Who was the only musician who got to play Woodstock 1969 twice?
Discounting the horrific Woodstock reboot in 1999, the beauty of the festival is that it really only happened once.
Unlike every other great festival that recurs annually and gives fresh talent an opportunity to join the legacy, Woodstock 1969 stands alone as a cultural pillar that only a few acts can be privileged enough to stand on. As David Crosby once put it, it was the big bang of counterculture, powered by names who defined a generation of liberals.
Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and the Kozmic Blues Band, The Who and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were but a few names immortalised in the festival’s history. Each of their shows lives long in music history, most notably Hendrix’s free spirit, which was not only perfectly aligned with the festival, but he also gave it the ultimate anti-authoritarian moment by delivering a soaring rendition of the American national anthem on guitar.
The whole festival was filled with once-in-a-lifetime moments that the crowd were grateful to bear witness to. If you missed someone, that was generally it, unless you were a Country Joe McDonald fan.
He arguably got more out of the festival than anybody else, playing twice over the course of the weekend, once on Saturday afternoon as a solo act, while the stage was being set for Santana to perform, he was asked to fill some time and keep the audience entertained, and then again on Sunday afternoon following the three-hour rain delay that came after Joe Cocker opened day three.
He remembered the weekend, saying, “It was a wonderful experience the whole three days. I got there on Thursday, and I left on Monday. Was on stage watching a lot of the shows, and I had a wonderful time. I never thought about the historic significance of it, but I do believe that the Woodstock Festival, film and album changed everything in America. And the changes are still happening today, right?”
But why was Country Joe McDonald’s set so famous?
Despite the festival boasting some of the very biggest names in music history, there was a very specific reason as to why Country Joe McDonald made such an impact, and it wasn’t the fact that he was the only musician to play twice.
During the first slot he played, ahead of Santana, McDonald led a crowd of nearly half a million people into a mass protest against the Vietnam War. It all began with an unexpected solo acoustic performance of his track, ‘I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag’. But where the lyrics usually saw McDonald spell out the word “Fish”, McDonald changed it to “Fuck” and therefore had to crowd brazenly chant it together as they stuck a middle finger up to the government.
He remembered, “I was saving the Fuck cheer and ‘Fixin’-to-Die-Rag’ for the rock and roll Country Joe and the Fish set, which was later on that night, right? And I got off stage, and my manager said, ‘What difference does it make? Nobody’s paying attention to you.'”
Adding, “And so I thought, OK, that’s great, and then I went out, and I yelled, ‘Gimme an F,’ and they all stopped talking and looked at me, and they responded.”
McDonald didn’t need another set to make an impact that weekend. That united chant served as a distilled reflection of the weekend’s revolutionary attitude that balanced anger and harmony.
