and "do wacka do" by singing:

And it's one, two, three what are we fighting for

Don't ask me I don't give a damn

Next stop is Vietnam

And it's five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates

Well there ain't no time to wonder why

Whoopee we're all gonna die.

And in "Superbird," Joe aims his attack directly at President Johnson:

Look up yonder, way up in the sky

What is that I see

It's a bird, it's a plane

It's a man insane

It's my president, LBJ.

Country Joe and the Fish try to laugh at the horror of the War and of the ugliness of death. They have their own kind of humor--at the same time satirical and sick. "If you get people to laugh at themselves, something happens," Joe said.

In the "Rag," the laughter is meant to combine with tears. "Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box," David sings toward the end.

ASPIRITUAL-TYPE piece that the Fish do runs in the same vein. "Please don't drop that H-bomb on me, drop it on yourself," Joe pleads, and then, as if to say that the only way to fight the destruction and evil and hideousness of War is to turn on, the group begins immediately to play the beautiful "Thought Dream":

I walk through the center air of summer's blooming

Into the frozen air of winter's dying.

And as tears inside me fall

The pain of old wounds calls me to mend them.

And I realize once more

That things gone before

Have no ending.

But Country Joe and the Fish are not dropouts in the usual sense--they are really not dropouts at all. "We've got everything we need, except love, but that's available," Joe said Friday night. "There's a way to relate to each other, to be nice."

Talking to Joe MacDonald, you get the feeling that he may be right--that it may be possible to "turn on" the whole world. "Sure, we can turn on everybody, and I don't mean drugs," he said. 'Go back home and relate with your parents. Eat dinner with them. You don't have to turn them on to drugs. My parents don't take drugs, but that's all right. It doesn't make much difference. We know something that they don't know. We gotta help them out.

"Start being a family again. Start talking to older people. It's a bummer to be old in this country. What a bummer. But we can all get together and talk. It's a big job but it can be done."

Beneath the facade of idealism, Joe also recognizes the reality and harsh truth around him. "There's something wrong with this country," he said. "The War is just a manifestation of everything else that's happening." That is why he has been planning the Chicago festival. "It's an attempt to polarize the country, to establish ourselves as a political froce. It's a matter of life and death."

"WE have to turn the tide of history," he continued, "turn it into a global community, disarm the world, feed everybody. There's a way to approach things, you know. You can reach people by approaching them intelligently."

Joe is not convinced that music is the way to reach these people. "Music is nice," he said, "but it's not gonna solve the problems of the world."

On other groups, Joe's ideas are as outspoken as his political views. "The Beach Boys," he said, "are like a bunch of fraternity brothers who took LSD and have really gone beserk. Some of their effects are nice, but their lyrics..."--and a grin spread over his face--"wow."

He said that he had heard the Boston Sound "doesn't exist," and that he was "in love with Ed Sanders of the Fugs."

"I turned into a homosexual when I started playing rock and roll," Joe said, "and now I'm kind of in love with several guys."

In particular, he said tha the was in love with Jimi Hendrix as well as Sanders. "The best music in this country is Negro pop music. It just comes out," Joe said. "We're now trying to learn to play it."

Together for two years, with two albums so far and a third due fairly soon, Country Joe and the Fish have successfully managed to be irreverent and different. 'We don't intend to have a method at all," Joe says of the future. 'We'll just try different things and keep trying to have a good time making music."