Country Joe McDonald’s death in March of this year — at 84, after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease — closed a particular chapter of American rock and roll, and opened another: the era of the last surviving members, carrying forward a catalog that helped define what psychedelic rock could be when it had something to say. On Saturday, August 29, founding keyboardist David Bennett Cohen and co-founder Barry “The Fish” Melton will perform as Country Joe & The Fish at Colony Woodstock in Woodstock, New York — a 150-capacity bar and music room in the town that gave the most famous music festival in history its name, despite the festival never actually having been held there. The geography, and the timing, warrant your attention.
About Country Joe & The Fish
Cohen and Melton are not understudies filling in for the principal cast. They were there at the founding. Country Joe and the Fish took shape in Berkeley, California in 1965, when McDonald and Melton reconnected over folk music and the protest tradition Woody Guthrie had established a generation earlier. The classic lineup — McDonald on vocals and guitar, Melton on lead guitar, Cohen on organ, Bruce Barthol on bass, Gary “Chicken” Hirsh on drums — signed with Vanguard Records in late 1966 and released two albums the following year that still stand as landmarks of the psychedelic rock canon: Electric Music for the Mind and Body and I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die. The latter contained the anti-Vietnam anthem that would become the band’s signature piece and, by any reasonable measure, one of the defining protest songs of its era.
Their 1967 appearance at the Monterey International Pop Festival put them alongside the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane as architects of the San Francisco sound. Then came Woodstock — August 17, 1969, in Bethel, New York, to be precise, a geographic detail that lends the August 29 show a layer of quiet irony. McDonald led a reconfigured lineup through thirteen songs that afternoon; the “Fish Cheer” and “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag” were captured on tape and immortalized in the 1970 documentary. The band dissolved in 1970. Brief reunions in 1977 and 1994 added little to a legacy that was already sealed.
What Melton and Cohen bring to the Colony stage is something less like tribute and more like continuation. Melton spent decades practicing as a defense attorney while never stopping performing — he has maintained a working band that draws on other veterans of the San Francisco scene and continues to play throughout the Bay Area and Europe. Cohen, whose career spans more than six decades of professional performance, has shared stages with Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, and Bonnie Raitt, and released Bittersweet as recently as 2022. These are not musicians winding down. This is two founding members of one of the more historically significant bands in American rock doing what they have always done, under circumstances that are newly, inescapably elegiac.
About Colony Woodstock
Colony Woodstock, at 22 Rock City Road in Woodstock, NY, is a bar and music venue with a capacity of 150. It is an intimate room — the kind of space where the distance between performer and audience is measured in feet rather than sections. For a show built around two musicians who helped soundtrack one of the largest gatherings in American history, that intimacy is either a pointed contrast or the whole point, depending on how you want to think about it. Doors open at 6 PM; the show runs 7 PM to 10 PM. Attendees under 18 are admitted with a parent or legal guardian.
Tickets & Pricing
Tickets for Country Joe & The Fish at Colony Woodstock on August 29 are priced at $35 to $50, available via the link below. Note the venue’s non-refundable policy at purchase. For more upcoming shows in the area, see our full calendar of Hudson Valley concerts.
Get Tickets — Colony Woodstock, August 29