Country Joe McDonald's Chart

American musician who was the lead singer of the 1960s psychedelic rock group Country Joe and the Fish. McDonald has recorded 33 albums and has written hundreds of songs over a career spanning 60 years. His father, Worden McDonald, from Oklahoma, was of Scottish Presbyterian heritage (the son of a minister) and worked for a telephone company. His mother, Florence Plotnick, was the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, and served for many years on the Berkeley City Council. In their youth, both were Communist Party members and named their son after Joseph Stalin, before renouncing the cause. In 1965, he and Barry Melton co-founded Country Joe & the Fish which became a pioneer psychedelic rock band with their eclectic performances at the Avalon Ballroom, the Fillmore Auditorium, the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, and both the 1969 original and 1979 reunion Woodstock Festivals. Their best-known song is his "The "Fish" Cheer/I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" (1965), a black comedy novelty song about the Vietnam War, whose familiar chorus ("One, two, three, what are we fighting for?") is well known to the Woodstock generation and Vietnam veterans of the 1960s and '70s. McDonald was married to Kathe Werum from 1963 to 1966, dated singer Janis Joplin, and married Robin Menken a year after his divorce from Werum. In 1968, Menken gave birth to the couple's first daughter, Seven Anne McDonald, in San Francisco. Seven had a career as a TV child actor in the late 1970s and early 1980s, managed Johnny Depp's Viper Room nightclub and the alternative rock band Smashing Pumpkins in the 1990s, and wrote for magazines in the 1990s and 2000s. McDonald has four other children, Devin (b. 1976) and Tara (b. 1980) from his marriage to Janice Taylor, and Emily (b. 1988) and Ryan (b. 1991) from his marriage to Kathy Wright. McDonald lives in Berkeley, California.