Country Joe McDonald Hits the Radical Notes

Country Joe McDonald is one of the most misunderstood and overlooked figures to emerge from the mid-’60s San Francisco music scene. For many of his generation, the singer-guitarist’s most significant musical contribution came in the form of a trenchant one-liner: The infamous “Gimme an F . . . “ cheer that opens Country Joe & the Fish’s 1967 Vietnam protest song “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag.”

That comical rant turned McDonald into a 15-minute celebrity when he performed it at Woodstock in 1969, and even though his fame faded soon after, he has continued to record modest albums that are rooted in country-folk and leftist politics.

Performing a solo acoustic set at the Whisky on Tuesday as part of that club’s weeklong 35th-anniversary celebration, McDonald was every inch the grizzled, unrepentant radical. He railed against nuclear power and big government, spun amusing tales about his 1969 Worchester, Mass., arrest for inciting lewd behavior, reminisced about trying to get high from smoking banana peels and, sang embittered antiwar songs and even led the audience in that darn cheer.

It was all a bit desultory and canned, a harmless exercise in feel-good protest for baby boomers. McDonald occasionally displayed flashes of inspiration, as on the elegiac “Thinking About John Fahey” and his former band’s psychedelic classic “Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine.” But it was not enough to turn his set into a satisfying experience.