Country Joe McDonald: No ordinary Joe
Country Joe McDonald infamously led 500,000 people in the 'Fish Cheer' at the Woodstock Festival. But his fondest Sixties memories belong to more intimate times in the hippie idyll of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, he tells Robert Sandall

Play it again

Adam Abeshouse, a Grammy-winning classical-record producer and helpless hyper-enthusiast, has taken several concrete measures to address what he regards as an urgent imperative: to rescue Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, and that crowd from a specific sort of oblivion. In October, during a concert at Carnegie Hall, Abeshouse formally launched the Classical Recording Foundation, an entity devoted to the proposition that posterity is despoiled when artists are denied the chance to record their own interpretations of certain repertoire. For a long while, it's been evident that the executives behind the major classical-recording labels (Sony, Phillips, EMI, etc.) are far more aroused by the hypothetical bottom-line appeal of, say, Dolly Parton singing the Bach "Wedding Cantata" or Bon Jovi conducting the "1812 Overture" than they are by the prospect of investing in Gilbert Kalish and Joel Krosnick's rendition of Brahms's cello sonatas, or the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio's complete cycle of Beethoven trios, or the St. Luke Chamber Ensemble's "Brandenburg Concertos."
[more]