The times, they have changed for ‘the Fish’

Sometimes a man’s past can trick you, inviting predictions that prove off the mark. So it is with Barry Melton.

Thirty-five years ago, the United States was waging a war in a far-away land, and Melton, a shaggy-haired rock star, stood at the vanguard of the peace movement, using his guitar and voice to galvanize a generation of protesters.

And it’s one, two, three,

What are we fighting for?

Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,

Next stop is Vietnam.

Melton backed Joe McDonald on those lyrics as co-founder of Country Joe and the Fish, the ‘60s folk-rock band whose “I- Feel- Like- I’m- Fixin’- to- Die- Rag” became the signature antiwar anthem of the era. At Woodstock, he pranced around stage with a joint between his lips, embodying the country’s youthful rebellion against Vietnam.

Now he is 55, with a paunch, gray hair, two children, a mortgage. And when it comes to the war in Iraq, Melton is a conflicted man.

“You probably came here looking for some passionate sound bites about how wrong we are to be fighting over there,” he said the other day, sounding almost apologetic. “Well, the truth is I’m ambivalent.”

Saddam Hussein has a human rights record that is among the most appalling in the world, Melton continued. At some point, “there’s a morality to going in and stopping a dictator like that.”

“But diplomatically, this war has been terribly bungled. And I do worry very, very much about the long-term consequences of that.”

Melton shared his thoughts in the small office where he makes his living these days -- as public defender for Yolo County. Appointed to the post in January 2000, the onetime hippie wears a collared shirt, a tie and loafers to work and points proudly to a wall plaque honoring him as the county’s department manager of the year.

“They like me here,” he said with a grin. “Turns out administering an office of public defenders is a lot like running a rock ‘n’ roll band.”

But while Melton’s life today may look positively establishment, the link to his rebellious roots is obvious too. Public defenders, after all, are paid to fight the government -- its prosecutors, police and other agents.

“It’s the perfect job for a guy like me,” he explained. “It’s really a societally sanctioned way of taking out all your anti-authoritarian angst.”

A voluble man who likes to laugh, Melton vowed to become a lawyer as a boy after reading a biography of Clarence Darrow. His musical career, he said, was just a nice -- and profitable -- detour mapped out by his folks.

Determined their middle child would play guitar, Melton’s parents got him started with lessons in Brooklyn when he was 5. The family moved to North Hollywood a few years later, and Melton kept on strumming.

While attending Grant High School in L.A. in the early ‘60s, Melton became deeply involved in the civil rights movement, “like any good, socially conscious folk singer,” he says. By day, he joined sit-ins and volunteered for the Congress of Racial Equality. By night, he jammed with seasoned musicians passing through L.A. at the old Ash Grove nightclub on Melrose Avenue, developing a versatility music critics would later praise.

At 17, Melton moved to San Francisco and enrolled in college, ready to pursue his dream of becoming a lawyer. He got sidetracked when he met McDonald, a musician fresh out of the Navy with strong feelings against Vietnam. Their two-man jug band initially entertained at antiwar protests, then took on new members and became Country Joe and the Fish.

The year was 1965, and success came quickly. By 1967, the group was a national act -- receiving equal billing with the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane -- and had an album that stayed on the charts for months.

Melton remembers the early years of the antiwar movement as imbued “with a great sense of optimism. Everybody just figured that the war would stop simply because we were putting all this good energy out there.”

They learned good energy wasn’t enough and, in time, McDonald and the Fish -- as Melton was and still is known -- eventually swam off in different directions. Melton recorded some solo albums and passed the bar exam after taking correspondence classes while playing music on the road.

Though the law consumes most of his energy now, Melton still finds time to play gigs around Northern California, sometimes alone, sometimes with other ‘60s alumni. “Music is part of me, part of my expression,” said Melton, whose office decor mixes pictures of Mahatma Ghandi, his legal hero, with assorted fish and other memorabilia from his rock ‘n’ roll past.

Nonviolent protest remains part of him as well, when the cause demands it. A few years back, it was in defense of old growth redwoods in Humboldt County. Disturbing him more recently is the government’s “scary” crackdown on civil liberties in the wake of Sept. 11.

So now comes this war, and the conflict within the man.

Close friends are fiercely opposed, marching and risking arrest, but a nephew is a soldier fighting in Iraq. Melton’s youngest son, Kyle, is against it, period. Along with his peers, the 16-year-old junior walked out of class at Davis High School the first day U.S. bombs began to fall.

“Everything is black and white to him -- everything,” Melton said, sounding a lot like a father. “But you know, he hasn’t even finished American history yet.”

For Melton, the son of a World War II veteran, there is a lot of gray in the picture now. Vietnam, he said, was an easy call: “It was foreign adventurism, it was us backing one dictator over another dictator, and drafting thousands and thousands of young people to fight the war.”

This is different. It could be that what the U.S. is doing is morally correct, “going after a truly despotic man who silences dissidents by cutting their tongues out.” The parallel, as he sees it, is intervention in Kosovo under former President Clinton, the necessary move to stop ethnic cleansing that was killing so many people there.

But what concerns him is the Bush administration’s decision to “go outside the United Nations, ignore popular sentiment in much of the world and strike out on their own,” without making a persuasive case for the war.

That move, he said, has earned the country international enmity that could reverberate with serious economic and other consequences for decades to come.

“America may be the most powerful country on Earth, but that doesn’t mean we should act outside the community of nations,” Melton said. “If you think the ship is steered in the wrong direction, there’s a duty to convince everyone on board of that.

“That’s just a responsibility of leadership, isn’t it?”