Jefferson Airplane

Classic though White Rabbit and Somebody to Love may be, they fall easily into that category of songs that, once they lose their initial, fresh power, never regain it. Grace Slick oversings and I cringe now at the very thought of it. And that's Pillow spoiled.

up against tha wall, muthafucka!

aw c'mon they're not that bad

i went back and listened to Takes Off/Surrealistic/Baxters- a pretty solid run right there, for any band of the day. granted, there's some filler-fodder, but i mean, c'mon! it WAS the 60's fer christ's sake!

that said, Skippy shoulda stayed and played some gtr!! JA coulda had 'Hey, Grandma', 'Omaha', and any number of Skip tunes had they let him hang around...

We are all outlaws in the eyes of America
In order to survive we steal cheat lie forge fuck hide and deal
We are obscene lawless hideous dangerous dirty violent and young
But we should be together
Come on all you people standing around
Our life's too fine to let it die and
We should be together
All your private property is
Target for your enemy
And your enemy is
We
We are forces of chaos and anarchy
Everything they say we are we are
And we are very
Proud of ourselves

I keep harping on it but After Bathing at Baxter's is a total mindfuck of a guitar-oriented psych album. If someone is into psychedelia but disses the Airplane then he/she ain't really into psychedelia.

Was is Slick writing the lyrics for "We Should Be Together" and similar Yippie stuff, or Kantner? I have always had in mind that it was mainly Kantner, but I have no idea why, and I haven't bothered to do any actual research.

"she's conscious of this" -- that's the nub, isn't it? I do like those WSBT lyrics, and a bunch of the other revolutionary stuff on Volunteers and Blows Against The Empire, but it's always been a sort of guilty pleasure: reminders of my simpler, dumber youth and all that. I never had the sense that they were in any way self-conscious about their ironies; in fact, some of what I love about those lyrics is that they just go all in with no evidence of adult hesitation.

QuantumNoise may be confusing self-consciousness about their own confusion with the attitude I think was far more characteristic (at least during the 18-24 months when all these songs were written): absolute moral certainty that whatever replaced The System after The System was smashed would be beautiful, and better. It was for the ineffectual Old Left types to debate the details of the future socialist regime; like Rummy invading Iraq, the young'uns assumed that that shit would work itself out later.

I can say with certainty that's not what I'm getting at. I once included a bunch of these lyrcis in an article. When I get home tonight I will post what it is I'm talking about. But the lyrics do deal specifically with observing that there was a young generation of people who wanted something new but didn't know WHAT they wanted. The Airplane were both caught up in the times and outside the times.

And I can even hear these sentiments in the Airplane's music. They didn't write too many upbeat lets-get-together type protest songs between '65 and '70. Even Balin's own tunes were somewhat melancholy: "Today" and "Comin' Back to Me". The Youngbloods, the Airplane most definitely ain't. "Wild Tyme" off of Baxter's is a good example. There is a certain amount of ecstacy and joy in the lyrics but those dissonant voices and guitars also emit a ton of chaos and confusion. It's quite complex as someone said before.

BTW- Slick, Kantner and Balin all wrote lyrics.

I feel like those particular lyrics are mainly Kantner's.

You mention "Blows Against the Empire" -- an album-length fantasy about hijacking a starship and creating a hippie-commune paradise among the stars -- you don't think that's totally a self-aware exercise in exploring the limits of certain ideals? I suppose it could be a metaphor for Kantner's deadly serious conviction that everyone should drop out and join up right away, here on Earth -- but it seems more like a complicated feeling out of the attractiveness of that idea.

I don't know much about these folks apart from their lyrics and the liner notes in the CD reissues, but those notes have recent interviews that also support the idea that the JA crew were hardly gung-ho, uncritical revolutionary types. (There could be a degree of revisionism here -- Slick seems particularly big on complicating any straightforward reading of her songs -- "I was this city girl, making fun of Marin vegetarian hippies, I liked to wear makeup," etc. -- but nonetheless.)

VH1 recently played a JA concert clip that I'm sure is famous, but I had never heard about it... Slick is very very drunk, and starts taunting the audience: "Whooo woonnn the waaaaarrr....."

65-72=hawt n' slue-tay!