[3][4] Raised in Brooklyn's Brighton Beach neighborhood and the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, California, Melton served as a Congress of Racial Equality volunteer during Freedom Summer and participated in a demonstration against Trần Lệ Xuân during her September–October 1963 lecture tour of Europe and the United States.

Having previously studied under Kay Kyser guitarist Milton Norman for much of his youth at the instigation of his parents, Melton initially befriended future bandmate Bruce Barthol in his high school's folk music club.

After ascending to the presidency of that organization, Melton became ensconced in the American folk music revival in earnest, playing at such venues as the Ash Grove.

Upon graduating early from Ulysses S. Grant High School in January 1965, Melton enrolled at San Francisco State University after becoming a devotee of faculty member S. I. Hayakawa's writings on general semantics.

Dissuaded by the fact that Hayakawa only taught upper-division courses and "lured away by the music", he dropped out after ten weeks, reuniting with McDonald in nearby Berkeley, California; paralleling the development of such contemporaneous groups as the Grateful Dead, various duo and jug band-oriented permutations of their act (centered on the Jabberwock, a Berkeley coffeehouse) would ultimately evolve into Country Joe and the Fish by early 1966.