REVIEWS:
This was one of the original psychedelic 1960s bands from San Francisco, associated with the fame bestowed upon the scene by journalists covering a congregation of hippies at the corner of Haight and Ashbury streets during the "Summer of Love" in 1967. Haight-Ashbury, these days, is just another commercial district, San Francisco just another crowded business venue, and the Airplane long dead as a creative concept. This reviewer was too young to have seen the original Airplane (old tapes and videos still inspire him anyway), though he was there for the incredible free concert at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco at the beginning of Jefferson Airplane's 1989 reunion tour.
The Airplane celebrated the 1960s, and the scene that developed in San Francisco at that time, like no other band, before, during, or since. The Airplane offered psychedelic music, psychedelic lyrics, and in-your-face political broadsides that doubtless inspired dozens of later performers. Or maybe they just inspired me and my friends to have lots of fun in college, listening to their old '60s albums at the beginning of the 1980s, when the whole concept of "college" was descending from its peak of financial excellence and slowly evolving into the relatively impoverished reality it is today. The whole Airplane concept, however, was too top-heavy with talent, and toward the end of the 1960s the Airplane split up into two rather different bands; Hot Tuna, a guitar-and-bass blues band with Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady, and Jefferson Starship, a changing-lineup band revolving around Paul Kantner with Grace Slick and Marty Balin participating on and off.
Neither of these bands are what the Airplane was. Hot Tuna sounds like a living, unchanging (if respectable) relic of blues culture, not like the Airplane, and the Starship was a band during the 1970s that made money playing conformist pop, though Kantner has revived it in the 1990s for the sake of playing old Airplane tunes and rambling about politics. At any rate the whole scene changed around 1971 when their album Bark came out, because the two factions started putting their leftover compositions on the Airplane albums and saving their own stuff for their own projects. Needless to say, by the time the 1970s Jefferson Starship came out with big boring hits like "Miracles" and "Sara" and "Find Your Way Back," it should have been clear to all what the real politics of rock music was and is -- we buy the albums of baby-boomer rock bands, and they use our money (after all the corporate middlemen get their huge cuts) to live well by the standards of possessive individualism, well of course sometimes they (like Jorma did) use some of this money to create a "guitar camp" in southeast Ohio, a much cooler thing to be sure. (In short, their former claims to nonconformity are rendered meaningless by their current lives.)
Go see these people anyway if they are playing in your neighborhood, and pay them your utmost respect for what they used to be. Read Grace Slick's autobiography SOMEBODY TO LOVE, it reveals her great sense of humor. Visit the Web site of the Journal of Trionic Physics at http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/2424 -- the links page should lead you to all of the other pages with all of the other stuff you might want to know.
--Samuel Fassbinder
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(Samuel Fassbinder's review)
The Airplane was originally Marty Balin's band, because he owned the venue where they started; the Matrix, in San Francisco. Their original lineup had Marty Balin, Jorma Kaukonen, Paul Kantner, and Jack Casady, and it also had a female vocalist named Signe Anderson, and they came out with their first album, a somewhat derivative folk-rock album which was titled Jefferson Airplane Takes Off -- Surrealistic Pillow is the second Airplane album, and this album has Grace Slick on it instead of Anderson, and its sound is more the Airplane's own sound, very dignified and eccentric and creatively understated (tho' this IS rock) and filled with love. Grace's paisley dress on the clippings decorating the back cover says a lot. The title is an invention of Jerry Garcia of the Greatful Dead, and it fits -- this is a soft mind-bender.
This album has heartfelt and pretty love songs like "Today," "Comin' Back To Me," and "How Do You Feel" though the type of love described in this album is not characterized by attachment but rather by freedom, as is sung in "My Best Friend." In fact, the whole album is about non-attachment -- "She Has Funny Cars" lyrics: "Your mind's guaranteed/ It's all you'll ever need/ So what do you want from me?" -- lyrics from "D.C.B.A -25": "We come and go as we please" -- lyrics from "3/5 of a Mile in Ten Seconds": "Take me to a circus tent/ Where I can easily pay my rent". Great, very polite Jorma Kaukonen guitar throughout. "Plastic Fantastic Lover" is a hit of later Airplane cynicism, a song about (as Grace said at the free 1989 Golden Gate Park concert) people who watch too much TV. It's really too bad that this version of "cool" is today often thought obsolete -- I guess the hippies woke up from the surrealistic dream one day only to discover that capitalism in fact made them what they are.
Deduct a point for "Somebody To Love" and "White Rabbit," the two least interesting songs on the album, and of course the only two Airplane songs that ever made the pop charts. The Jefferson Starship played these songs when I saw them in 1982, back when they were a commercial band. Grace Slick did these songs with her first band The Great Society, before she came to the Airplane, and IMHO she did them better with that band. Try to find Great Society albums if you can, you won't be disappointed.
Imagine it's 1967. You're 17 and you walk into a local music store. You see a new album by a relatively new band on the national scene called Jefferson Airplane. You shell out the bucks for the LP out of curiosity. What awaits you when you get back to your turntable? Well, I'll tell you what. What awaits you is a great listen.....it's psychedelic, but not TOO psychedelic. It's rock, but not TOO intense or butt-kicking. It's pop, but not very schlocky at all. It's got a tinge of folk, a tinge of blues, and a decent-sized helping of Dr. Owsley's finest brew if ya know wot I mean. In short, Surrealistic Pillow is rather unique sounding. I mean, you KNOW it's Jefferson Airplane and it's obviously a San Francisco record, but nevertheless, it's brand of psychedelic pop-rock was something that not even the Airplane did the same again. It's a fairly soft and gentle listen---even the rockers don't kick it up too hard. Now, this is not to accuse the fiery guitarmanship of Jorma Kaukonen of lacking energy---it surely doesn't. However, compared to later efforts by the band, this is pretty tame stuff.
It's hard to get tamer than the ballads on here----sure, they're very mellow, but mellow doesn't equal bad. In fact, mellow equals FRIGGIN GREAT for at least two of 'em. Yeah, I mean Today and Comin' Back To Me. Both are Balin songs, which shows in their simple, yet still lovely, lovey-dovey type lyrics. It's the musicality that makes them, especially on Comin Back To Me......what a gorgeous song. For me, it's Grace's flute playing that makes it. On the other end of the scale lies Somebody To Love, which is another fab ditty. However, where CBTM is gentle and sweet, Somebody To Love is jarring and WILD. So is 3/5 Of A Mile in 10 Seconds.....whoo!
Of course, we have things that fall between the two "extremes"....for example, White Rabbit. It's got this martial sound to it, almost like it's a war cry to the youth of the nation (HA! I made a P.O.D. reference in a Jefferson Airplana review! Next thing you know, I'll be saying that the guitars go BOOM, or that Grace's flute makes certain songs feel so alive for the very first time! Ha ha ha ha! How you like me now???) I apologize for the P.O.D.-inspired rant. Since they are Christians yet involve themselves with the evil secular realm, they don't love God. Or at least that's what one high-ranking official at my school thinks. I think he's full of bull.
OK, back to the Airplane. The whole album is filled with catchy psychedelic pop/rock concoctions. And one folky guitar piece (Embryonic Journey). I guess the beauty of this one lies in its consistently nice vibe---it's either pretty enough to be nice, or it's aggressive enough to be nice. Take your pick as to which vibe you prefer. I like them both. Before I close out, I must confess a bias towards music from 1967. I still think 1967 was the best single year for music....of course, that's just me and my always subjective opinion. And this is a '67 album. Feel free to knock a point or two off if this isn't your bag.
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COMMENTS
this album when i listen to it now carries me back to quiet thought filled moments of several decades ago with the same mind satisfying rhythm and feel. the songs on this album carry you to different places, farms in countrysides, rage against a war machine, quiet brooks filled with sunbathed trees on either side, energetic chants that want you to stand up and sing or lie back and close your eyes and dream. With this album jefferson airplane reached and apex of creative and organization of music on an album making you feel fresh every time you hear it. mine is scratched in several places but i still lie back and am carried ot places of the mind and heart.
love those airplane people
danny
(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
Whereas the last album was soft and surreal, this, the third Airplane album, is loud psychedelia, with brain distortion in every trick of the studio. Now remember, a 1967 studio produced this album, so the technology isn't as advanced as today's technology, and of course they really liked playing with the stereophonic effect back then, shifting the sound from one speaker to the next, back and forth and back again. Reviewers (maybe Wilson and Alroy's Record Review) like calling this a "failed experiment," so I'll beg to differ, and claim error-free success for the Airplane's efforts. The Airplane established a wide variety of moods, freedom ("The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil"), love ("Martha"), hyperactivity ("Wild Tyme"), mesmerization ("Spare Chaynge"), celebration ("Won't You Try Saturday Afternoon"), Grace Slick intoning mumblings about James Joyce's Ulysses like a high priestess ("rejoyce").
Less witty than Surrealistic Pillow, this is nevertheless the album where Grace sings "War's good business/ So give your son/ But I'd rather have my country die for me". In Baxter's the Airplane were interested less in poetry than in inundating the senses with a kaleidoscope of sounds and evocative images, like what inundates the senses during a psilocybin experience when the serotonin receptors of one's brain are preoccupied. No, there is no virtuoso performance on this album, but it is a great album for such experiences. Here is where the world was first exposed to Jorma Kaukonen's euphoric electric guitar sound, and Jack Casady's rangy bass. Get the remastered CD version with Jeff Tamarkin's liner notes and original Airplane artwork, or get the vinyl if you can find it.
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
If After Bathing At Baxter's was the good trip, Crown Of Creation is the bad trip, and like good trippers, the Airplane people attempt to use the social decay that was supposedly around them (in the Haight district, in 1968) as a pretext for growth, for maturity. The point of this album seems to be the Airplane's realization that the world around them hasn't really grown up at all, not even by its own standards, though the bodies of the players have gone through puberty and all. Modern American society has left its participants in this sterile perpetual childhood with no arrow pointing forward, and anyway much of America was going in the wrong direction back then, what with the death of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the prolongation of the war in Vietnam, the ruination of the war on poverty, etc. This album is also about what Heidegger called "being-toward-death," only unlike Heidegger, the Airplane actually sung about the physical circumstances of death, you can tell right away from the nuclear bomb explosion that graces the album cover.
The acid ecstasies of Kaukonen's electric guitar as it shone on After Bathing At Baxter's have been replaced by varying distortions that make it sound weary, or crazy, or creepy, depending upon the song. I'm not as impressed with it as I was on After Bathing At Baxter's. Jorma's acoustic guitar is quite prominent on this album, too, esp. on "Lather," a song about grown-up babies, and "Triad," where Grace Slick sings in praise of free love. Notably absent is Grace Slick's flute-playing, one of the things that made the last two Airplane albums so pretty. Heavy philosophy is prominent throughout this album. The main songwriting conspirators, Grace and Marty and Paul and Jorma, all share the album fairly equally. It's all good, except on songs like "Ice Cream Phoenix" and "The House At Pooneil Corners" the paranoia seems kind of unprofound.
Some highlights: Grace sings this scorching and sarcastic song called "Greasy Heart" where she criticizes pretentious phonies and heavy makeup. (In Jeff Tamarkin's liner notes in the remastered CD, Grace claims the song is about herself.) Marty sings this crazy song "If You Feel" about (of course) love, only this is acid love, Jorma's guitar backup makes great use of the wah-wah pedal and the lyrics are all nonsense. Paul wrote the title track, basically a before-the-fact funereal dirge for all humankind ("Soon/ You'll obtain the stability you strive for/ In the only way that it's granted/ In a place among the fossils of our time"). No, this isn't a heavy metal album. Jorma wrote "Star Track," which seems to unify all the big themes together: "The freeway's concrete way won't show/ You where to run/ Or how to go/ And running fast/ You'll go down slow in the end." Just wait 'til global society dies an entropy death, with the further onset of the greenhouse effect and the coming energy crises. You'll listen to this album with the last energy in your car batteries.
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
This is a live concert album, recorded over concerts at the East and West Fillmore auditoriums, which used to be landmarks but exist no longer (of course). Almost everything here has been played elsewhere before. Nothing from Crown Of Creation or After Bathing At Baxter's is played on this album, but the songs they play from Surrealistic Pillow ("3/5th Of A Mile In Ten Seconds," "Somebody To Love," and "Plastic Fantastic Lover") are all played with all of the subtlety of a herd of stampeding wild horses. In Flight Log, an old anthology of Airplane tunes that I used to own back when vinyl was king, the extensive liner notes to the Flight Log album explained that this change in Airplane direction with this album was a sign of the times, a sign of the frenetic nature of 1969 when compared with the Summer of Love in 1967. (Marty Balin sings about the "Summer of Love" on the reunion album titled Jefferson Airplane, in tones that are pure Karo syrup.) Well, OK, but if I were listening to an illustration of how things were back then, I would have preferred some more new tunes on this album as opposed to remakes of the old ones. I'll take "Bear Melt," tho, it's a pretty jam, but that's it for new tunes. Also noticeably missing from this album, and from Crown Of Creation, is Grace Slick's nice work on recorder.
What IS on this album is a version of "Rock Me Baby" that is basically Hot Tuna, Jorma and Jack playing while everyone else takes a break, very erotic, and it's better than the Led Zep cover of this tune. "It's No Secret," a hot opportunity for Marty Balin to show off his vocal cords, outdoes the version on that Jefferson Airplane Takes Off album. And they do a great job with "Fat Angel," a Donovan tune from his album Sunshine Superman that is basically an ad for the Jefferson Airplane. I don't have any more to say about this album -- it's the Airplane live, it rocks, it contains not much that's new, what else is there to say?
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
This was a topical album written in a time of street protest, and some of its quality is of the "you had to be there" variety. I remember seeing a film about the 1960s (a long time ago -- I think I was an undergraduate) where they showed this enormous dancing human chain and "We Can Be Together" (the first song on this album) was playing in the background. I thought it was a blast. So there's an exciting, yet dated, quality to the music on this album. "We Can Be Together" takes its cue from the grafitti on the walls of Berkeley, California, at the time of the uprising that established People's Park. This is an album of anthems for a nation of hippies; the American flag with the tree negatived in the background is your tipoff to that fact. The album cover has lots of cool hippie humor.
I'll review each song: "We Can Be Together" is an anthem of anti-Establishment America, it starts with the verse "We are all outlaws in the eyes of America" -- a really great verse to sing BTW when you're on a political march -- and its most intense verse, "all your private property is target for your enemy/ And your enemy is we" -- belying the claim Paul Kantner (who wrote that song) made for Jeff Tamarkin's liner notes for the remastered CD -- "If people saw us as political, then that's their misconception." C'mon, Paul, if you're out there, answer me this: isn't it just that your politics have changed? How could they stay the same, it's no longer 1969 today or anything close to it. Either that or nothing you say is ever political, you're just another well-to-do rock star and we are your compliant customers, we can go that way if you want.
Gracie's comment in these same liner notes set the same tone -- "'what people have come to realize,' she said, 'is that your worst enemy is yourself. There is no us and them. It's all us. We were very naive.'" Yup, big war in Vietnam back then, liar President Nixon, COINTELPRO spied on the Movement, elites ruled America (like they still do) for exploitation and violence, oh, but we were "very naive" to believe in "us and them" back then. Oh well, that's the liner notes.
Continuing with the anthem theme: "We Can Be Together" segues seamlessly into "Good Shepherd," a traditional song here with some really great Jorma Kaukonen electric guitar, exciting use of the wah-wah pedal again, this one an anthem to communion for religious hippies perhaps. After that, "The Farm," a parodic Kantner anthem for the back-to-the-land movement, tossing psychedelic imagery into a countrified tune/ lyrics to make you laugh. "Here comes my next door neighbor, ridin' down the road/ He always looks so regal, ridin' on his toad/". Then we can hear "Hey Fredrick," an anthem to Grace Slick's unique psychedelic idea of freedom. "Turn My Life Down" is another religious-sounding song written by Jorma and sung by Marty, and that's followed by the Airplane rendition of "Wooden Ships," an anthem to escapism and the apocalypse. IMHO Crosby, Stills, and Nash do "Wooden Ships" better than the Airplane -- I think the problem is that the Jorma Kaukonen guitar is overbearing and gets in the way on the Airplane version, tho' I did like the atmospheric effects on this one.
"Eskimo Blue Day" is a Grace Slick anthem to the staying power of nature, with the famous lyric "Say it plainly/ The human name/ Doesn't mean shit to a tree." Song contains a big rock jam that gains steam like a boulder rolling down a great big hill, great tree-felling to end the song. "A Song For All Seasons" is the only released Airplane song written by Spencer Dryden the drummer, it's a silly lament of the hazards of life as a rock star. "Meadowlands," according to Jeff Tamarkin's liner notes, is Grace Slick playing the anthem of the Soviet Army on an organ. This album concludes with the title track "Volunteers," a song with an open call to revolution. Of course, for Jeff Tamarkin's liner notes Marty says "'Volunteers' wasn't a political song to start with." Have it your way, Marty. But, yup, Volunteers is an album of anthems. Deduct some points if "anthem" is not what you wanted.
I really loved "We Can Be Together" and "Good Shepherd" and "The Farm" but frankly "Hey Fredrick" was tedious at 8 1/2 minutes. At this stage in their metamorphosis the Airplane had started to use plenty of long jams of the type they did live in the song "Bear Melt" on Bless Its' Little Pointed Head, and sometimes these long jams work, and other times they don't. And this album doesn't have the combination of tunes and lyrics that allowed the albums Surrealistic Pillow, After Bathing At Baxter's, and Crown Of Creation to, each in its own way, impose a single, powerful mood and cerebral intensity upon the listener. Volunteers is still a classic. Deduct two points for incoherence, add a point for Grace Slick's nice work on recorder and piano and organ, for Nicky Hopkins (the old Rolling Stones' piano player who guest-stars here), and just for being so daring back then, as opposed to now.
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(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
Let's see, what happened between Volunteers and Bark? Cambodia was invaded, Kent State shot up, Jackson State shot up, the student movement ended, Janis Joplin died, Jimi Hendrix died, the Beatles broke up, Marty Balin quit the band. I'm sure there's more to the history than just that. Jefferson Airplane became two bands -- there was Hot Tuna, Jorma and Jack, still alive and performing today, and there were the various Paul Kantner projects (which took in the rest of the band if they wanted), of which the current incarnation of Jefferson Starship is one. The first of these projects, a science-fiction story set to a concept album titled "Blows Against The Empire," is something you really ought to get your hands on.
There are a bunch of aimless jams and lyrics devoid of meaning on this album. Oh, the musicianship is still of the high quality you can hear on the other Airplane albums, but that's part of the stopgap character of this album. Papa John Creach was brought in to play soaring violin on this album, giving it a sort of early 70s Starship feel, although we're not quite there yet -- it took the drumming of John Barbata, later on, to complete the artistic ruination of the Starship. BTW, Papa John plays an annoying violin, like a mosquito was in the studio. Jeff Tamarkin compares the three Paul Kantner songs ("When The Earth Moves Again," "Rock And Roll Island," "War Movie,") to the Paul Kantner solo project "Blows Against The Empire," but whereas "Blows" was majestic, these songs are dorky - "Rock And Roll Island" is a concept MTV would use, of course.
Oh, yeah, and there's lots of filler on this album, "Wild Turkey," "Never Argue With A German," "Thunk." "Crazy Miranda" was a bad idea of Grace's - Grace revives the cynicism of "Greasy Heart" (from the Crown Of Creation album) to criticize Crazy Miranda, who believes everything she reads. But Grace! (I wanted to say when I heard this song) Crazy Miranda READS, which is better than you can say for a lot of Americans. But there's one meaningful song here, "Third Week in the Chelsea". Its lyric: "So we go on moving trying to make this image real/ straining every nerve not knowing what we really feel/ straining every nerve and making everybody see/ that what they read in the Rolling Stone/ has really come to be/ and trying to avoid a taste of that reality" pretty much says it all about Bark. It's strained, it marks the death of the Airplane as a vehicle for "art."
If anything, my review of Bark serves to gainsay the individualist myth of the self-made artist. When the social circumstances were right, Jefferson Airplane put out "art." When they weren't right, Jefferson Airplane was two separate bands -- one of them fairly good, the other just punching the clock. When these two bands communicated with each other under those circumstances, you got Bark. In either case, social circumstances were the cause of "art," not any myth about the superiority of the (artist) Ubermensch to the rest of humankind such as one might read in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nevertheless, give this album four points for competent musicianship.
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(reviewed by Kevin Baker)
I love the Airplane. Before somebody construes this to mean that I'm attracted to liberalism (no offense, Samuel), lemme clarify. Jefferson Airplane was an awesome band who wrote some kickbutt songs that never fail to captivate me and hold my interest. A lot of people say that they're too dated and a product of the time period. The amazing thing is that when you separate the politics and times from the music, it still holds up fairly well. There's no one word that can describe the Airplane sound. At first, they sound fairly Byrds-ish, just without the soaring harmonies. Once, Grace Slick joined the band, the times were a changin', and a LOT of drugs were taken. The songwriting changed, and they became something totally unique with all sorts of music elements coming together in one gigantic LSD-laced melting pot.
Admittedly, by Volunteers, burn-out, drugs, and weird intrapersonal stuff really began to take a toll on the band. and later music (and even some of Volunteers) suffered tremendously from all the adverse circumstances. However, before then, they put out some killer tunes. Basically, 2400 Fulton Street is an anthology with holds a lot, but not all, of the JA music you'll ever need. I was a little disappointed by some of the omissions, but I will survive and just break down and buy the albums. They divide the tracks up into 4 parts---Beginnings, Psychedelia, Revolution, and Airplane Parts.
Beginnings basically covers the first two albums. In truth, their first album selections sound like poor quality Byrds tracks. However, a poor quality Byrdsong is still pretty good, so everything turns out OK. It's kind of amazing how soft most of this stuff is, even the Surrealistic Pillow selections. I think Samuel Fassbinder called that album a "soft mind-bender"....that's actually pretty dead on. Lots of little touches like flutes and recorders and acoustic guitars make for a good listen. Of course, the standout is Somebody To Love. That one's not soft at all. Rather, it's anthemic and trippy. One of my favorites. Also not to be missed---She Has Funny Cars, Comin' Back To Me, Let's Get Together (I prefer the Youngblood's version), and Embryonic Journey.
But what Jefferson Airplane collection would be complete without plenty of trippin'-out, frigged-up, acid-drenched mindblowers? It wouldn't be! That's why there's a whole section of them. Naturally, most of these songs are from After Bathing At Baxter's, which is drugged out in a major way. However, the best come not from there but from Surrealistic Pillow. Plastic Fantastic Lover and the CLASSIC White Rabbit are fabulous acid rock tunes. OK, maybe some of the best are from Baxter's. Wild Tyme, The Last Wall Of The Castle, The Ballad Of You and Me and Pooneil, and Won't You Try Saturday Afternoon are all excellent. OK, maybe Crown Of Creation turns in the best stuff, seeing as how Lather and Geasy Heart are also excellent. OK, the Airplane just did psychedelia better than anyone else. All this section is great, but......
I'm not sure if I can say that with 100% certainty about the next section, Revolution. This one has a lot of post-1969 stuff, but luckily, it's all decent. Plus, the pre-69 stuff is dynamite. The best is of course Crown Of Creation, my personal favorite Airplane song. Killer basslines, an eerie melody---ooh, it's good. The rest isn't too bad either, though I do lament the absence of The House At Pooneil Corners....spooky and insane. The live version of Volunteers is pretty good, We Can Be Together is good except for the now infamous "up against the wall" part, Rejoyce isn't much of a protest song but I like it anyways, and all the rest is decent. Oh, I nearly forgot Wooden Ships. I love it! It's an awesome anti-war song, and it kicks the butt of the CSN version, as good as it is.
The final section is a mixed bag of stuff. Standouts? Martha, Today, Triad, and Good Sheperd are all awesome, but the rest are good as well. Plus, it has the Jefferson Airplane doing two Levi commercials....odd. Overall, this is a good sampler of the Airplane (far better than the too-short Worst Of Jefferson Airplane). Get it, and then choose your own JA destiny---do ye go farther, give up, or follow just one area? It's up to you, and this is the perfect travel guide for such.
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COMMENTS
[email protected] (Samuel Fassbinder)
Dear Kevin,
Let me explain. My remark about your being attracted to liberalism pertained only to your affinity for CSN's first album, and I discussed this in Joni Mitchell's Ladies Of The Canyon album because it was Joni's most obviously liberal political statement (not to mention being a musical love letter to CSN), and with Joni I wanted to discuss the concept of "liberal music," what it looks like, what would characterize it. So it was an aside. Now, to my mind, CSN were famously liberal, given their lyrics and given Crosby's book "Stand And Be Counted" and given the enormous number of benefit concerts for liberal causes they've done. Would you pay to see CSN at a "No Nukes" concert?
Now, the Airplane. Hmmm. Your love of Jefferson Airplane would seem to prompt all sorts of questions, the first one being: what do you think about the hippie drug culture of the 1960s? After all, you DID give this double album, a retrospective of the Airplane's most LSD-drenched period, a 10, and those people were heads for sure. What do you say to the conservatives who have staked their careers on hunting down folks like Paul Kantner (who still smokes marijuana, apparently, though they've all cooled off since '69) and tossing them in jail for 25 years to life while confiscating their possessions using Civil War-era forfeiture laws? After all, none of those old Airplane albums would have happened if the cops and the judges had been doing their jobs (not to mention the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, etc., they were all busted and they all got off because they had rich white lawyers. The only high-profile rock music victim of the drug laws that comes to mind is James Brown, and he served a prison term for cocaine in a later era.) Have you tried pot? LSD? Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms? What do you think? It is duly noted that today's political culture does allow one to be "conservative" while adopting "liberal" positions on drug legalization; William F. Buckley for instance.
What do you think of the Airplane's most audacious political statements? When Gracie sings "War's good business/ So give your son/ But I'd rather have my country die for me" in "Rejoyce," did you think of her as being unpatriotic? After all, there was that "conservative" theory, popular at the time of After Bathing At Baxter's release, that the US could have "won the war" against North Vietnam if the public had allowed LBJ to escalate the US effort sufficiently. Do you agree with that theory? What did you think about "We are all outlaws in the eyes of America," beginning "We Can Be Together"? Bunch of criminals, I say. If you are "separating the politics and the times from the music," do you give the politics and the times a 10 as well as the music? I would.
At any rate, I agree with much of your review, it was fun to read like most of your reviews are. I'd argue that the better version of Gracie's "Somebody To Love" was not on Surrealistic Pillow but on one of the old "Great Society" albums, by her old band before she joined the Airplane. I'm glad you liked "Martha" and "Good Shepherd," two of my favorites. In my current music searches I tend to look for stuff like that, and in that vein I will be reviewing two more Fairport Convention albums soon. No, they're not political.
[email protected] (Kevin Baker)
Well, that didn't take you long! You know, for someone who I seem to disagree so much with, we certainly do seem to be the chattiest reviewers here. Oh well, I have a communist friend who is the nicest guy in the world, so apparently opposites do attract sometimes. At any rate, no I wouldn't pay to see CSN at a No Nukes concert because while I (like Charles Krauthammer) do believe in reducing our nuclear arsenal and investing in post-cold war necessities militarily speaking, I don't believe in total nuclear disarmament. Also, there's no way China or Russia would disarm even if we did, so it wouldn't serve much of a point.
I hate drugs and will likely never "experiment"; I like my head the way it is. However, if other people want to desecrate their bodies, it's their body and not mine. I'd support legalization if it could be controlled and regulated by the government like alcohol is to reduce risk to others. I hate the fact that the government has used the "drug war" as an excuse to do all sorts of stupid seizures and raids. I like their music because it sounds cool, and Jorma Kaukonen is a cool guitarist. Plus, Grace Slick has an awesome voice, and Jack Casady is one of the best American bassists ever.
Ah, so now we bring up Vietnam. America's biggest error ever, at least on the international level. I don't think we could have won, and the fact that it met with such a lack of popular support should have hinted to LBJ that just maybe he'd goofed by sending troops in. I do think the main problem of the era was that instead of losing faith in the government and reviling it, people began to revile America and what America stands for. The beauty of our country is that you can do so openly and it not be seen as criminal under the law as interpreted constitutionally. BTW, I only rate music, not epochs, especially ones I didn't live during.
If I ever see the Great Society's cd that was put out, I'll get it. Thank you for the compliment about my reviews; I appreciate that. Looking forward to the Fairport Convention reviews; are they the British folk band with Sandy Denny?
REVIEWS:
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released by Paul Kantner
(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
I have no idea where Nick Karn is going to put this release on his webpage -- on the Airplane page, on the Starship page, or on a separate page just for Paul Kantner releases, if anyone ever finds it there. There's a case to be made for each choice -- Blows Against The Empire comes at a time when the Airplane was still alive, and would have been put out as an Airplane album except for the fact that Jorma and Jack were skiing in Scandinavia at the time (and Marty Balin, as I recall, quit the band). The album itself has "Paul Kantner/ Jefferson Starship" written on its front cover, although this album sounds like nothing in the Jefferson Starship repertoire -- there's certainly no Craig Chaquico guitar or *cringe* John Barbata drumming on this album. The remastered release credits the album to "Paul Kantner." Paul did run the show on this one.
Paul has certainly done plenty of stuff since he shut down the old Jefferson Starship. What I remember reading was, that sometime way back in the 1980s, the old Jefferson Starship had voted at a band meeting to go on tour as a backup band for Journey, and at that point Kantner decided he couldn't sell out any further, so he quit the band and had his lawyer send them a letter telling the rest of the band that the name "Jefferson Starship" was his property. Or something like that. At any rate, sometime after that, the new version of "Jefferson Starship," which Paul calls "Jefferson Starship/ The Next Generation," is better as a cover band for old Airplane stuff than for anything new they write today. Basically it's Kantner, Balin, Casady, and some session guys, with Diana Mangano replacing Grace Slick on the female lead vocals.
At any rate, this 1970 release is a unique album -- Paul got Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, and David Crosby (among a star-studded cast of thousands) to contribute to this one, and it was nominated for a Hugo award (that's right, a Hugo) for Best Science-Fiction Album. The science-fiction theme of this one is powerful, but it develops slowly. The other main theme is the try-harder-to-celebrate earnestness developed through the demand for "Free minds/ Free bodies/ Free dope/ Free music" that permeated the hippie consciousness of 1970. It's in books such as James Michener's "Kent State" and (I think) Sara Davidson's "Loose Change." I suppose Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book" counts as a memory of that period of history, though it's more like a manual for anarchists.
After the killings at Kent State and at Jackson State, apparently, all of America shifted into reverse. The counter-culture went into full retreat, setting up communes in the backwoods. Protest, and indeed radical thought, on many of the Nation's college campuses was essentially over by the beginning of the 1970-1971 school year. Nixon invaded Cambodia while lying to the public about it (in fact, the carpet-bombing of Cambodia started in '69, but that only surfaced as one of Nixon's crimes during the Watergate hearings). Troops were brought back from Vietnam, then, without being replaced. Blows Against The Empire was released in October of '70, its lyrics and tune imprinting a last-stand defiance and a blown-mind consciousness. Try to find the vinyl version of this one, esp. if you have a vinyl player but even if you don't -- Kantner released this album along with a book full of stuff from his and Grace Slick's notebooks, drawings and poetry.
The first song, "Mau Mau/ Amerikon," is a shouted song apparently intended to be played at a demonstration or a free concert in Golden Gate Park. It's lyrics are hippie-political -- "Sign me up as a diplomat/ My only office is the park". Some of the lyrics were intended to mess with the head of then-President Richard M. Nixon. Paul shouts, "Hey Dick/ Whatever you think of us is totally irrelevant/ Both to us, now, and to you"....
After than, there's a weird song called "The Baby Tree," courtesy of the pen of folkie Rosalie Sorrells. The hippie theme resurfaces on "Let's Go Together," which puts out the main theme of the whole album, "Wave goodbye to Amerika/ Say hello to the garden." (Comments, Kevin?) "Let's Go Together" re-echoes and updates "Wooden Ships" as another piece of escapism. "A Child is Coming" is about Gracie's pregnancy, and Paul/ Grace's intention to hide the identity of their child from the "files in their numbers game" of the US Government. I love it when rock stars have the ganas to put out stuff like that. It ends with a prayer to hippie optimism -- "It's getting better/ brighter," over and over again...
"Sunrise" starts the science fiction part of this album by signaling the entry of some trippy distorted guitar, and Gracie's complaint about "civilized man" and "two thousand years of your God-damned glory." "Hijack" continues in symphonic vein, overviewing the hippie movement, and the disasters of the '60s, and laying out the main plot: some hippies are going to hijack a starship, and spread their lifestyles across the universe. No, not the "Across The Universe" on the Let It Be album, rather, across the real universe. Great pounding piano chords by Grace Slick, winding down the tune to a spacey backdrop with special effects. Between this and "Wooden Ships" Kantner could have commissioned the writing of some real science fiction, it's too bad he didn't. From there we glide softly into "Have You Seen The Stars Tonite," one of the high points of David Crosby's career as a composer, very pretty and inspiring, more of Gracie's great piano chords in the foreground.
At the end of that song, Kantner inserts the sound of rockets roaring, although maybe it's just a vacuum cleaner, the one Jeff Tamarkin mentions in the liner notes to the CD version. We blast off into "Starship," an attempt to push the adventure into the Other Realm, the one experienced after death. Great jamming by Jerry Garcia, vocals by Kantner and Slick. "Spilling out of the steel glass/ Gravity gone from the cage/ A million pounds gone from your heavy mass/ All the years gone from your age." A vision of the ultimate trip, one where you don't come back because you've become something else.
Apparently Kantner's band still plays this stuff now and then. There was a sequel to Blows Against The Empire, titled Paul Kantner Planet Earth Rock And Roll Orchestra, put out in 1982, but Paul couldn't get anyone from the Dead or CSN to participate so he had Jefferson Starship perform his tunes under that name. The result was underwhelming, though I'll admit that the Kantner album was at least as good as anything Jefferson Starship ever put out. That isn't saying anything, though. On the other hand, I heard this album, the original, and moved into a forest with a garden, definitely one of the high points of my existence. I don't know where to deduct points from this one. You could pick on "Mau Mau/ Amerikon," saying (like Rolling Stone said I think) that it sounded like a rehearsal session, I suppose, or you could pick on something else, the hillbilly elements in Kantner's sound or Kantner's earnest blathering or something. It's just that I wouldn't. The mood sways from anthemic to pretty to earnest to spacy and back again, throughout.
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COMMENTS
[email protected] (The Bakers)
How did I know I'd pop up again? To address your direct question, my comment basically mirrors one in my 2400 Fulton Street comment---it was an unsettling time for everybody in America, and a lot of people lost faith in America as a great nation for one reason or another. Take it from someone who used to be like that (thought not in the 60s, seeing as how I'm only 16). National crises like Vietnam or Kent State (or the impeachment of Slick Willy in my case---that was what convinced me we need less government involvement in people's lives) can upset people tremendously and cause them to have some extremist views. That's what losing faith in a nation does to people. Coming as one who knows about it, it is a painful time and one in which escape is what you desire, whether it be from Nixon or Clinton, war or "politics as usual." I can relate to that wanting to escape America. Now, my dislike and hate has been supplanted with a zealous desire to (after fulfilling God's call on my life to be a missionary in Romania of one sort or another) return to the US and go into politics in my later life with the intent of being the total opposite of what politicians have become; spineless, faithless, belief-less, and brainless servants of a party.
As for the record itself, I haven't heard it, but if it's up to JA standards, I'll be buying it first chance I get. BTW, what do ypu think of the Byrds?
[email protected] (Samuel Fassbinder)
Dear Kevin,
Now, I can understand your concern with current events, and I deeply respect your right to form an opinion through their analysis; but I do find your comparison of "national crises like Vietnam or Kent State (or the impeachment of Slick Willy in my case" to appear somewhat ludicrous. The impeachment of Slick Willy was a last-ditch publicity stunt of a Congress whose "Contract With America" was at an impasse. It _wasn't_ a national crisis -- it wasn't going to lead to a conviction anyway, since the Republicans didn't have the strength in the Senate to pull it off, and in fact, it didn't even serve its purpose as a publicity stunt, and as evidence of this we need only note that Clinton's popularity in the opinion polls actually _went up_ during the impeachment proceedings.
Vietnam, on the other hand, drastically overheated the American economy (leading to the crises of the '70s), and brought the Nation quite close to civil war in '68, putting 50,000 Americans (and two million Vietnamese) in their graves for (among other things) the right of the good folks at Dow Chemical to manufacture napalm at government expense. Aren't those your daddy's employers? The publicity surrounding Kent State, furthermore, inspired America's older generations to hate every college student in the nation, if only for a brief moment in history -- please check out James Michener's book "Kent State" for a deeper understanding. Look, I'm not trying to say anything about your brains, your faith, your beliefs, or your spine. I _do_, however, want to give you my understanding of historical perspective. There's a reason why the '60s and '70s need to be studied carefully -- they're _pivotal_. (And it's not a conceit, either -- I was just a _little kid_ during most of the period in question.)
Now, for your music question: "As for the record itself, I haven't heard it, but if it's up to JA standards, I'll be buying it first chance I get. BTW, what do ypu think of the Byrds?" Well I _did_ give Blows Against The Empire a 10, so clearly I liked it a lot. It's better than Volunteers, which I rated too highly. The main difference, you'll hear, is that instead of Jorma on guitar there's a lot of Jerry Garcia, whose distinctive style is hard to miss. As for the Byrds, sorry, I really haven't taken much of an interest in their lyrics, melodies, or voices. They did a bunch of somewhat enjoyable Dylan covers, as I recall; but so did Joan Baez, and I like her voice better than that of McGuinn or Hillman. And I'm not a big Dylan fan. I used to own Fifth Dimension; I was really only entertained by "Wild Mountain Thyme," IMHO the best song on the album, and "Eight Miles High." The opening instrumental on "Eight Miles High," btw, was composed in imitation of John Coltrane's "India," on the Impressions album. BTW: what do you think of Coltrane, esp. the quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones?
[email protected] (The Bakers)
I wasn't comparing the Impeachment to Vietnam, nor do I desire to go into my thoughts over that part of my development as a human. That was a cruddy year anyways, and watching everybody in Washington from the White House to Congress to the courts act like children did not help my faith in the ability of government.
And yes, the 60s and 70s are vital to understanding the US as it is now; it's the generation who saw their friends and family die in Vietnam that's running the nation now, and they're making the same mistakes LBJ and Nixon did. Heard about Colombia lately? I'll bet dollars to pesos that we'll be fighting there in 10 years time. We're already coming dangerously close. I will say I dislike people trying to blame Vietnam on American businesses---that war was caused by too much interventionism and LBJ's sick desire to look like a Commie-fighter while still trying to focus on the Great Society. It's hard to focus on Medicare when little places like Ia Drang and Khe Sahn are sending home American boys in pine boxes.
At any rate, I'm in the process of getting all of Blows Against The Empire, and I haven't really heard much John Coltrane.
So little has been written about the Blows Against the Empire in such a positive way as Mr. Fassbinder's review. And its a shame because Blows.. is a genuine classic. Id like to add to his review, the stunning vocal shadings and colouring by Grace Slick. On " A Child is Coming" she makes the song etheral. and her piano work is outstanding. side 2 is kinda like abbey road in the sense its a continuous song cycle. "Starship" displays the band peaking. a definite vibe was there and the musicians interplay with each other is cosmic. Jerry Garcia;s guitar on that track is as good as anything he did with the Dead! any one who hasnt heard this album, and love the airplane, must get this album....pronto. on vinyl. it isnthard to find at least in los angeles. and i cant resisit and buy em when they are clean. i probably own 5 or 6 now! (well for a couple of bucks i get the great arwork the booklet and an album that is a 10+)
released by Paul Kantner & Grace Slick
(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
This album has one of the greatest album covers of all time: a sun near the horizon, dark foreboding clouds shadowing it, and in the middle of the ocean as it extends to the horizon, two hands come up from the water holding a very young baby. The baby is Kantner & Slick's recently-born China Kantner Slick. If you get the vinyl, there's an awesome lyrics booklet in it, just like with Blows Against The Empire.This one is more uneven than Blows, it's got a lot of songs that are unconnected except that they convey the feelings that Paul and Grace had for the world back in 1971, they had moved to Bolinas and were commuting long distances to the studios in San Francisco, they just had a kid, and the Airplane was dragging its sorry existence all the way to the end of their last record contract with RCA. Jack and Jorma had Hot Tuna going and Paul and Grace were trying to decide what to do next. Marty and Spencer dropped out for that period. The death of Janis Joplin contributed to Marty's departure. Sunfighter came out two months after Bark, in November of 1971. Sunfighter is thus in that twilight era before the formation of Jefferson Starship and their first album Dragon Fly, and neither that album nor that group excites enough interest in me, as of yet, to prompt a review. And they probably never will.
Soon, I will post an article explaining my convictions about the connection between politics and music. Here and now, I will just speculate on how the changes precipitating the '70s affected Paul and Grace, since they composed this album. At any rate, the political reality for Paul and Grace was this: as the world of the '60s was being replaced by the world of the post-'60s, as the period of economic optimism that extended from 1948 to the beginning of the '70s ground to a halt, Paul and Grace put out another album with some depressing concepts in it, like Crown Of Creation, only more about nature and nature-lovers (plenty of that in Bolinas) and less about nuclear war, LSD, or philosophy.
"Silver Spoon" was about Grace's tweaking the noses of the vegans who lived in Bolinas at that time -- "why not eat human flesh," Grace opines. A thoroughly obnoxious song -- you may wish to fast-forward on the CD-player. Maybe it was funny -- once. OK, Gracie's piano is on it, so that makes it listenable. Barely. "Diana Part 1" is about a woman named Diana Oughton, one of the Weathermen, who died in March of 1970 when a bomb exploded in an apartment as she was building it. Jeff Tamarkin's liner notes (to the CD version) explain the context. "Sunfighter" has an environmental message -- "no more room/ On this planet to grow". It guest stars the Tower of Power horn section and the Edwin Hawkins Singers. I like it. "Titanic" is a sound-effect foreboding of things to come. "Look At The Wood" is another absurd tribute to rural life, much in the spirit of "The Farm" of Volunteers' fame. "When I Was A Boy I Watched The Wolves" is a romanticization of the wild with a great lead guitar by Jerry Garcia. "Million" is about Woodstock and its idealism, it's got to be, it's of course also about living in a communal household in San Francisco. Something worth pondering.
"China" is Grace's love for her baby. The beginning is pretty but the end has obnoxious fanfares. "Earth Mother" is another environmental song, "Once the earth was a garden/ It gave us all we need/ Then it grew so barren/ All because of greed." The tune is more of that hillbilly stuff that Wilson and Alroy find so tiresome on the Airplane's Long John Silver, another record I won't review yet. "Diana Part 2" is the conclusion to "Diana Part 1," "Universal Copernican Mumbles" is electronic filler, "Holding Together" is a long, fun, two-chord jam with Kantner's science-fiction lyrics. More great Grace Slick piano chords! More great Jerry Garcia guitar licks! This is the only Kantner science fiction stuff outside of Blows Against The Empire that I can groove to. Apparently they culled this jam from 25 minutes to seven -- I'd like to hear the whole 25 minutes.
The songs on this one don't seem to have any order or concept behind them, and you're likely to disagree with some of them regardless of your bent for music; thematically, they don't seem to have an order either. This album is, I think, the only place you'll hear any of these songs. I checked JAbase, the record of Airplane/ Starship sets at http://www.mv.com/ipusers/owsley/airplane -- There's practically nothing of Sunfighter played at Airplane concerts! And I don't remember reading any of this stuff in the Starship/ TNG ("Jefferson Starship - The Next Generation") setlists either! This has caused me to suspect that Kantner has disowned this album. It's really too bad if my suspicions are founded. I still find the songs on this album intriguing.
OK, reviewing the big concepts. Much of Sunfighter is a "celebration of the wild" or an "ecological warning," but not "China" or "Holding Together" or "Million." In fact, this album seems to be all over the place. I was going to give this a 6 because even though it's all listenable, its scattered, disorganized songs and their mostly unmemorable tunes mark it out as a 6. Come on, folks, isn't Gracie's voice on the Sunfighter track quite off-key and monotone? But then again, it _is_ better than Country Joe and the Fish's Together album, my standard for a pre-1973 "6" album. It's mostly better on the basis of Jerry Garcia's guitar and Grace Slick's piano. So I'll give it a 7, even though it's not as good as, say, the Pretenders' ¡Viva El Amor! which I gave a 7. Actually, I have the Airplane's Volunteers overrated -- it deserves a 7 too. I like giving albums 7s. Hmmm, I better watch that.
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REVIEWS:
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released by Grace Slick
(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)
Manhole is one of Grace Slick's four solo albums, the first and probably the best of them. It was recently rereleased on a British import CD that you can find at the major Internet music addresses. This is a transitional work, for a transitional time in the history of pop music, between the dynamic '60s and the affirmative '70s. Grace's old band, the Jefferson Airplane, had pretty much disintegrated by 1973, and her new band, the Jefferson Starship, had not quite yet come into being, that event waiting for 1974 to happen. In this transitional time, a revolving operation called the "Planet Earth Rock & Roll Orchestra" came into being, and all sorts of new people begin to enter the music of two composing Airplane alumni, Paul Kantner and Grace Slick -- so in albums like Kantner and Slick's (1971) Sunfighter we have guest appearances from (Grateful Dead's) Jerry Garcia and (Quicksilver Messenger Service's) David Freiberg. This album is like that -- lots of guest appearances, a smorgasbord of creative output. The post-1960s trajectory of Jefferson Airplane/ Jefferson Starship was congealing at the time of Manhole's writing, and you can listen to it happening here.
The title "Manhole," according to Jeff Tamarkin (who wrote the liner notes), came out of Grace's calling herself a "cunt" in an antagonistic response to the feminism of her neighbors. In her autobio "Somebody to Love?", Grace associates feminism with a suspicion of sex and sexual freedom -- thus in disliking feminism she seems to want to affirm trust in men as opposed to distrust, which is also you hear in songs like "Across The Board" in the album Baron von Tollbooth and the Chrome Nun. In a similar vein, the music in Manhole, like the music of most post-Airplane Airplane members, is generally affirmative in tone, lots of major chords and affirmations of goodness in the lyrics. Even so, Manhole retains the claims to artistic dignity of the Airplane and of the music of the transition period before the (early) Starship.
You can hear this throughout the first incarnation of Jefferson Starship (before Kantner reorganized it in the '80s), too, though without the artistic flair. I suppose the affirmative tone of Starship music was a '70s reaction to the scarier aspects of the history of the '60s, Vietnam and all that. There was a general non-incorporation of the hard edges of punk and New Wave in their music, in contrast to hard-edged Airplane albums such as Crown of Creation (the high point of Airplane seriousness) put out in the '60s when Airplane members dared to put a nuclear explosion on the album cover and write songs of similar tenor into the album itself. Go ahead, listen to Crown< and then compare it with anything the '70s Starship put out. You'll hear a difference. Albums of the transition period, like Manhole, stand between the two extremes, on the border between the musical experimentation and art-music that was, and the alliance between easy listening and hard rock that was to come.
There's a brief 37 minutes and 43 seconds of music on this album, only six songs. The beginning track, "Jay," is short and very mellow, reminiscent of much "Planet Earth Rock & Roll Orchestra" stuff. The next track is the "Theme from the movie 'Manhole'," orchestral theme music from a nonexistent movie. 'Twas Grace's ambition to compose something like this, tho' a movie would have been too much. Fifteen minutes, and the tune to this one isn't all that memorable, tho' not unpleasant. However: a song with images of sex in zero-gee. Dreams of flying. Lots of made-up Spanish. A steady and powerful stream of dreamlike images sung by Grace in her sharp voice with orchestral string section backup alternating with John Barbata's mainstream drumming, Craig Chaquico's mainstream guitar solos, Grace's sonorous piano chords. There's nothing like it. The next song "Come Again? Toucan" is a song about being misunderstood, and I guess about Grace and her famous big mouth, capable of saying anything to anyone. The music is gentle, swinging pop with hooks. Contains the album's most memorable (& best) melody -- very much pop music.
"It's Only Music" is even more mundane than "Come Again? Toucan" -- it has as lead vocal David Freiberg, lyrics by Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, self-referential and lightly poetic: "If you try to grab on too tight/ or try to read too much into it/ You know it's only music/ don't try too hard/ it will come to you," as it says. "Better Lying Down" is a blues with Grace-written lyrics about sex, 'nuff said. "Epic (#38)" is orchestral again, this time with Paul Kantner (!) writing and singing lyrics and tune. This is an anthem that makes its point ("the latest in a long line of Kantner invocations for the world to come together and practice love," as Tamarkin says in the liner notes) by impressing the listener with different musical motifs, rather than with a catchy melody or complex lyrics. We hear an orchestra, followed by bagpipes (Craig Chaquico guitar in the background), followed by rock with strings, with lots of changes in arrangement. Two breaks for silence in the middle. A (mostly) beautiful song with one prominent moment of profundity: "And if you think we've come nowhere at all/ think about where we were just ten years ago/ All of us most everybody lookin' just looking/ for a hero." That lyric blew me away, but it's a small part of Manhole, an album that speaks largely through arrangements and images. Still, this album is one of the most experimental moments in the history of Grace Slick & Company and is to be treasured as such. I gave Sunfighter a 7, I'll give this one a 7 too.
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