POP/ROCK - April 29, 1987

UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza--home of some of the fiercest anti-war demonstrations of the 1960s--will be the site for a weeklong “Vietnam Film Festival and Arts Fair.” At a rally Monday to get the fest under way, veteran singer-activist Country Joe McDonald did his trademark “Fixin-to-Die Rag” and spoke to the crowd. “We want to reawaken people from the sleep they’ve fallen into,” McDonald said as he tuned up his guitar. “We have to get this thing farther away from Rambo and Woodstock. There’s no fiction here today.” But McDonald later acknowledged the difficulty of activism in the ‘80s: “It’s hard to just grab people (these days). It was a long and difficult era.”