In 1965, a new band called Jefferson Airplane was making waves in the San Francisco Bay Area. Word reached a famous record producer down in Los Angeles. The following story has never before been published in its entirety. With the news that Phil Spector has passed away, The Airplane recall the full tale of their meeting for the first time.
Marty Balin, one of Jefferson Airplane’s lead singers and the band’s co-founder, had arranged—without the knowledge of the Airplane’s’s then-manager, Matthew Katz—for the band to audition for Phil Spector in Los Angeles. Spector’s sister had heard the commotion about the group up in San Francisco and had called Balin to see if they might be interested in playing for Phil Spector. Being a brand-new band, of course they were!
The call had taken place in the late summer of 1965, barely a month after the group’s first public performance, and just a week after Ralph J. Gleason’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle raving about this new band. A number of record executives were already looking at the group as a possible signing, but none were as high-profile in the industry as Phil Spector. The New York native was still considered the finest pop record producer in America, maybe the world, and had been for a few years. His string of successful records with the Ronettes, the Crystals and, more recently, the Righteous Brothers, was lauded as monumental, and his trademark “Wall of Sound” technique was emulated by dozens of competitors, among them the massively successful Beach Boys and Four Seasons. To be taken under Spector’s wing could be a major coup for the band.
The Airplane, accompanied by Katz, flew to L.A. to meet Phil Spector. What they weren’t yet aware of when they boarded the plane was that Spector was also known to be something of an eccentric, a reclusive character who was notoriously difficult to deal with. In later years, several of the artists he worked with, among them his then-wife Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes, would tell tales of brutal treatment by their mentor. According to recollections from those who knew him, Spector was always surrounded by bodyguards, was rumoured to flash around firearms, and was a taskmaster in the studio. (He would, of course, famously spend his final years in prison, having been convicted of murdering actress Lana Clarkson.)
But here, on September 20th, 1965, was the new sound out of San Francisco, mild-mannered Jefferson Airplane, unproven, unknown and waiting for Phil Spector to size them up. The band members remembered it well. In interviews conducted by this author for his Jefferson Airplane biography, Got a Revolution!, they flashed back to their memorable meeting with the so-called “Tycoon of Teen.”
Jorma Kaukonen (lead guitarist): We went to Phil’s place and of course Phil Spector was [acting like] Phil Spector. We set up in his huge house in Beverly Hills, and I remember he had his bodyguards and the whole deal. He had a…I don’t remember if it was a pellet pistol or a real pistol. Probably was a pellet pistol. He was shooting and stuff. Made me uncomfortable and I left after we played.
Marty Balin: When Jorma and I tried to leave and his bodyguard showed us his gun, we said, “Get out of the way. What are you gonna do? Shoot us?” He [Spector] was a little strange. He was always looking in the mirror and while he was talking to us he was looking at the part in his hair. And then, under this stairway, he had all these drawers that came out, full of all this great grass. And he never offered us one joint. So I looked at Jorma and said, “Man, let’s get out of here.” So he and I walked out. I said, “We can’t take this guy.”
Bob Harvey (original bassist): Matthew wanted him to produce the band. I’ve never seen a more paranoid bastard in my life [than Spector]. I mean, heavies with 45s. He’s out there in space! He didn’t want us in the room where he was at, in the big room, so he had us play out in the hall. And it was pretty strange. But he and [guitarist/singer/songwriter Paul] Kantner hit it off. They talked and talked and talked. The rest of us went back to the cars and packed up the instruments and everything, and he and Kantner talked for another 45 minutes, inside there alone. And it seemed like just because of the rapport that he had going there with Kantner that maybe something was going to happen because of it. If you could put up with his insanity, good things could come out of it. As long as you could cope.
Paul Kantner: It was interesting, given his reputation. But he didn’t like us.
Signe Toly Anderson (original female lead singer): I remember his stone-cold entrance hall. I had to sit there for two hours while we waited for him because he wasn’t available. Excuuuse me.
While they were in L.A., the Airplane also auditioned for several other labels, including Capitol, Columbia and Colpix. Ultimately, they signed with RCARecords, beginning a relationship that would last more than two decades, through changes of style, personnel and even band names. They never saw Phil Spector again.
There are three versions of the Jefferson Airplane’s debut LP, each with a dedicated mono and stereo mix. The “first” (and rarest) version is the 12-track uncensored version, which was originally released on August 15th, 1966. This version was quickly recalled and the track “Runnin’ Round This World” deleted off side 1 due to the line “the nights I’ve spent with you have been fantastic trips”. Very few of these original copies have survived, and they usually sell for an awful lot of money.
Jefferson Airplane “Takes Off” is the debut studio album by the American rock band Jefferson Airplane, released in August 1966 as RCA Victor LSP-3584 (stereo) and LPM-3584 (mono). The personnel differs from the later “classic” line up: Signe Toly Anderson was iniatally the female vocalist and Skip Spence played drums. But both soon left the group—Spence in May 1966, Anderson in October and were replaced by Spencer Dryden and Grace Slick, respectively.
RCA executives found some of the lyrics too sexually suggestive. They had the band change the lyrics in “Let Me In” from “I gotta get in, you know where” to “You shut your door, now it ain’t fair”, and “Don’t tell me you want money” to “Don’t tell me it’s so funny”. In “Run Around” they had the end of the line “Blinded by colours come flashing from flowers that sway as you lay under me” altered to “…that sway as you stay here by me”. With “Runnin’ ‘Round This World” the executives insisted that “trips” in the line “The nights I’ve spent with you have been fantastic trips” referred to taking LSD, though the band insisted it was merely common slang. Even replacing the word “trips” with a guitar arpeggio did not placate RCA’s concerns with the line’s sexual connotations and refused its inclusion on the album, and the recording remained unreleased for the next eight years.
The “second” version to appear of this album happens to be exactly the same as the first version minus “Runnin’ Round This World”. However, these copies were also soon recalled, and two tracks replaced for the “Third”, final, and most commonly found version of the LP. The two tracks “Let Me In” (with lines “Oh let me in, I wanna be there/I gotta get in you know where” and “Don’t tell me you want money”) and “Run Around” (having “… that sway as you lay under me”) were re-recorded with censored lyrics.
The ”first” US pressing of the debut by Jefferson Airplane has three versions, released in both mono and stereo, the first two of which are extremely rare: 1) Six tracks on side A, the sixth being ”Runnin’ Round This World”. This contains the original versions of both ”Let Me In” (with the lyric ”Don’t tell me you want money”) and ”Run Around” (with the lyric ”That sway as you lay under me”). The backcover has no caption ”RE” in the top right hand corner.
2) Five tracks on side A, ”Runnin’ Round This World” is deleted. Still, the original versions of ”Let Me In” and ”Run Around” are included. The backcover does have the ”RE” caption.
3) Five tracks on side A. The re-recorded versions of ”Let Me In” and ”Run Around” are included with the offensive lyrics altered. Backcover identical to 2).
This second version has also become somewhat uncommon, and is discernible from the third version only by the etched matrix numbers or by listening to the record itself. Only the “third version” has been fully reissued on CD in both mixes, although a couple mediocre-sounding vinyl-sourced tracks appeared on the most recent remaster.
This transfer is from one of the 2nd version LPs (-12S / -3S) . I definitely prefer this original version, if for no other reason than it is clearly what the band intended to be released before they were censored by RCA Victor.
The album’s release drew little press attention at a time when mainstream newspapers did not normally cover rock releases and the rock press was yet in its infancy. Crawdaddy! magazine highlighted the album on the cover of its January 1967 issue, which included a three-page review by the magazine’s assistant editor, Tim Jurgens, who called the album “faulted” yet “the most important album of American rock” of 1966.
The Band:
Marty Balin – vocals, rhythm guitar
Signe Toly Anderson – vocals, percussion
Jorma Kaukonen – lead guitar
Paul Kantner – rhythm guitar, vocals
Jack Casady – bass guitar
Skip Spence – drums
Spencer Dryden – drums (on “Go to Her,” alternate version of “And I Like It,” and alternate version of “Chauffeur Blues”)
David Crosby’s now classic debut solo album “If I Could Only Remember My Name” featured members of CSN&Y, Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Santana on the illustrious guest list. If I Could Only Remember My Name was regarded as one of the best sounding albums of the early 70s but this is some of the coolest Crosby you’ll ever hear.
What is Perro Sessions? : The Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra is a nickname given to artists who recorded together in the early 1970s. They were predominantly members of JeffersonAirplane, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Crosby, Stills and Nash. Their first album recorded together was “Blows Against the Empire”, when they were known as Jefferson Starship. The name changed to Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra for the next album, David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name.
During the sessions for Crosby’s album at Wally Heider Studios, the musicians of each band were invited to the sessions and rehearsed hours of material, and everything was recorded. Material played during these recorded sessions in 1971 was used for Crosby’s album (the “Perro Chorus” is credited on the song, “What Are Their Names”) and several other solo albums after Crosby’s . The name Jefferson Starship was later used for Paul Kantner and Grace Slick’s new band formed in 1974. Paul Kantner recorded a solo album in 1983 as a tribute to this time, Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra.
The material on the Perro tapes was very interesting, but had nothing to do with CSNY. There were 4 reels of 2 track mixes made in 1971 during the sessions (obviously there is more that has never been mixed). The tapes were put into storage in Nash’s vault. Paul called Nash in 1992 and requested DATs of those tapes. This was the first time they had been outside of the CSNY organization. They were copied at A&M Post Production audio and my personal DAT was made at that time. The roots of Perro go back a lot further than 1971. 1 guess it had its inception in the early years of the ’60s (prior to the Airplane, the Byrds et al) when Kantner, Crosby and Freiberg used to hang out, play music, get high and rap together around Venice Beach. That was the initial bond, the start of it all.
The “PERRO Chorus” is credited on Crosby’s song, “What Are Their Names” and several other solo albums after Crosby’s. The name Jefferson Starship was later used for PaulKantner and Grace Slick’s new band formed in 1974. Paul Kantner recorded a solo album in 1983 as a tribute to this time, Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra.
Later, when they were in bands of their own, there were occasional points of interaction – like Garcia sitting in on the ‘Surrealistic Pillow’ sessions, like Crosby giving “Triad” to the Airplane when he couldn’t get the Byrds to record it, like Kantner, Crosby and Stills writing “Wooden Ships”.
Then, as the ’60s drew to a close, two sets of circumstances combined to bring the Planet Earth Rock And Roll Dream a whole lot nearer. One was the opening of Wally Heider’s studio in San Francisco – because now the local SF musicians (Airplane, Quicksilver, Dead) had a place on their doorstep where they could record. This gave item freedom from the corporate studios to record and produce as they saw fit, to come and go more as they pleased and to invite the musical neighbourhood in if they chose. (It hadn’t been so easy when they were holed up at RCA’s or Warner’s studios in Hollywood.) The other catalyst was the state of flux that a lot of bands were falling into by 1969/1970, for Crosby had left the Byrds, the Airplane was a less cohesive force with Dryden out and Hot Tuna splitting off, and Dino Valenti’s arrival had unsettled QMS.
Things had come pretty much full circle by the end of the decade. Kantner was again hanging out with Crosby (quite often on the latter’s yacht) and with David Freiberg – and, when Paul came to assemble musicians to record ‘Blows Against The Empire’, it wasn’t just to his Airplane cohorts that he turned but also to Crosby and Garcia and even Graham Nash – who’d just bought a house in Frisco and ended up producing the whole second side of the ‘Blows…’ album at Heider’s studio. ‘Blows…” was the first album by that collection of musicians whom Paul liked to term the Planet Earth Rock And Roll Orchestra.
The fact that he billed the album as being by Jefferson Starship shouldn’t mislead anyone. Kantner, Crosby, Slick, Freiberg, Nash, Garcia, Kaukonen, Lesh, Casady, Kreutzmann, Hart – these people were the Planet Earth Rock And Roll Orchestra, supporting each other on key projects.
As Grace recalls, “These sessions were like ‘Uh, do you wanna play guitar on this one?’ ‘No, man, I have to go to the bathroom.’ ‘Okay, David, you wanna play?’ ‘Sure’. Whoever felt like doing something did it. Parts interchanged, people interchanged.”
Graham Nash says “They asked me my opinion and I just jumped right in. Grace, Paul, David – they let me do whatever I heard. I was searching for this kind of environment when I came to America and when I was mixing in the studio our imaginations were running rampant. We were creating virtual kingdoms with music.”
The second such PERRO project was David Crosby’s debut solo album, ‘If I Could Only Remember My Name’, which features all of the above-mentioned Planet Earthers plus the likes of Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Greg Rolie and Mike Shrieve from the band Santana.
They come from sessions at Wally Heider’s San Francisco studios in 1971. Crosby had sailed his boat up to Sausalito harbour. Nash was resident in the Haight. Kantner and Slick had moved out to Bolinas and the Dead were in Mill Valley but they would all head for Wally’s of an evening to work on PERRO songs. Some of these things ended up on Crosby’s solo, a couple on Garcia’s solo, one on Grace’s album, one on Paul’s 1983 ‘Planet Earth...’ album – and some have never seen the light of day, in which case we’ve had to guess at what they might be title.
“Walkin’ In The Mountains” (1′ 47n): A Crosby composition featuring typically attractive chordings, but little in the way of finished lyrics. “All the words we got so far are just ideas of places we’d like to go,- he tells Garcia at the start of this…
> “I went walkin’ out last summer> Tryin’ to find a breath of air.> I went walkin’ in the mountains> A friend had told me I’d find you there”
comprises just about all the words he has, but the feel is so airy and open you can almost smell that mountain air. The sequence makes a surprise reappearance later in the tape, as an intro to version four of ‘The Mountain Song’.
Barncard: Two of the versions are actually the same performance, the second remixed a little better.
“Is It Really Monday?” (4′ 55″): Crosby again, and this one begins with his acoustic guitar and the composer scat-singing the abstruse melody. When the lyrics arrive, he asks:
> “Is it really Monday? > I must have been here before. > Is it really Monday? > I think the walls begin to speak.”
The tempo is very slow, in a country blues vein and Garcia adds some restrained picking. The lugubrious bass sounds like that of Phil Lesh.
“Under Anesthesia” (5′ 14″): The timing includes a false start of about 45 seconds, after which Crosby calls a halt and announces ‘No, that’s not it. Started too slow, it’s outta time and I didn’t get the right words!” When he does, it’s another hugely impressive song, the lyrical angle of which is to bemoan the inertia of the common man – who is portrayed as stupefied by beer and TV. At the conclusion, Crosby launches into a brief sequence on guitar and comments ‘I thought I’d try something original…if I write another song in E Minor, man, I’m gonna get fired!’
*This song is actually called “You Sit There”
“Loser” (8′ 41″): The timing includes several restarts and Jerry explaining – and indeed demonstrating – the chord progression to his colleagues, who could well be Crosby, Lesh and Papa John*. There’s certainly a violin in here and it works especially well, counterpointing the three guitars most effectively. *Papa John never hung out in PERRO sessions. Possibily David Freiberg on viola.
It’s obviously an early run through the song as Jerry doesn’t have much more than the first verse written. The second crack has more audible vocals, but Garcia still resorts to “da da das” from the second verse on. The bridge is there, at least intact musically, even if the only line Jerry seems sure about is the closing “Don’t let that deal go down” The genesis of a great song.
“Over Jordan” (3′ 30″): Another Crosby song, replete with a beautiful structure, but short on completed lyrics. It begins with David’s rippling acoustic guitar which is soon joined by that of Garcia for some impressive picking.
> “I’m only going over Jordan, > Just a-goin” to my home”
sings Crosby, but after a couple of minutes he declares that he’s forgotten the changes, so restarts the performance at the bridge. This is a delightful half-song which the composer should really have completed and recorded at some stage. *Also called “Wayfaring Stranger”
“The Mountain Song – 1″ (5′ 11″): This is the first of several attempts at what would eventually become a slice of classic Airmachine. However, at this stage, the only fragment of the song they had to work with was the line “Gonna make the mountains be my home” and the chord-sequence that supported it, so it’s quite amazing that from such a meager base Kantner, Slick, Crosby and Garcia (possibly with Casady and Hart) are able to conjure 23 minutes of undulating beauty. There’s a banjo featured prominently, plus two acoustic guitars and Grace’s distinctive piano. The banjo is Paul K.& the touches are so accomplished, it’s Kantner on the five- string with Garcia and Crosby on guitars. Surprisingly, there’s no trace of Paul’s vocal – though the other three take care of that handsomely enough.
Early on, it’s Jerry singing the line in orthodox fashion, while Grace embellishes with some improvised lyrics around the theme. Then Crosby takes Grace’s place and scats around Jerry’s vocal for a while. As you’d expect, the playing is loose and slightly tentative on this first version, but no less affecting for all that.
“The Mountain Song – 2″ (5′ 17″): Grace is back providing an improvised descant to Jerry’s straight vocal at the start here, and she’s singing about the sky and the river as he eulogizes the mountains. After a minute or so, Crosby introduces his scat and Grace leaves the chorus to concentrate on her keyboards. Her vocal chords are re-engaged towards the close.
“The Mountain Song – 3″ (3′ 44″): This version begins with Jerry and David singing the line and Grace gliding around them. Briefly, Crosby supersedes her in this role but soon the two of them are improvising around the structure as Jerry perseveres in the middle. At the end of this effort, Paul is heard to remark “It sounds like everybody’s going in and out of time” to which Crosby responds “No, no, no, it’s all working – and it works perfectly.” The listener is strongly inclined to agree with him.
“The Mountain Song – 4″ (8′ 20″): As you’ll see, this is the longest version and undoubtedly the most satisfying of the four. This is where Crosby’s embryonic “Walkin’ In The Mountains” suddenly reemerges and he goes through the verse and various chord sequences as an introduction to “The Mountain Song,” to which it bridges seamlessly and beautifully. It’s a remarkable segue which makes the listener keenly aware of how the song could have developed in a very different direction had Crosby stayed to contribute throughout its evolution. Speculation aside, what we do have is a return to the familiar pattern of banjo, guitars, bass, piano and percussion. Crosby reverts to his scatted counterpoint before it slips into a stunning instrumental section. Herein, the music weaves a genuinely hypnotic spell as it rolls effortlessly along the bed of Paul’s banjo and Grace’s piano, with Garcia picking exquisitely. After several minutes of this, the vocal pattern is re-introduced, now in a more restrained vein against instrumentation which has become subdued, with Grace and the Crosby gently dancing around Jerry to the finale of a wonderful excursion.
A definite high point on this portion of the tape Mountains v. 4 reaches its apex (a phenomenal passage in it’s own right), when the band led by Jerry starts coaxing out a proto version of Loser and a brief reprise of Deal including a pause to recapitulate the chords. Then there is a cold cut in the tape and Jerry plainly recounts the chord progression: C-Em-Am-G-Am. At which point they go into Deal proper.
“Wild Turkey” (4′ 20″)(AKA “Leather Winged Bat”): An interesting improvisation with Jorma and Jack at the controls, this may or may not be an early styling of what became the dynamic duo’s “Bark” instrumental. It certainly starts off that way, with Kaukonen roaring out some aggressive electric noise and Casady on a familiar rumble. But soon it settles into something much gentler, employing a more reflective chord progression. Jorma’s playing rises and falls in a fairly relaxed manner – until the finale, when he stirs it back towards the “Turkey” structure with some more combative lead guitar. It could well be that Jack and Jorma decided the split-mood approach didn’t work and restructured the number as the wholly aggressive strut we encountered on ‘Bark’. Whatever, it’s a nicely balanced piece and a pleasure to hear.
“Jorma & Jerry’s Jam – 1″ (14′ 22″): If the previous outing was a pleasure, this jam is a sensation! As readers will be aware, there’s little recorded evidence of Kaukonen and. Garcia essaying their remarkable skills together, so this is a rare chance to hear the fruits of one such collaboration. Backed up by the supple bass of Jack Casady plus solid percussion (Mickey Hart?), this is a quarter-hour of incisive and responsive musicianship – intuitively structured and beautifully realized. Jorma leads it off on electric guitar, his playing funky and rich in wah-wah, whilst Jerry complements it with a more subdued style. Casady is well mixed and excellent, but it’s Jorma’s sprawling mass of notes which take center stage in this section; hot, handy and winding all over the soundscape in unfettered rampage. Having played a disciplined supporting role for the first half of the jam – his accomplished touches providing the perfect foil to Jorma’s aggression – Jerry assumes control for the second phase. Initially calm after the Kaukonen storm, this movement gradually builds over several minutes into a fabulous jam, delightfully evolved and transfixing the listener as it develops. Jerry’s playing gets less lyrical, more earthy, until it is stylistically much closer to his partner’s earlier contribution. Naturally, Jorma then resumes the lead and steers the ensemble to a nicely judged conclusion. It would be perfectly reasonable to hail this example of superlative sparring as San Francisco jamming at its very finest.
“The Wall Song -1″ (6′ 00″): After a waggish intro from the composer, we’re into a captivating version of a Crosby song which appeared in 1972 on the LP ‘Graham Nash David Crosby.’ On that take, the duo were backed by Garcia, Lesh and Kreutzmann and there’s no reason to suppose that the same trio isn’t in support here. The real distinction between the released version and this is the absence of Nash – though this is more than ably compensated for by the double-tracking of Crosby’s wonderful voice, which provides an imaginative and memorable harmony. But there’s a bonus. Just when listeners familiar with the 1972 record expect the track to finish, there’s a lovely instrumental excursion with Garcia in winning form, shuffling percussion from Bill and a gentle ripple from Lesh. Really, this is so good it eclipses the official release by some distance – and should clearly have been included in the CS&N box of 1991.
“The Wall Song – 2″ (4′ 27″): Again, David is doubly tracked, but this time there’s only his own acoustic guitar in support, and the performance is generally a little lazier than before.
“Eep Hour” (4′ 44″): A very dissimilar reading from the one which appeared on ‘Garcia’ and which had keyboard and pedal steel dominating the sound. This is just the acoustic guitars and bass and has a very Spanish ambiance. Presuming that Jerry isn’t multi-tracked and playing everything himself – as he did on his album – we might take the other participants to be Lesh and either Kantner or Crosby. *Jack Casady plays bass on EEP HOUR
At the close, there’s a whoop of triumph from somebody and what sounds like Kantner’s voice saying ‘everybody just have a little break from their guitar strings!’
“Shuffle” (2′ 20″): Two guitars (one electric), bass and drums glide effortlessly down a four-chord structure for a couple of minutes. The drums shuffle effectively but nothing much happens and the piece sounds more like an intro to something more substantial than an entity in itself.
“Jorma & Jerry’s Jam – 2″ (14′ 29″): This has a slightly longer introduction than its earlier incarnation (i.e. it starts a few seconds before) but is otherwise identical to the first version.
These tapes are a fabulous find, showing as they do the formative stages of some classic songs and hinting at others, notably by Crosby, that could have been among the best things he never recorded.
Personal: David Crosby — guitars, vocals Laura Allan – autoharp, vocal Jack Casady – bass David Freiberg – vocal Jerry Garcia — guitars, pedal steel guitar, vocal Mickey Hart — drums Paul Kantner – vocal Jorma Kaukonen – guitar Bill Kreutzmann — drums, tambourine Phil Lesh — bass, vocal Joni Mitchell – vocals Graham Nash — guitar, vocals Gregg Rolie – piano Michael Shrieve – drums Grace Slick – vocal Neil Young — guitars, bass, vibraphone, congas, vocals
The first example of a rock poster to feature band photographs, these by Herb Greene. Wilson’s lettering, by now evolved into a more elegant ‘blocky’ style, reflected his discovery of the work of Vienna Secessionist designer, Alfred Roller. Together again, Jefferson Airplane, with original vocalist Signe Anderson, and the Grateful Dead shared this August billing.
it’s Hard to believe that Grace Barnett Wing was only four years younger than Elvis Presley! Yet she was one of the queens of the San Francisco Rock scene in the 1960s and 1970s. While Elvis was cranking out mediocre films, Slick was beginning to get noticed in a band called the Great Society with her then-husband Jerry Slick (drums), His brother Darby Slick (lead guitar), and David Miner (bass). It wasn’t long after the band made its debut at the Coffee Gallery in the City in October 1965 that Slick composed her signature song “White Rabbit.” about the effects of hallucinogenic drugs. The band’s popularity grew, and they recorded several tracks in late ’65 with Sylvester Stewart at the controls.
One single “Somebody to Love,” with Grace Slick on vocals, piano, and recorder was released. When Signe Anderson left the Jefferson Airplane to be with her daughter, Jack Casady invited Slick to join the band. The group’s musical focus shifted from folk-rock to a more psychedelic-oriented groove. and the landmark album “Surrealistic Pillow,”, was released in early 1967 and became an instant hit, landing at No3 on the Billboard Album Chart, with the singles “Someone to Love,’ and “White Rabbit,” also climbing to the Top 10 at the dawning of the Summer of Love. Suddenly the Airplane became one of the most popular bands in America, with Slick and the Airplane leading the charge for the psychedelic revolution that was in progress.
No less than George and Patti Harrison showed up in the Haight-Ashbury in August wondering what all the hoopla was about. Slick’s powerful vocals, political convictions, and outspokenness catapulted her to into prominence as a female Rock musician who was not afraid to speak her mind. On the Dick Cavett show in 1969, she dared to use a 12-letter word that George Carlin had proclaimed could not be said on television. Up against the wall indeed you ————! At the end of the 1960s after three more successful studio albums, a live album and a visit to Monterey and a trip to Woodstock, Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen departed the group. Slick responded by forming the Jefferson Starship with bandmate Paul Kantner, and others, recording: Bark,” (1971), “Long John Silver,” (1972), and a trio of solo albums: “Manhole,” (1974), “Dreams,” (1980), and “Welcome to the Wrecking Ball,” (1981). There was also an album “Sunfighter,” from 1981 with Paul Kantner.
The Jefferson Starship recorded eight albums, including the hugely successful “”Red Octopus,” which zoomed to #1 in 1975, and “Earth,” which went to #5 in 1978. Slick was the only original member of the now truncated band named Starship in the mid to late 80’s with the album “Knee Deep in the Hoopla,” (1985) Slick left the Starship in 1988. The last hurrah was the reunion of the Jefferson Airplane in 1989 including a well-received tour. Slick retired from the music business after the tour, citing that “All rock-and-rollers over 50 looked stupid and should retire.” After appearances with a revamped Kantner-led Jefferson Starship in 1995, and a Post 9/11 appearance, Grace Slick called it quits for good and began painting Although suffering some health issues in 2006, she has fully recovered. Her band the Jefferson Airplane was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 and was presented with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016. Grace Slick is fondly remembered by those 1960s baby boomers who watched her trajectory from the Great Society to the top of the heap with the Airplane and the Starship and watched her perform at Winterland, the Fillmore, the Avalon, and Fillmore West. Those were the golden days of Rock in San Francisco, and Grace was there to help ignite the spark.
In June 1967, The Beatles album ‘Sgt. Pepper” had just hit the US and the Summer of Love had barely began when Jefferson Airplane headed from San Francisco to L.A. The year 1967 saw the emergence of an entire new wave of American rock, much of which centered around the San Francisco scene of bands like Moby Grape, CountryJoe and the Fish, The Grateful Dead and the Quicksilver Messenger Service. And within this cohort, no group showed more promise, exerted more influence or found more early success than Jefferson Airplane.
They’d spend the next four months recording ‘After Bathing at Baxter’s” It was their third album with the classic lineup. Following the smash success of the debut ‘Surrealistic Pillow” fired by two unexpected AM radio hits (“Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit” they had a surprisingly big budget and creative carte blanche from their major label, RCA Records.
They also had a radical plan: to move past the poppy folk-rock that had been the Airplane’s stock-in-trade since the band’s first version formed in 1965.
Airplane, signed to RCA, started the year with a record already under its belt, 1966’s Jefferson Airplane Takes Off. Its gently twisted folk-rock had received decent reviews but hadn’t sold much of anything. That wouldn’t hold true for Surrealistic Pillow, the group’s second album.
To start with, that meant beefing up the studio sound to match the group’s live shows. As in, Jack Casady’s bass had little heft on ‘Pillow’—not at all the fat-toned omnipresent rumble my teen self witnessed at the Café Au Go Go in spring 1967.
Besides, the group’s dynamics and ambitions were rapidly evolving. Internal frictions were pivoting them in directions heavier sounds, art-rock song forms, looser vocal interplay that would define the Airplane going forward.
On ‘Baxter’s’, the creative and personal tensions that would undermine Jefferson Airplane’s cohesion over the next three years found powerful artistic balance. Despite period-piece flaws an overlong jam, some hippie-dippy lyrics it is arguably the most daring and accomplished album this trail-blazing band ever made.
When the Airplane cut ‘Baxter’s’, the San Francisco counterculture they were such an integral part of was peaking though nobody at the time knew it. The album’s dazzling array of song structures unusual, eccentric, oblique distills and reflects that scene’s trust and hope in the joys of experimentation. It sought to embody the shared feeling that the world was open to question and on the cusp of change.
As was the JeffersonAirplane itself. Their internal chemistry was deliberately shaken up to yield a sometimes uneasy democracy, where all six members contributed compositions, dialed up new sounds, and pushed at the edges of their talents. It didn’t always work; why would it? But it’s why ‘Baxter’s turns through a marvelous kaleidoscope of sounds, moods, and textures that are darker and denser, more layered and aggressive than anything they’d done to date.
Jack Casady and guitarist Jorma Kaukonen were among the key drivers of the sonic shift. Casady honed his agile, melodic runs, which routinely spilled with jagged finesse across bar lines, while playing R&B with the likes of James Brown; he and Kaukonen had played together since high school. Back then, ironically, Kaukonen played rhythm to Casady’s lead guitar. All those years gave the duo an almost telepathic interaction (Hot Tuna,) that drummer Spencer Dryden, a trained jazz musician with years of experience, prodded and anchored with skilled finesse. They all came to ‘Baxter’s wanting to inject more jamming into the mix a la the Grateful Dead, Cream, and Hendrix.
Grace Slick joined the Airplane just in time to record ‘Surrealistic Pillow’; somewhat ironically, she brought that album’s surprisingly edgy hits with her from her old band, The Great Society. Adept on keyboards, gifted with a supple, richly timbred voice, she was catalytic, strong-minded, and far from a hippie earth mother. On ‘Baxter’s, she was determined to pursue her idiosyncratic composer’s voice and explore her fierce feminist perspective.
Airplane co-founder Paul Kantner, originally a folk singer who idolized Pete Seeger, went to a military high school which helps explain the martial rhythms and feels to many of his songs. Since ‘Pillow’, though, he had started developing his own offbeat song forms and wanted more space for them. That and his shrewd musicality and sense of the times led him to buy into the others’ ideas and redirect the Airplane’s flight plans.
That left co-founder Marty Balin, an ex-folkie with an acute pop sense who, as singer and writer, was at the center of the earlier Airplane. Watching his role diminish on ‘Baxter’s didn’t exactly elate him. But he also knew he owned one of the band’s biggest assets: a fantastically flexible, expressive, and outsized tenor that, whether out front or part of the blend, capped the group’s utterly distinctive singing.
In fact, with Balin and Slick, the Airplane had two of rock’s most distinctive and charismatic singers. Their vocal ranges overlapped, though with very different timbres that offered possibilities they soon learned to manipulate and maximize. On ‘Pillow’, Kantner’s baritone anchored their nuanced blends. On ‘Baxter’s’, though, their approach becomes looser and richer, with harmonies unwinding into counterpoint lines and offshoot solo moments; that became another Airplane signature and helped shape subsequent outfits like The Band.
Then there’s the material, ranging from grungy garage rock to cantilevered art rock. At the dawn of classic rock’s golden era, ‘Baxter’s’ surveys the teeming musical landscape and filters it through the Airplane’s hydra-like sensibilities and talents. Sure, there are clunky moments. But they’re far outweighed by the thrilling, at times purposely disorienting probes into new turf.
Still, this early “concept” album has its share of disposable pretension, like grouping tunes into “suites.” Sometimes this makes some sense. The first, “Streetmasse,” gathers the initial three songs, which share a sense of whimsy, assembling “found” materials, and youth perspectives. “The War is Over,” the second “suite,” yokes two quite different Kantner pieces that share themes of connectivity and change. “Schizoforest Love Suite,” the last, contains “Two Heads” and two songs interwoven, so that fits. For the other two, your guess is as good as mine.
“Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil”
By now JormaKaukonen has mastered the joys of feedback, and his opening longer and more intense live is a call to arms that starkly contrasts with the sonics and poppier feels of ‘Surrealistic Pillow’; it will be a band staple from now on. Strutting in Kantner’s favored 2/4 sprung rhythms, the lyrics, a la William Burroughs, mash up pieces of A.A. Milne’s kids’ poetry. (Slick thought folk-blues artist Fred Neil, a Kantner pal and model, resembled Winnie the Pooh and dubbed him Pooh-neil.) Its multipart structure is tight and complex; the dynamic and rhythmic contrasts create breathtaking drama between the strut and the hovering chorus. And the finale’s sly harmonies create an open-ended feeling that segues into the next cut.
“A Small Package of Value Will Come to You Shortly”
OK, this collage is definitely period-piece, but it’s also clever dada-style fun: making it ‘Baxter’s second track illuminates why the band originally asked Frank Zappa to produce the record. Dryden, who composed it, was a skilled jazz musician who took a lot of crap from “serious” players for working with these guys, and his uncle happened to be Charlie Chaplin, so maybe comic irony came naturally. That irreverence was as much a part of hippiedom as drugs and courses through ‘Baxter’s—though in Slick’s hands, it can turn more savage.
“Young Girl Sunday Blues”
This brilliant blues-rock piece navigates around almost every blues-rock cliché—no mean feat. Dryden’s preternatural ability to shift accents and mesh with Casady’s fluid, serpentine bass powers the band’s supercharged engine. The inventive craft shaping Airplane charts is evident in how each section’s instrumental colors and interaction morph. The yearning tune and emotive (if druggy) lyrics let Balin unleash his loose, rangy tenor to terrific effect while avoiding standard-issue blues moves. Ironically, it’s also the only song on ‘Baxter’s that Balin, until now the Airplane’s chief composer, penned with Kaukonen. From here on, their mutual antipathy grew.
“Martha”
Ah, the Summer of Love: this paean to Kantner’s then-girlfriend, the runaway teen daughter of Sausalito’s mayor, has its hippie-lyric moments, but also gestures toward the incipient feminism (“She does as she pleases”) that Slick’s pieces deepen and slam home. Structurally, it’s a tour-de-force, playing minor and major keys off each other to yield a Mideastern/modal feel. Its impacted syncopations are punctuated by Casady’s sudden climbs up the neck. The tonal colors rotate and mutate: Casady’s burbling bass against Slick’s breathy snake-charmer recorder, Dryden’s delicate blocks, Kaukonen’s slicing fuzz guitar. Then comes the entropy of the finale’s gradual slowdown, until there is only Kantner’s voice, intoning, evoking, remembering: the bittersweet transition between the preceding and following tunes.
“Wild Tyme”
The track lifts off like a rocket, with a hooky riff delivered by an entwined guitar army crackling with Kaukonen’s barely suppressed feedback. At times the vocals are backdrops for the Kaukonen-Casady-Dryden proto-metal instrumentals; then the mirror flips, in that patented way this band veers away from clichés just when you expect them in order to feed dramatic tension. Kantner’s often eccentric chord progressions, like Ray Davies’, swerve in unique ways that encourage the Airplane’s powerhouse instrumental core, prodded by Casady’s ever-restless rumbling, to dive headlong into openings and teeter enticingly on the edge of chaos.
“The Last Wall of the Castle”
Teetering on the edge of chaos is actually this track’s goal. Here the rough edges running through ‘Baxter’s’ experimental ethos are foregrounded, as the high-octane rhythm section, spearheaded by Casady’s frenetic bass firing off counter-rhythms and filigrees, at once drives and battles with its grooves, creating disruptive tension as it romps hungrily through its varied sections. “The Last Wall of the Castle,” whose tightly-packed, half-spoken lyrics and soul-influenced chords reveal very real connections with the Nuggets-style garage rock then bubbling out of college towns across America. Where a garage band would stick tightly, head down, to the beat and song structure, the Airplane’s rhythm section struggles to break free, pulling the band into a thrilling middle ground between jam and song, the driving rhythm fraying into a heaven of skidding, slicing guitars. The record isn’t precise because the band isn’t going for precision – instead, it’s the sound of a rough democracy in living action.
“Rejoyce”
Grace Slick’s art-rock compositions on ‘Baxter’s’ highlight the dawn of feminism. No hippie earth mother, she wields her assemblage culled from Molly Bloom’s internal monolog in Ulysses—the ur-modernist experimental novel that, like the Pooh stories, was a counterculture fave like an acerbic rapier, slicing openings for women to speak truth to a man’s world. Her music is provocatively eccentric and experimental, anchored by her limber, accomplished piano, too often overlooked as an essential Airplane ingredient. Dryden’s horn chart evokes jazz classics like ‘Sketches of Spain and the ride-out incarnates the feminist pushback lurking beyond men’s glances and desires. It remains one of classic rock’s most powerful, unsettling songs.
“Watch Her Ride”
Sure, this Kantner anthem’s lyrics are shot through with hippie clichés, but they also link up, at least tentatively, with Slick’s feminism: relationships between males and females aren’t about possession, but about the freedom to share hope and risks. But skip, if you prefer, and focus on the densely textured musical layers, far subtler and more finessed.
“Spare Chaynge”
Here’s where the boys who’ll become Hot Tuna get their wish to stretch…and oh yeah, it’s too long and meandering with sporadic jawdropping passages. So try a different angle: listen to it upside-down, focusing on Casady and Dryden. Kaukonen, the feedback maestro and fingerpicking genius, is frankly at his weakest in extended solos like this. Remember that Casady played lead while Kaukonen played rhythm in high school, that Casady plus Dryden create tension and release as casually as breathing in and out, and you’ll find half to two-thirds of this comes interestingly alive, its rawness a sharp contrast with the rest of the album. But it’s still too self-indulgent.
Freedom is also the best word to describe what is arguably Baxter’s definitive track. In an age of overly indulgent jams, the dark, minimal grind of “Spare Chaynge” is astonishing, a bass-heavy excursion that slowly builds to a crescendo of pounding drums and circling guitar. As close to “free rock” as almost anything on record, the jam has a sense of space and style that reflects the band’s ballroom-honed chops. It conjures an aggressive, almost primal minimalism, resembling something from early Can or Hawkwind.
“Two Heads”
The gated percussive shock that opens this Slick piece punches this album’s ambitions about art and feminism home with brooding menace mixed with savage humor. What can you say about a line like, “Wearing your comb like an ax in your head?” The clipped harpsichord is teamed with Casady’s now-surging, now-thumping bottom-end bombs for a disorienting study in contrasts that mates perfectly with the lyrics. Slick’s rich contralto can wail or sneer, while Balin’s ghostly soaring behind her mimics the lyric’s central conceit while reminding us this outfit boasted stronger, more unconventional vocals than almost anyone else around. All that is just part of what makes it timeless.
“Won’t You Try/Saturday Afternoon”
This phenomenal two-tune mashup—it’s not a medley, really knits together the album’s moods and themes into an uplifting and challenging finale; its sonics, pacing, structure, and execution recap ‘Baxter’s musical journey before releasing listeners back to reality. See, the album wasn’t meant to be a soundtrack for the LSD-laced times; it was meant to embody them in musical form. So this highly wrought composition and chart, with dazzlingly mutating mini-sections that pulsate with mesmerizing tension and release, puts you inside the psychedelic peaks of the San Francisco hippie dream, the gatherings at Golden Gate Park, where the moods were free and easy and hope was abundant and change seemed imminent and palpable. Naïve? Oh, sure. But I still listen to this cut on 11 to find reasons to believe in the future.
RCA was unhappy about how long and complicated the sessions for ‘Baxter’s were. After the gold rush of ‘Surrealistic Pillow’, with two hit singles showcased on prime-time TV shows as well as AM radio, ‘Baxter’s two singles didn’t crack the top 25; the album peaked at 17 and never went gold.
Whatever. ‘Baxter’s set the Airplane’s conceptual template for the next three years. The band, obviously, disagreed with the market. But by 1970, its internal tensions, synthesized on ‘Baxter’s into ear-opening creative leaps, would tear it to pieces.
All around them, too, things were falling apart. The Summer of Love unleashed an overwhelming influx of runaway teens, drug dealers and pimps, and cops on the fragile, insular hippie counterculture’s epicenter. In its wake, the original scene-makers regrouped and dispersed. Baxter’s is, without a doubt, a record of many flaws – its jams can go on too long, its sequencing is uneven, and those oh-so-hip-at-the-time sound collages haven’t aged particularly well. It’s also a remarkably sloppy record; vocals often run askew, full band hits are fudged and the drumming occasionally runs aground. Yet, in a lot of ways, the album is a thrilling listen because – not in spite of these problems.
The looming dissolution of the Beatles, after a stirring run of creative genius, signaled that everything would be different in the ’70s. They released their final album in Abbey Road, though the earlier-recorded Let It Be would follow, after some post-session doctoring from Phil Spector. They weren’t the only ones who departed: The original Jimi Hendrix Experience, Eric Burdon and the Animals and the Jeff Beck Group fell apart, even as Rolling Stones co-founder Brian Jones died. The warm feelings of Woodstock were quickly forgotten in the bloody aftermath of Altamont.
The death of Brian Jones, July 3rd , Brian Jones had long since relinquished his role as a major contributor to the band he founded, the Rolling Stones, when he drowned in his swimming pool at his home in Cotchford Farm, the estate formerly owned by A.A. Milnes, author of the ever popular children’s book, Winnie the Pooh. He had been fired by the Stones the month before due to drug use and increasingly erratic behavior, leaving Jones more or less out in the cold as far as any further recording ventures were concerned. Initially ruled “death by misadventure,” the verdict was later questioned when rumors spread that a construction worker named Frank Thorogood actually murdered Jones and had made a deathbed confession to a confidante. In 2008, the Sussex police department declared it was no longer investigating the claim. Nevertheless, Jones became the first member of the so-called 27 club, whose membership now includes Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Amy Whitehouse and a number of other artists whose lives ended at the fateful age of 27. His death also ended a prolific and profound era for the Stones, which many still argue, was the most creative period of their collective career.
At the same time, bands appeared that would dominate the decade to come. Led Zeppelin released their acclaimed first and second albums in ’69, laying a sturdy foundation for superstardom. Zeppelin seemed to arrive as a fully formed new blues-rock variant, harder and louder than anything that had come before. In fact, after touring together extensively, the band arrived in the studio with this material so well rehearsed that they only needed 36 hours spread out over two weeks to complete the album. Its influence, however, has endured – not just as a template for their own career, but also for untold legions of soon-to-be-famous heavy-metal purveyors.
In the summer of 1969, Zeppelin was a band on the rise. Its self-titled first album, released in January of that year, reached Number 10 on the Billboard charts in the U.S., and peaked at Number 6 in the U.K. The band’s pairing of blues, folk and psychedelia eventually would make it the biggest band of the 1970s, “as influential in that decade as The Beatles were in the previous one,” Zeppelin would play more than 40 gigs on their Summer of 69 tour of U.S.A.
Chicago issued the first of what will eventually be four straight multi-album projects, A band with a bright horn section and a scalding guitarist, Chicago was really all about dichotomy back then. Four songs from their introductory double album would enter the charts, through to 1972’s Chicago V.
Mick Taylor joined TheStones, sparking their most heralded period – though one that was marked by a turn toward darker subject matter. Rolling Stones, ‘Let It Bleed’ was aptly titled, the second in a quartet of genius albums by the Stones echoed all of the very real apprehensions surrounding this era – like a gritty yin to the Beatles’ utopian yang on ‘Abbey Road.’ Mick Taylor’s arrival also ushered in a harder-edged sound, which combined to create one of rock’s most visceral triumphs. It’s sexy, foreboding, topical and dangerous, sometimes all at once.
Altamont – December 6th was one of the darkest days in music history, Altamont sealed the lid on the promise of peace and love that was capped by Woodstock, and did so within mere months following that celebratory event itself. The Stones, who headlined the sprawling festival in the California desert, may have had good intentions to offer a free concert, but enlisting the Hell’s Angels as security was a terrible idea. Though the line-up was stellar—CSNY, Santana and Jefferson Airplane reprised their roles from Woodstock, along with the Flying Burrito Brothers providing an excellent add-on—an aura of violence and uncertainty pervaded the proceedings. Both Jagger and Airplane singer Marty Balin were accosted the former as he left his chopper, the latter onstage and the death of concert goer Meredith Hunter by a pack of Angels who claimed they saw him wielding a gun, ensured the fact that an idyllic utopian era of the ’60s was quickly come to an end.
‘Abbey Road’ was always a far more fitting send off for the Beatles than ‘Let It Be’ could have ever been. It’s among Paul McCartney’s brightest, most artistically satisfying, moments. But John Lennon’s punctuations (and, to a quickly emerging degree, George Harrison’s) undoubtably make it so. Moments away from imploding, they arrived for these sessions as distinct individuals, rather than stylized mop-topped group. Yet, for a moment in time and for this one last time, the Beatles’ separate personalities seemed to work again in service of the whole.
The Beatles Final Concert, January 30th, Although the Beatles’ impromptu performance on the rooftop of their Apple headquarters in London’s central environs was rumored to be a tryout for a return to live concerts, it was in fact part of the band’s final hurrah. The tumultuous sessions for their album Let It Be exposed a group in disarray, and indeed, a mere nine months after this live six song set—all culled from tracks they had been working on at the time The Beatles were officially broken. Filmed to provide a cap on the ill-fated Let It Be film, it’s still an exhilarating experience to watch the four former Fabs giving it a final go for the curious crowds below. “Hope we passed the audition,” John says before vacating the premises on orders from the police. Yes, Mr. Lennon, indeed you did.
Nick Drake, ‘Five Leaves Left’ was an autumnal yearning which surrounds these folk-rock recordings, and that’s likely the reason Drake was overlooked in his time. Even smart assists from Richard Thompson, then of FairportConvention fame, couldn’t push this delicately conveyed album into the public consciousness back then. Sadly, Drake only had five years left. He died at age 26 in 1974 of an overdose.
This daring debut by prog rock band King Crimson, ‘In the Court of the Crimson King’ still remains prog’s standard bearer, the best example of a then-emerging movement that sought to combine musical concepts with rock. ‘In the Court of the Crimson King’ was also a template for how this seemingly ever-evolving band would operate, as their lineup almost immediately flew apart. The core pair of Robert Fripp and Greg Lake was all that remained by the time King Crimson set about recording a follow-up.
The Kinks ‘Arthur,’ a triumph of rock with a British sensibility subtitled “Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire,” never gets the short-hand praise of contemporary works like the Who’s ‘Tommy.’ That’s likely because it’s less ambitious. But it’s also far more listenable – like a rock musical, rather than a rock opera. Hailed as one of rock’s first great concept albums, ‘Tommy’ – like so many examples in that genre – sometimes suffers creatively at the expense of furthering the plot. But at its best, this represents the Who at their finest. And there’s no questioning how the album opened up new narrative possibilities for pop composers.
The Who Performed Tommy for the First Time, April 22nd Notably, the concert in Devon, England, preceded the album’s official release by a month. Although other offerings can claim to be the first real rock operas—The Pretty Things’ S.F, Sorrow and the Kinks’ Arthur, among them—The Who were the only band to take the unusual step of performing an album in its entirety. They’d later take Tommy to some of the world’s great opera houses, elevating rock in both intellect and intent.
The debut of supergroup Blind Faith, June 7th, Heralded as the first true “super group”—a term that would resurface continuously in the years that followed Blind Faith was based on an all-star union between guitarist EricClapton and drummer Ginger Baker of Cream and vocalist/keyboard player Steve Winwood of Traffic, with bassist Ric Grech, formerly of Family, added later on. Although Clapton in particular was wary of the implications involved in such a high profile ensemble and equally concerned about inviting the tempestuous Baker into the fold—he agreed to pursue the possibilities, owing in small part to the fact that he and Winwood had worked together in a short-lived ad hoc outfit called Powerhouse a few years before. The group’s less than spectacular live debut at Hyde Park further exacerbated Clapton’s concerns, and after a single spotty album and tours of Scandinavia and the U.S., the group disbanded later that year.
Dylan Reemerges at the Isle of Wight, August 31st, Dylan had been largely absent from public view since a 1966 motorcycle accident drove him into self-imposed seclusion. Other than his work with the Band at Big Pink, he chose to spend time with his family and record an album, Nashville Skyline, a shocking departure from any album he had offered before. Consequently, the announcement of his appearance at England’s Isle of Wight Festival attracted an extraordinary amount of interest, including the curiosity of various Beatles, a Stone, Eric Clapton, Pink Floyd’s SydBarrett and a still gestating Elton John. Rumor had it that Lennon, Harrison and Starr might join Dylan onstage, and although that proved false, Dylan alone was enough to mesmerize the masses. Dressed in a beige suit, his hair cut short, he performed a 17-song set with backing from the Band, a concert that included several classics from his catalog as well as tracks from Nashville Skyline and its immediate predecessor, John Wesley Harding. It’s still considered a landmark performance today.
That was probably to be expected for a generation still reeling from shocking assassinations and an ever-escalating war. So, too, was a move toward nostalgia for the old ways. Bob Dylan Having hinted at his intentions on the more rustic ‘John Wesley Harding,’ Dylan definitively left behind protest music for a head-long dive into deep country for the charming, determinedly happy ‘Nashville Skyline.’ In its own way, this was revolutionary too as he went country, even as his old backing musicians in The Band released a determinedly homespun self-titled masterpiece. The Byrds also splintered, with two members Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman left to dive deeper into their passion for country and western music. The resulting album, unfortunately, did little on the charts – but it proved to be a well-spring of inspiration for descendent bands like the Eagles. breaking away to form the Americana-focused Flying Burrito Brothers.
Although there had been several gingerly moves to find common ground between the disparate realms of country music and rock ’n’ roll early rock pioneers Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers and Rick Nelson all had claims on country—in the divided America of the late ’60s, followers of the two styles were decidedly distinct. Nevertheless, the Byrds and the Buffalo Springfield effectively made efforts to narrow that divide, making it only natural that the two groups they spawned, the Flying Burrito Brothers and Poco respectively, would, to paraphrase the title of the latter’s debut album, pick up the pieces. As a result of releases like The Flying Burrito Brothers’ debut, The Gilded Palace of Sin, in February 1969, country-rock blossomed, spearheaded by the influence of “cosmic cowboy” Gram Parsons (a member of both the Byrds and the Burritos) before later finding a permanent bond with the release of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken, featuring members of both the new guard and the old, two years later.
The Stooges, ‘The Stooges’ This album’s wiry, first-take feel was no put on: Three songs from the Stooges‘ titanic debut were written in a single day, after their label said the album needed more material, then banged them out live. The ferocious results gave the nascent heavy metal genre new fire, presupposed far-off punk, and scared the hell out of parents everywhere.
Creedence Clearwater Revival began to come into their own here, reaching heralded high points with “Born on the Bayou” and “Proud Mary.” The rest of ‘Bayou Country’ doesn’t always reach that level, but the album is nevertheless surrounded by a sense of expectancy. They’re discovering themselves with every revolution of this album, and it’s a fizzy joy to hear. The second of an incredible run of three CCR albums from 1969 codifies every great thing the earlier ‘Bayou Country’ pointed toward. Sharply drawn, ‘Green River’ is just as sharply played – with none of the period-piece noodling that had occasionally seeped into their first two albums. John Fogerty dilated his muse on ageless cuts like “Bad Moon Rising,” the title track and “Lodi,” and Creedence finally found its true voice.
The Allman Brothers Band an accomplished debut as they blended rock, blues, jazz and a distinctly Southern sensibility to came up with something uniquely and forever their own. Taken for granted in today’s multi-cultural melting pot, ‘Santana’ marked the big bang of Latin rock. Within a year, congas and timbales had found their way into the music of the Rolling Stones, Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis, among many others. But it all started here, as ‘Santana’ blended mind-blowing, genre-bending musical explorations with more compact songs like the rambunctious Top 10 hit ‘Evil Ways’.
Jimi Hendrix forms the Band of Gypsies, October and with the release of Electric Ladyland, Jimi Hendrix was at the height of his prowess, but the break-up of the Experience left him without a band and bereft of new recordings. His band at Woodstock, ostensively dubbed “Gypsy Sun and Rainbows,” found him expanding his original trio concept and reuniting with his former army buddy, Billy Cox. The aggregate, which Hendrix referred to as “a band of gypsies” when interviewed on The Dick Cavett Show, fell apart soon after, although Cox continued on bass and joined Hendrix for some informal recording dates with Buddy Miles. It was a natural combination; Miles had subbed for Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell on two tracks used for Electric Ladyland, and the trio went on to record a few demos and rehearse for an upcoming concert at the Fillmore East that would span New Year’s Eve. The self-titled album, released on Capitol Records to satisfy a contractual obligation, became the band’s only official recording, but clearly pointed the way to a more racially charged sound Hendrix was working on for the future.
Woodstock, August 15th-18th, If ever there was a single gathering that served to define the spirit of the ’60s, those three days spent in the muddy fields of Yasgur’s farm in upstate New York takes the prize. It wasn’t always pleasant—despite an amazing array of rock’s most influential artists (Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, CSNY, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Richie Havens, et. al.), the traffic, the mud and the scarcity of supplies (other than the acid of course) tended to test the resolve of all involved. Still, it was that spirit of love, peace and music that pervaded the proceedings over all, assuring a communal embrace while setting the precedent for festival gatherings, a basic blueprint that remains relevant to this day.
Jefferson Airplane, ‘Volunteers’ was the last album to feature both Marty Balin and Spencer Dryden,‘Volunteers’ blended a few bucolic moments (featuring guest stars Jerry Garcia and members of CSNY) in with the now-expected psychedelic rock – but that’s not this album’s best-remembered legacy. Instead, it’s a series of molten, occasionally profanity-laced rebukes of the American status quo. They left the ’60s with a bang.
Joining together for the first of what would become a string of free-wheeling, muscular successes alongside his band Crazy Horse, Neil Young blows a hole in the comfy folk-rock conventions of ‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere’ in fact, has a lot more in common with the wild eclecticism of his work with Buffalo Springfield, but with a new tone that’s both sharper and looser.
Records in heavy rotation in my bedroom included the debut album from Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II,The Beatles Abbey Road , The Who’s Tommy, King Crimson’s In The Court Of The Crimson King a great record,one that for its time was truly unique, The Rolling Stones Beggar’s Banquet which never left my turntable and the follow-up release Let It Bleed, Neil Young’s masterpiece Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Zappa’sHot Rats which help change my musical perspective, Fleetwood Mac’s Then Play On, CSN debut, Blind Faith’s one and only official release which is also a very strange record, Nashville Skyline by Bob Dylan, The MC5’s Kick Out The Jams, Isaac Hayes’ Hot Buttered Soul which arrived unexpectedly when I did not respond in time to a record company selection deadline and glad I got this gem,Chicago Transit Authority double set before they shortened their name to Chicago, Jethro Tull’s Stand Up, Live Dead, The Doors Soft Parade,Pink Floyd’s Live Ummagumma, Jefferson Airplane’s Volunteers, and Procol Harum’s A Salty Dog.
Few events in American history caused as much upheaval as the war in Vietnam. Young people took to streets and college campuses, protesting a conflict that they viewed as little more than an excuse for a murder machine entangling thousands of young draftees. Not surprisingly, musicians supplied the soundtrack against which protest was pursued. With the sound and imagery flashing across television screens night after night, it was only natural that people would find respite in an array of anthems—“Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival, “StreetFighting Man from the Rolling Stones,” “For What It’s Worth (written about the riots on Sunset Strip) by Buffalo Springfield, “Machine Gun” from Jimi Hendrix, Country Joe and the Fish’s “Vietnam Song” and “Volunteers” which came courtesy of Jefferson Airplane. All served to remind the youth of the country that they weren’t alone in their determination to sway some sentiment and avoid the bloodshed overseas.
Marty Balin, whose tenor voice provided hits for the ’60s psychedelic rock band Jefferson Airplane, has died,
The family said Friday: “Marty’s fans describe him as having had a substantial impact for the better of the world: ‘One of the greatest voices of all time, a writer of songs that will never fade, and founder of the quintessential San Francisco band of the sixties.’ His music is known for being the soundtrack to all of life’s monumental moments.”
Balin’s songwriting credits for the Airplane included “It’s No Secret,” “Today,” “Comin’ Back To Me,” “PlasticFantastic Lover,” “Share a Little Joke,” and “Volunteers” the latter sung at Woodstock.
Another co-founder, Paul Kantner, died in January 2016, the same month the Recording Academy named Jefferson Airplane one of its annual Lifetime Achievement Award recipients at the Grammys.
Balin and the Jefferson Airplane were pioneers of psychedelic rock — their sound fused fuzzy, distorted, reverb-filled tones with influences from folk, rock and the blues.
The Airplane helped define the San Francisco music scene in the 1960s, debuting at the Matrix nightclub in 1965, about a year before its first album, “Jefferson Airplane Takes Off,” was released.Jefferson Airplane formed in 1965 when folk artist Balin decided to create a rock group in response to the Beatles-led British Invasion. The band quickly attracted a local following – and when fledgling promoter Bill Graham opened his legendary Fillmore Auditorium, Jefferson Airplane served as the first headliner.
Signed to RCA Records for the then-princely sum of $25,000, the band scored five gold albums in the US, including 1967’s Surrealistic Pillow and 1968’s Crown of Creation in their first run of success.
Marty Balin wrote and sang some of the best-loved songs of both Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship. In memory of the singer, who passed away on September. 27th, 2018. Here are some of the great songs.
Marty Balin started his musical journey as a pop singer in the style of Gene Pitney or Paul Anka. In 1962 he signed to Challenge Records, releasing two singles that went nowhere. He then immersed himself in the folk music scene, fronting a group called the Town Criers, which also failed to ignite. While Balin re-thought his musical path, a business opportunity opened up that would tie this all together. He and friend Elliot Sazer took over a failing pizza shop called the Syndicate, and relaunched it as the Matrix, which would become a new music venue for San Francisco’s up-and-coming rock and rollers.
It was during this that he connected with like-minded guitarist Paul Kantner. The two would soon form what would become one of the most important bands of the ’60s. Jefferson Airplane would break every rule in the book, and be all the better for it. “One night we were playing this gig and Jorma [Kaukonen] just suddenly took off, you know,” Ballin recalled in the documentary Fly Jefferson Airplane. “He just flew away and played the hell out of this song. We never heard that before. So the next night, Jack [Casady] and Jorma took off, you know, and it was just great. So the next night, we all just took off and we played the song however we wanted, whatever we thought. So that became our approach.”
Balin, along with Signe Toly Anderson, would share lead vocals in the original lineup. Balin wrote and or co-wrote most of the songs on their stunning 1966 debut, “Takes Off”. Within the year, Anderson left the band to raise a family, leaving the door open for Grace Slick who would take the band up the charts with “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love.” It would be, however, Balin who remained the heart and soul of the band over their often tumultuous life span.
Grace Slick, whose powerful vocals added another unique element to the band’s sound, joined the group in 1966, bringing those two songs with her from her previous band, the Great Society.
Those songs, “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit,” became Top 10 hits the following year on “Surrealistic Pillow,” one of the defining rock albums of the late ’60s.
Multivocal harmonies were a staple of the Airplane, with Balin and Slick soaring over one another and Kantner weaving in. In a 2011 interview, Kantner said this interplay is “maybe the best thing I do in the bands that I’ve been in.”
The band performed at three of the legendary music festivals of the ’60s, including the Monterey Pop Festival, Woodstock and the ill-fated Altamont. Balin was brutally beaten by the Hells Angels after he dove into the audience to help an audience member in distress. “I woke up with all these boot marks all over my body,” he told Relix in 1993. “I just walked out there. I remember Jorma saying, ‘Hey, you’re a crazy son of a bitch.’”
As Kantner and Slick would get farther out in their concepts, Balin would remain the more grounded voice in the band, but would often be out-voted by the others. His input into the band became less and less, but still potent with songs like “Volunteers” and “Share a Little Joke.” Though he left in 1971, he later would once again hook up with Slick and Kantner in Jefferson Starship in 1974, writing the band’s biggest hit “Miracles” in 1975.
“Marty and I are like totally different creatures, we make different kinds of music,” said Kantner in Fly Jefferson Airplane. “Marty is extraordinarily good, particularly at writing simple songs that connect and touch you. I can’t write a simple song to save my life.”
Balin had a warm, pure and honest voice, which worked as a perfect counterpart to Grace’s more brash style. He took part in various reconfigurations of the group over the years, but never really receiving the respect he was due for starting and steering the band at the start. In addition to his strengths as a singer, Balin was an accomplished songwriter as well, and he contributed several key numbers to the Airplane’s canon early on and later supplied several successful songs to its designated successor, Jefferson Starship. Although Starship was Slick and singer/guitarist Paul Kantner’s vehicle after the mothership’s demise, Balin’s loyalty to his former flightmates helped give that band its first hint of commercial success. Here a mere handful of Balin’s finest moments here to enjoy. There will never be another band like Jefferson Airplane.
“It’s No Secret” From: ‘Jefferson Airplane Takes Off’ (1966)
Issued as the band’s debut single, “It’s No Secret” was the sound of Jefferson Airplane circa 1966. Balin at the front with backing from Signe Toly Anderson and Paul Kantner and a straight-ahead folk-rock track. Still, despite being on similar ground to bands like the”Byrds, they couldn’t help but sound like anyone but the Jefferson Airplane. It was an understated start to an amazing catalog of music. “It’s No Secret”
One of Balin’s most indelible contributions to the initial Airplane album Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, “It’s No Secret” helped define the Airplane’s oeurve, a striking sense of defiance coupled with an emphatic emotional investment. Balin seems to teeter on the brink of desperation in trying to convince a skeptical lover that he’s all in as far as their relationship is concerned (“It’s no secret, How strong my love is for you/ It’s no secret, when I tell you what I’m gonna do/ ‘Cause I love you, yes I love you”), and indeed, by the time the song reaches its soaring conclusion, it becomes a notion that shouldn’t be taken for granted.
“Young Girl Sunday Blues” From: ‘After Bathing at Baxters’ (1967)
Most of the band’s third album, After Bathing At Baxters, was under the hands of Kantner and Slick, but Balin got this one gem into the mix. A stomping rocker co-written with Kantner, its style slots in between the more psychedelic start and end of side one of the album. Balin was a brilliant balladeer but could deliver on a rocker as well.
“Comin’ Back to Me” From: ‘Surrealistic Pillow’ (1967)
Balin wrote and sings solo on this incredible, haunting ballad. Perhaps more than any other song on our list of the Marty Balin Songs, this captures him at his truest. The timber and tone of his voice fully in force is a thing of beauty. This song sounds even more striking today than it did in 1967.
“With Your Love” – From “Spitfire”
Written with drummer Joey Covington and an occasional collaborator Vic Smith,“With Your Love” was one of the final significant songs in the Airplane’s last years. It made its appearance on the album Spitfire shortly before their initial break-up. While the subject matter may have been of a more mundane variety, a style the group turned to in their final desperate grasp for commercial success, Balin’s vocal remains as impassioned as ever. Here was proof that even as the Airplane’s other engines were failing, he could still help them takeoff.
The album closer on the classic Surrealistic Pillow, “Plastic Fantastic Lover” is a “pounding rant inspired by the most pervasive American addiction of all, television” according to the Jeff Tamakin bio Got a Revolution. While the studio version is a concise rocker clocking in under three minutes, the version the band let loose at Woodstock Festival is an amphetamine-fueled juggernaut of rock and roll fire. Showing what a great band, They could be so fierce live.
One in a series of searing duets with Grace Slick, and another highlight of the landmark “Surrealistic Pillow” album, this song was widely believed to be a euphemism for a sex toy, although Balin later insisted that it was written in praise to his new stereo set-up. The staunch drive and determination inherent in the song’s emphatic performance set a standard for the banshee wail that would come to full fruition on later albums Crown of Creation and Volunteers in particular. The song itself was ensured immortality when it was tapped as the B side of the band’s most immortal anthem “Somebody To Love.”
“Crown of Creation” From “Crown of Creation”
Sung in the manner of a tribal chant, “Crown of Creation” finds Balin soaring above Slick and Kantner’s insistent wail, adding to the song’s irrepressible urgency and forward thrust. Taken from the album of the same name, its militancy and unapologetic verve made it a standout of their early sets and another example of their populist platitudes. Here again, there’s a menacing sense of irony and insistence at play (“You are the crown of creation/ And you’ve got no place to go”), seemingly assuring its subject that “the stability you strive for” will be found, but only in barren environs they refer to as “a place among the fossils of our time.” It’s a dismal assessment indeed.
“Miracles” From: ‘Red Octopus’ (1975)
By 1975 the Airplane were long gone and the Jefferson Starship had taken on a life of its own. Though Balin first connected with them in a somewhat tentative fashion, he soon slid right into place, providing them with their biggest hit as Jefferson Starship. “Miracles,” a three-minute edit of the seven-minute album track, hit No. 3 on the Hot 100 in early 1975 thanks to Balin’s beautiful lyric and vocal.
“Caroline” – From ” Dragonfly”
In many ways “Caroline” was Balin’s audition contribution to Jefferson Starship. Balin hadn’t yet committed to joining the band on a full-time basis, but this dynamic ballad, recorded for the album Dragonfly, helped transform the group from a loose conglomeration of fellow travelers with little commercial intent into a viable radio-ready entity that was well worthy of taking on the Airplane’s legacy. Shedding the psychedelic sheen for a sound well in keeping with the early ‘70s AOR, Balin helped the band make the leap.
“Come Up the Years” From: ‘Jefferson Airplane Takes Off’ (1966)
Though never released as a single, “Come Up The Years” still sounds like a hit, on which Balin and Kantner harmonize on this tale of new love. Like so much of the band’s early material, its simplicity is the key to its success. Throw in a glockenspiel for the solo and we have a song that, like so many of theirs, defines the era from whence it came.
“3/5 of a Mile In 10 Seconds” From: ‘Surrealistic Pillow’ (1967)
This rocker opens side two of the 1967 classic Surrealistic Pillow. As strong lyrically as musically, “3/5 of a Mile In 10 Seconds” was all Balin. With lines like “Do away with people laughin’ at my hair / Do away with people frownin’ on my precious cares / Take me to a circus tent where I can easily pay my rent / And all the other freaks will share my cares.” Though that may seem rooted in ’67, it sounds just as applicable well after the end of the Flower Power movement.
“She Has Funny Cars” From: ‘Surrealistic Pillow’ (1967)
Arguably one of the greatest opening tracks to an album, “She Has Funny Cars” was co-written with lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and still packs a punch like no other. The galloping drums give way to a monster guitar riff before Balin sails in on lead vocal. Soon joined by Grace Slick, this song pretty much defines Jefferson Aiplane stylistically.
“Volunteers” From: ‘Volunteers’ (1969)
The 1969 album Volunteers certainly ranks right up there with the band’s finest material. From the opening call to arms of “We Can Be Together” through the title cut that closes the LP, it’s one hell of a ride. The song “Volunteers” was supposedly first inspired by Balin hearing a Volunteers of America donation truck out in the street. He jotted down some lyrics and, with the powerhouse guitar riff from Kantner, created a genuine anthem for the end of the ’60s.
The title track from the Airplane’s most insurgent effort of their collective career, “Volunteers” was exactly the anthem needed when dissent and desperation raged across the country throughout the Nixon era of the late ’60s and early ’70s. The emphatic rallying cry, “Up against the wall mother fucker,” emphasized the outrage and intent inherent in Balin and Slick’s banshee wail. This was indeed protest with both passion and purpose.
“Today” From: ‘Surreaslistic Pillow’ (1967)
“Today” stands as one of the most beautiful love songs ever written. A simple guitar riff dripping with haze and minimal percussion are all that is needed to accompany Balin here. Marty’s voice is so pure and bare. Eventually Slick comes in to harmonize, making it all the more beautiful. Like most of the album, it is drenched in reverb, which only adds to the ethereal nature of the songs. Legend has it that this arch ballad, which made its initial appearance on the Airplane’s defining album Surrealistic Pillow, was written on spec in hopes of securing a cover by Tony Bennett. That never happened, of course, although Balin’s emotive delivery made it an unlikely addition to an album known mostly for psychedelic suggestion. Jerry Garcia’s simple repetitive guitar figure adds to the track’s poignancy and design, but it’s Balin’s heart-wrenching vocal that ensured its searing embrace.
“The Other Side of This Life” From “Bless Its Pointed Little Head”
A staple of the Airplane’s set during their prime, this Fred Neil composition was radically transformed as a fiery rocker by the time it made its appearance on the band’s early live album Bless Its Pointed Little Head. Another dynamic vocal duel between Balin and Slick, it acquired an undisputed urgency that turned it into one of the band’s most memorable rallying cries. “Would you like to know a secret just between you and me?” they ask in unison. It’s an entreaty the listener dared not resist.
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“RIP Marty Balin, fellow bandmate and music traveler passed last night,” Jefferson Airplane bassist Jack Casady said in a statement. “A great songwriter and singer who loved life and music. We shared some wonderful times together. We will all miss you!!!!”
“Marty and I were young together in a time that defined our lives,” Jefferson Airplane guitarist JormaKaukonen wrote on his blog. “Had it not been for him, my life would have taken an alternate path I cannot imagine. He and Paul Kantner came together and like plutonium halves in a reactor started a chain reaction that still affects many of us today. It was a moment of powerful synchronicity. I was part of it to be sure, but I was not a prime mover. Marty always reached for the stars and he took us along with him.”
Remembering Alexander Lee “Skip” Spence, born on April 18th, 1946, born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada — he died on April 16yj, 1999.
He was co-founder of Moby Grape, and played guitar with them until 1969. The first Moby Grape album is probably in the Top 10 Psychedelica rock albums of all time! Skip released only one solo album, 1969’s Oar, and then largely withdrew from the music industry. He had started his career as a guitarist in an early line-up of Quicksilver Messenger Service, and was the drummer on Jefferson Airplane’s debut album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off.
He has been described on the Allmusic website as “one of Psychedelia’s brightest lights”; however, his career was plagued by drug addictions coupled with mental health problems, and he has been described by a biographer as a man who “neither died young nor had a chance to find his way out.”
Described as “one of the most harrowing documents of pain and confusion ever made”,the album was recorded after Spence had spent six months in Bellevue Hospital. Spence had been committed to Bellevue following a delusion-driven attempt to attack his ex Moby Grape bandmates Don Stevenson and Jerry Miller with a axe.
In November 1968, Alexander ‘Skip’ Spence stepped outside Bellevue Hospital for the first time in five months. While he had dozens of new songs and sketches in his head, he was no longer a member of Moby Grape. He needed another outlet. Meeting with producer David Rubinson at a hotel in Manhattan, Spence hatched a plan to record his new material in Tennessee.
Receiving some advance money from Columbia, he bought a motorcycle, and… well, either he returned to his family in California, or he drove down to Nashville. The timeline and course of events is uncertain. What is certain, however, is that in early December, Spence entered Columbia’s Nashville studio on 16th Ave. Though his future was unclear, he was ready to embark on a solo project. It turned out to be a recording process – and record – like no other.
The 12 original songs on Oar communicate a whole range of emotions. Often, it’s as though Spence is whispering to us, stuck somewhere between accusation and confession. At times, he croons in a baritone, telling tales of travel and betrayal. Other times, he cracks himself up with his own wordplay. There are moments when his music veers towards the dreamy, others when the sense of intimacy is arresting.
After its original release in May 1969, Oar went out of print. Yet over the years it has returned to us again and again. When first released, Oar was not promoted by Columbia Records, despite pleadings fromproducer Rubinson. It was at the time the lowest-selling album in Columbia Records history. Subsequent reissues have added ten more songs, in different stages of completion, to the original dozen. The original release ended with a fade out of “Grey / Afro”. The 1999 Sony/Sundazed reissue appends “This Time He Has Come” to a fade-less “Grey / Afro”, which reflects how the two songs appeared on the master tapes.
Jefferson Airplane’s contribution, the immense “Bless Its Pointed Little Head”, seems to have gone oddly un-heralded, despite being one of the very best of the period. Jefferson Airplane were -and remain- legends of the hippie counter-culture that sprang up in the mid-sixties in San Francisco. Their politically-charged and drug-tinged anthems touched a deep chord in the hearts and minds of California’s youth, whilst the charisma and beauty of singer Grace Slick made them perhaps the most media-friendly of all the West Coast bands bar The Byrds. Their 1967 hits ‘Somebody to Love’ and ‘White Rabbit’ became staples and signatures for an entire generation of American refuseniks.”
No ’60s concert scene was better documented than the San Francisco explosion . But of the official releases that came out at the time, the one to have is this JeffersonAirplane set, recorded during October ’68 dates at SF’s Fillmore West and a month later at Fillmore East in NYC. Here in that time between Monterey and Woodstock, between the albums “Crown Of Creation” and “Volunteers” , the band was growing daily in confidence, muscle and a knack for making the most of the moment. The constantly shifting dynamic of vocal triad Grace Slick, Marty Balin and Paul Kantner was a nimble beast, but more evident than ever was how much the tandem of guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and bassist Jack Casady formed the beating heart of this band.
Must-hear song: Balin’s “Plastic Fantastic Lover” has fury only hinted at on the Surrealistic Pillow studio version . But the real treasure is the version of folk figure Fred Neil’s written staunch and steely “The Other Side Of This Life” , a live Airplane staple from the early days, but never before seeing official release.
The cheat: Not only was it pieced together from several dates, some of the songs themselves are multi-date spliced jobs.
The live rock album really took flight at the end of the decade with Bay Area bands like The Grateful Dead “Live/ Dead” Quicksilver Messenger Service “Happy trails” , Big Brother & the Holding Company(parts of ’68’s ) Cheap Thrills . It made perfect sense: part of the San Francisco mystique was the live experience, the sense of community and unpredictability, bands being given the space—and the state-of-the-art sound systems to take winding (and long) musical trips. With , a combination of 1968 recordings from the Fillmores East and West on both coasts,
Jefferson Airplane made one of the defining albums of the band’s career, with dynamic vocal interplay among its three singers (Marty Balin, Grace Slick, Paul Kantner), a blues spotlight for guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and Rock Me , a swirling rendition of Donovan’s “Fat Angel” (“Fly Jefferson Airplane, gets you there on time,” it goes, making this a self-referential self-tribute), and a soaring 3/5 of a Mile In Ten Seconds . The Airplane were a strange amalgam, part post-folk (there’s a terrific take on Fred Neil’s “The Other Side Of Life” on ‘Pointed Little Head’), part psychedelic rock, part electric blues, and it could all get scattered, but when it locked in, they were one of the more mesmeric of the groups who came out of San Francisco scene. If you want to get a sense of what made them, on a good night, so special, you can start here.
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The Fat Angel Sings 