Nick FALCON et Cie

Barry “The Fish” Melton met Country Joe McDonald at the 1964 Berkeley Folk festival. Almost a year later, the duo recorded a song for a “talking issue” of McDonald’s folk music magazine called Rag Baby.

By 1966, McDonald and Melton were making big waves in the Bay Area music scene with a newly recruited backing band. According to Melton, San Francisco’s psychedelic music scene was relatively small when his group began. “When we first started as an electric band, there wasn’t much competition,” he says.

That all changed in 1967 with the Monterey Pop Festival, an event that catapulted San Francisco bands like Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Big Brother & the Holding Company and Country Joe & the Fish into the nation’s consciousness. “It was really the Monterey Pop Festival that put us all on the map,” Melton says.

After Monterey Pop, Country and Melton were invited to perform at another get-together, this time…