For 4 years after Janis Joplin died, Country Joe McDonald said the same thing in every interview. She is probably the one person from that time in ’67 that I really wish was around today so I could compare notes with her. He said it in 1974. He said it in 1987. He said it in 2007 standing outside the apartment building on Lyon Street in San Francisco where they had lived together for 3 months in the summer of love.
He said it for 55 years. Country Joe McDonald died on March 7th, 2026. He was 84 years old. He never got to compare notes. Neither of them did. This is the story of the summer of love. A small apartment on Lyon Street, a dog named George, and two musicians who were briefly something to each other that they both carried for the rest of their lives. Early 1967.
San Francisco. Haight-Ashbury. Country Joe McDonald had been in the Bay Area since 1965. He had come from El Monte, California. The son of a man from Oklahoma named for Joseph Stalin by his communist sympathizer parents. Raised in the specific working class California that produced a certain kind of politically serious young person in the 1960s.
He had started Country Joe and the Fish in 1965. The band had already recorded I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag, the anti-Vietnam protest song that would make him famous, and was performing constantly at the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom, and everywhere that San Francisco music happened.
In early 1967, he met Janis Joplin. She had just joined Big Brother and the Holding Company. She was 24 years old. She was not yet famous. She was a girl from Port Arthur, Texas who had found her way to San Francisco and was beginning to understand what her voice could do. They got together after a gig at the Golden Sheaf Bakery.
They moved into an apartment together on Lyon Street in the heart of Haight-Ashbury. They lived there for about 3 months and for 3 months in the spring of the summer of love, two of the most important voices in the San Francisco scene led an entirely ordinary life. The ordinary life. Janis had a small dog named George.
She and Joe would take George for walks up and down the Haight from their apartment to the corner of Haight and Ashbury down the block past the Victorian houses that were renting for $25 a month through the community that was forming in real time around them. They would see Freewheelin’ Frank, a well-known figure in the Hells Angels.
They would see Myra, an old girlfriend of Janis’s. They would stop somewhere for a beer. They would walk up to Golden Gate Park to Hippie Hill where people gathered and music happened and the specific outdoor community of Haight-Ashbury expressed itself in the afternoon. They did not make music together.
Joe said later that neither of them was a jammer. Neither of them liked to play casually with musicians from other bands. Their connection was not musical collaboration. It was ordinary life. Walks, radio, the apartment. When one of their songs came on the radio, they would both lean toward it. Listening to themselves in an apartment together.
Janis joked that their bands had merged into Country Brother and the Holding Fish. That is the version of Janis Joplin that almost nobody knows. The radio version, the dog-walking version, the woman who made a joke about Country Brother and the Holding Fish. Peggy Caserta was one of Janis’s closest friends during this period.
She ran a clothing boutique in the Haight and had met Janis the previous year. She knew what Janis felt for Joe McDonald better than almost anyone. “She fell for Country Joe McDonald,” Caserta said decades later. “And one night when she thought he stood her up, she came to me crying her eyes out.
He honestly didn’t realize he had a date with her that night.” That was the thing about the miscommunication, it was genuine. He had not deliberately stood her up. He simply hadn’t realized there was an expectation. “She was vulnerable,” Caserta said. The woman who stopped the world at Monterey, who would stop it again and again, who would be the most famous female rock singer in America within a year, came to her friend’s door and cried her eyes out over a man who forgot they had plans.
That is the gap between the stage version and the real version, the gap that Janis could never fully close no matter how many arenas she filled. Janis asked Joe to write a song for her. He did. He called it Janis. It was a request, not a demand. She wanted to be a subject of a song the way she was a subject of the music she sang, honestly, directly, without management. He wrote it.
He gave it to her. She had asked for it. And that asking said something about what she felt in that apartment on Lyon Street. The need to be seen in the specific way that a song can see someone. The relationship ended when Joe left for another woman, Robin Menken, who would become his wife. Janis was angry.
The Wikipedia entry describing their breakup notes that she was angered when he left her, which is the careful understatement of an encyclopedia entry for something that was considerably more than merely angering. She was hurt. She was a woman who had walked a dog named George through the Summer of Love with a man she had fallen for who had made a joke about Country Brother and the Holding Fish, who had asked him to write her a song. And he left.
She kept going. She was Janis Joplin. She kept going the way she kept going, by putting the wound into the music and singing it out. August 1969, Woodstock Music and Art Fair, Bethel, New York. 400,000 people in a field in Upstate New York. Country Joe McDonald performed. He led the crowd in the F-word cheer that would become one of the most famous moments in rock history, the anti-war protest chant that half a million people roared back at him, and then launched into I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag. It is one of the defining images of Woodstock. The crowd, the cheer, the song. Country Joe McDonald at his absolute peak of political and musical power. Janis Joplin was backstage waiting for her own set. Two years after Leon Street. Two years after the dog named George and the
radio and the joke about Country Brother and the Holding Fish. Two different stages at the same enormous festival. They did not seek each other out in the chaos of Woodstock. Or if they did, it has not been recorded. Both of them performed for the same 400,000 people. Neither of them did it together.
October 4th, 1970, Country Joe McDonald was in Santiago, Chile. He was producing the music for a left-wing film directed by Saul Landau and Nina Serrano and Raul Ruiz. He was on the other side of the world from San Francisco and Los Angeles. He got the news. Janis Joplin was dead.
Found in a motel room in Los Angeles. She was not yet 30 years old. She was recording with her new band and on top of the world, he wrote later. Like the upcoming elections in Chile, it seemed as though it was the beginning of a brand new day, but it wasn’t. He was in Santiago. She was gone. He had left her for someone else in 1967.
She had been angry. She had kept going. She had become the most famous female rock singer in America, and now she was gone from Santiago. With the political history of Chile about to change and the music film he was working on about to be overtaken by events, he processed the loss of the person he had walked a dog with on the Haight-Ashbury streets 3 years earlier.
“She is probably the one person from that time I really wish was around today so I could compare notes with her.” He said it for the first time shortly after she died. He said it for 55 years after that. Country Joe McDonald died on March 7th, 2026. He was 84 years old. He had been saying that sentence for 55 years.
He never stopped missing her. He never stopped returning to Lyon Street in his memory, to the dog named George, to the radio and the joke about the merged bands. She was the one he wanted to compare notes with. He outlived her by 55 years and 8 months. He said the same thing in every interview for 55 years and 8 months, and now he is gone, too.
Neither of them got to compare notes. Here is what this story asks you. Is there someone from a specific time in your life, a specific street, a specific apartment, a specific ordinary period that you have been carrying with you ever since? Not because the relationship was dramatic or headline-worthy, because it was real.
Country Joe McDonald and Janis Joplin were not each other’s great romantic story. He said so himself. “We were incompatible as lovers, really. There wasn’t a lot of sizzle.” But they walked a dog named George through the summer of love. They leaned toward the radio together when their songs came on. She cried when she thought he had forgotten their plans.
He wrote a song called Janis because she asked him to. He stood on the Lyon Street sidewalk 40 years later and said her name was the one he missed most. Some people are not the great love of your life. They are the person you walked the dog with, the person who was there for the ordinary version of you, the person you would want to compare notes with if only you could. Janis Joplin died in 1970.
Country Joe McDonald died in 2026. For 55 years he was the one who remembered the dog named George. Now both of them are gone, but the summer of love happened. Lyon Street happened. Country Brother and the Holding Fish happened as a joke in a small apartment in the Haight between two people who liked each other. That happened. Subscribe.
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