THE IRREVERENT ANTHEM
It was time for the second act on the second day of a music festival at a sprawling dairy farm in upstate New York in August 1969, but Santana, a relatively unknown band scheduled to go on stage next, was having trouble getting it together. So the emcee asked a performer hanging around backstage to go out and kill a little time. Reticent at first because his band was to play later that weekend, the singer gave in after he was handed a Yamaha FG-150 guitar and ushered onto the stage. After the audience ignored the eight songs he sang, he stepped off the stage momentarily, at which point his tour manager told him the way to seize the crowd’s attention was to perform the number he was saving for the next night.
“I never had a plan for a career in music, so Woodstock changed my life.”
The singer walked back on stage, alone. Decked out in a regulation army jacket, with long hair, a hoop earring, a paisley headband, and a handlebar mustache, he called out to the masses, “Give me an F!” With that, the infamous Woodstock crowd of “half a million strong” rose to their feet and joined in Country Joe McDonald’s antiwar cry, chanting along from the opening expletive to the “Whoopee! We’re all going to die” capper. Captured in Michael Wadleigh’s Oscar-winning 1970 documentary, , the three rousing minutes of McDonald’s acoustic version of the “Fish Cheer & I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” became the
