Country Joe Captures Whiff of Troubled ‘60s

Even with two decades to buffer the change, it has to be a spirit-wrenching experience for Country Joe McDonald to have gone from galvanizing a half-million people at Woodstock to playing before less than a 10,000th that number (we’re talking about some 40 persons here) at Huntington Beach’s Night Moves on Saturday.

But the psychedelic-era veteran opened a solo acoustic show with his “Entertainment Is My Business,” which, rather than the cynicism or hackdom that title might suggest, was defined by McDonald’s ensuing performance as a tenacious statement of purpose.

Despite the tiny--and in some quarters noisily inattentive--audience, the singer-guitarist still tried as hard to connect as he did in the days when folks got arrested for doing his “Fish Cheer” counterculture rallying cry.

Where he once painted his face with Day-Glo flowers and sported combat fatigues, on Saturday McDonald looked for all the world as if he had stepped out of a Montgomery Ward Father’s Day ad, dressed in casual, nondescript sportswear.

But the anti-war protest “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” and other of his ‘60s works still held pleasingly nostalgic whiffs of patchouli, including “Janis,” “Here I Go Again” and “Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine.”

The instrumental “Section 43” from the 1967 debut “Electric Music for the Mind and Body,” and a more recent guitar-and-harmonica piece fared less well, being neither compositionally nor instrumentally engaging enough to sustain the time they were given.

The show’s few lapses did seem to come in pairs, with songs about Florence Nightingale and Red Cross founder Clara Barton adding up to perhaps one more tune about nursing than was needed. Similarly, the back-to-back performance of “White Powder” and “Cocaine” only diluted the anti-drug slant of each.

Though he obliged fans expecting his ‘60s-radical anthems, McDonald very much remained a potent topical troubadour. He brought out the timeliness of Woody Guthrie’s Depression-era “Talking Dust Bowl Blues” with its tales of hard times and underfed kids who “looked like a tribe of thermometers running around.”

A Navy vet himself, McDonald has been active for decades in veterans’ causes, and his strongest song of the evening was “Go Go Johnny Rambo,” a biting slap at the way America embraces the Stallone interpretation of the Vietnam experience while ignoring the vets themselves, declaring “Loving Johnny is so easy, because he’s only a fantasy.”