Country Joe & The Fish Calendar - Dec 1966

This is the second in a series of monthly calendar posters created by Tom Weller to promote Country Joe and the Fish.

The first lineup of Country Joe and the Fish formed in mid-1965, when Country Joe McDonald (vocals, acoustic guitar) and Barry "The Fish" Melton (lead guitar, vocals) came together as a duo. The two musicians had a background rooted in folk music, were enamored with the recordings of Woody Guthrie, and worked on the local acoustic coffeehouse circuit in the early 1960s.

By late 1965, based on McDonald and Melton's interest in the live performances of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the recordings on Bob Dylan's album, Highway 61 Revisited, and their use of the mind-altering drug LSD, the group began equipping themselves with electric instruments and delving more into psychedelia. As their popularity grew, the band relocated to San Francisco in 1966 and became popular fixtures at the Avalon and the Fillmore Auditorium.

The first calendar poster was November 1966 and it highlighted the dates and places that the Fish were playing. This style was abandoned for the next three months in the series - the calendar dates were left blank - and only reappeared for March 1967, the fifth and final calendar poster.