Jefferson Airplane

Easily my favorite vocalist of that group. Grace tends toward stridency and Paul couldn't sing a lick. His was a fine, blue eyed soul voice. Besides the obvious JA material, i always liked, nay loved his mid to late 70s JStarship tunes also. And even his solo hit Hearts, which would make a fine song for Al Green himself!

Went down into the crowd to try to stop things at Altamont and got punched

Not only that, it looks like he got shoved off the stage @ around 4:40 in the clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLWhRDkJSWE

I love his voice, yeah. The combination of his and Slick's really makes some of the early Jefferson Starship stuff for me.

Seems like the world would have had a lot fewer people had "Miracles" not been written.

It's an amazing song, the way it builds and swells, and yeah the sexiness of it. Very unique. I remember precisely where I was when I first heard it and probably so do a lot of people

Today and With Your Love are my faves. eerie transcendent power of love.

Old enough that I bought Spitfire on release, just as I was beginning to love the Airplane via Worst Of.

After Bathing at Baxters is yer man innit.
Quite quite scrumptuous.

Long John Silver is a really solid album... sick guitar, great songs throughout.

Stash box 4 ever!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5b/Jaljs.jpg

I bought a vinyl copy a couple months ago; the older clerk who checked me out paused to show his millennial employees the jacket photo of the weed and told them how lucky they were to not have to deal with such dirty, earthy pot.

Lol. A teachable moment

Listening to their Woodstock set now....

"All right, friends, you have seen the heavy groups... now you will see morning maniac music."

https://www.grammy.com/sites/com/files/styles/news_detail_header/public/jefferson_airplane_woodstock-51240095_1.jpg

the 21-minute performance of “Wooden Ships”... 🤯

"All right, friends, you have seen the heavy groups... now you will see morning maniac music."

The previous night's/that early morning's lineup was (in order) Creedence, Sly, the Who, and then the Airplane. Pretty decent stretch of entertainment.

I didn't seriously get into (or even hear a whole album by) Airplane until a year ago, and then suddenly I couldn't listen to anything but Baxter's, Crown, and Volunteers for weeks on end.

always had the toughest time finding my way into these fools but man i'm fucking pretty hard w Volunteers.

That’s the gateway.

dig it. also

I am listening to Volunteers and I'm here to tell you that Nicky Hopkins is THE SECRET WEAPON.

― Curious George (1/6 Scale Model) (Rock Hardy),

otm

watched some clips of Slick on Letterman in the early-mid 80s. honestly she does seem cool af

man, I was otm in the oughts, what happened

Hey Fredrick and DCBA-25 are my top 2

There's this commercial for a cruise line I see a lot right now that uses "White Rabbit." Very disorienting--I still find "White Rabbit" to be an audacious and hypnotic song, and the commercial just glides by the lines about logic and proportion and feeding your head. I don't get it, unless they hand out hallucinogenics on this particular cruise line.

They should’ve used “Wooden Ships.”

i liek planes

Seaplanes...subaquarian boatcraft.

Baxters is yer man. Or anything live in 1968. I think they started jamming live sometime in 67 and progressively got better over that year. But were playing possibly too fast by 1969.
So 68 is peak them live for me. I think the same year is true for QMS and the Dead were quite good that year too. Also the Big Brother & the Holding Co live from that year is pretty great. Not sure who else. Maybe it's just peak ballroom in general, people having somewhat improved in playing over the previous year and some members changed for other bands. QMS got rid of Jimmy and Grateful Dead gained Micky Hart.
Airplane had pretty stable membership from late 66 to late 69. Think that later date is when Dryden goes and Covington joins though could be 70.
Only recently realised that Covington was only around for one lp before being replaced by Barbata. I find Covington a bit plodding and heavy handed after Dryden being dextrous and sublime,like.

On the topic of live 68 stuff, I had the luck to discover/watch a kinescope recording of an Airplane appearance on the Tonight Show from early 1968 at the Paley Center in NYC when I visited last year. It's part of an undated compilation of various 60s band appearances from the show, and when I talked to one of the curators about trying to dig up the exact date to help them, they didn't seem interested. This is the listing:

https://www.paleycenter.org/collection/item/?q=jefferson&p=1&item=B:59554

At the beginning, Carson says: “Jefferson Airplane is one of the most important and influential rock groups around. Originally from San Francisco, they’ve got a big sound, as everybody in Rockefeller Center found out this afternoon when they were running through this. They will be appearing Friday and Saturday night um, where at, I don’t believe I have it here... (Grace and Paul say “Fillmore” off camera) oh, yeah I’ve got it here, Fillmore East, so if you’re in the New York area you might want to drop over, would you welcome please, Jefferson Airplane!”

The performance is live and it kills. The set is really, really weird, with a rocking horse on the stage, a brass bed and lots of beads, random 'hip' junk etc. They open with a really slow version of Today, half the band hidden in the shadows wearing shades. They segue right into Somebody to Love and Grace is in top form, baiting the audience, saying "pick out the guy next to you, get somebody to love - what, is he too fat?". She's also wearing a military jacket with a grenade pinned to the pocket, as seen here:

https://www.gettyimages.ca/detail/news-photo/american-rock-singer-grace-slick-the-lead-vocalist-of-the-news-photo/2996509

There's actually audio floating around of this, mistakenly labeled as coming from the Jonathan Winters show - Crown of Creation at the end is from the Smothers Brothers show:

https://ia801203.us.archive.org/17/items/JeffersonAirplane1968JonathanWintersShowLosAngelesCA/JeffersonAirplane1968JonathanWintersShowLosAngelesCA.mp3?cnt=0

Anyways, as there's pretty much no chance of this ever being 'released' unfortunately, I'd definitely recommend going over to see it if you get a chance.

They played the Fillmore East May 3 and 4 (Fri/Sat), 1968 so the Tonight Show spot would've been just prior

man, I was otm in the oughts, what happened

better to be otm then not, than never to be otm at all is what i say.

dig it. also

/I am listening to Volunteers and I'm here to tell you that Nicky Hopkins is THE SECRET WEAPON.

― Curious George (1/6 Scale Model) (Rock Hardy), /

otm

Not sure this has been posted before, but if ye've never seen the Goddard-filmed rooftop concert in NYC 1968, it is awesome. Jack Cassidy is the coolest ever.

https://youtu.be/vuwMEiNg3B8

jack & jorma (and grace obv) look cool as shit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYsQJIdgApY

Get you there on time.

Man this is so good. The whole band, everyone's in sync and fired up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9CVLVevm4E

OTM. I used to limit my Airplane appreciaton but once I checked out some live stuff my head exploded.

Still way into Sweeping Up the Spotlight. May put it now.

I agree, their appearance in Monterey Pop is great. (The whole film also encapsulates everything good about the '60s counterculture, catching it early on when it still looked promising and utopian. It's still my favorite concert documentary outside of Stop Making Sense.)

The expanded CD of Bless Its Pointed Little Head is also recommended. I'm actually not a complete convert of the band - they're more or less a time capsule wholly representative of that era for reasons good and bad - but they could put on a great show and Monterey Pop and Bless Its Pointed Little Head are probably the best examples of that. Otherwise, the only studio LP I find wholly satisfying is Surrealistic Pillow (mono mix is ideal, MFSL's SACD is excellent and I got it for only $15).

An imperfect vehicle for sure, but for those couple of blazing years they were pretty special. And I agree about Monterey Pop, it's right on the cusp — documenting the scene and also documenting in real time the commodification of the scene. Such a great movie.

Absolutely. That run of albums from Surrealistic Pillow through Volunteers really is special, and even if three of those LP's feel a bit flawed and uneven to me, they're still a fascinating listen. ("Volunteers" was probably the first Airplane song I listened to long before I heard anything else, most likely because of the Forrest Gump soundtrack. I thought it was great and still enjoy it quite a bit.)

The band was probably my first real introduction to San Francisco in the psychedelic era, and as a kid growing up away from the city in the Midwest, it was like Mars, completely alien to anything I was familiar with and probably the kind of world that would've scared the shit out of my parents. They may be a time capsule, but I don't think time capsules are necessarily a bad thing - their best work can be pretty great simply for freezing that time on record and making it sound alive and exciting rather than forgotten.

Long John Silver is a really solid album... sick guitar, great songs throughout.

I found it mostly lackluster; you can argue with the slickness of Jefferson Starship, but by 1973 they needed a change from these desultory, hookless loose jams coated in non-stop lead guitar. They'd been pursuing that style since Volunteers and it was used up.

I mean to check out Baron von Tollbooth & the Chrome Nun to see where it falls in the Airplane/Starship continuum.

I love these guys 90% of the time, but I went to listen to a concert of theirs at Wolfgang's Vault and thought it was the most horriblest shit in the world. I like them a lot better in the studio than live.

― Rock Hardy, Friday, September 14, 2007 8:52 PM (fifteen years ago)

The Monterey "High Flyin' Bird" tipsy posted is good but I still agree with 2007 me. Balin and Slick wrestle control away from the instrumentalists onstage and unbalance the performance.

I like planes

Long John Silver is pretty bad. Even the “best” song, “Eat Starch Mom,” is basically a rewrite of “Plastic Fantastic Lover.”

"Alexander the Medium" would be the one song I'd save.

That one to me just sounds like a slightly tweaked/improved version of “When the Earth Moves Again,” from the previous album (which was itself just a degraded carbon copy of “We Can Be Together”).

I love this band, but it’s hard to think of a better example of “spent creative energies” than those two post-Volunteers LPs (notwithstanding the incomparably bitchin’ “Law Man”).

It’s odd they never put “High Flyin’ Bird” on any of their main albums, bc that’s gotta be one of their hottest tracks.

Yeah pretty odd. IIRC they recorded a version of it for their debut (with Signe Toly Anderson on vocals and Skip Spence on drums), but they left it off the album. (The outtake was eventually released in 1974 on Early Flight.) They could've at least re-recorded it for a B-side or something.

xp But yeah, no getting around that steep decline, one that's sadly reflected in any compilation that tries to cover the whole lifespan of the band. I'm not a Jefferson Starship fan, but I can't say their work after Volunteers made a great case for them to continue on.