Jefferson Airplane

The Jefferson Airplane began its flight in 1965. On board was a crew of young musicians coming from the most disparate musical backgrounds: Marty Balin on lead vocals, Paul Kantner on vocals and folk guitar, Jorma Kaukonen on lead guitar with blues roots, Jack Casady on bass, also with a background in blues and jazz circles, Signe Toly Anderson on lead female vocals, and Spencer Dryden on drums. They took to the skies with 1966's "Takes Off", built around a basic folk rock sound that already contained the first seeds of the psychedelic sound that would soon blossom into a floral, surrealistic explosion.

In those years, they were the first rock band to create a space devoted exclusively to rock, the Matrix; at 2400 Fulton Street they bought a building with many rooms and turned it into their exclusive headquarters - in other words, a genuine commune, one of the first of its kind at the time. Signe Toly Anderson, who left the group to devote herself to motherhood, was replaced by the charismatic Grace Slick, who came from the Great Society and brought with her a formidable stage presence and an enormous amount of talent. Grace was beautiful, intelligent, cultured; in her own way she had already been in the spotlight with a past as a model, and she already knew how to write great songs, bolstered by a wide-ranging, energetic voice. With Slick, Jefferson Airplane had found their catalyst and were ready to soar into the highest reaches of the rock firmament.

In the San Francisco Bay Area the air was thick with change: for most of 1966 LSD was still legal in the United States, and young people made extensive use of it to take flights of colourful fancy. Jefferson Airplane immediately became spokespeople for these currents, and through their music they steered that generation toward shedding all the inhibitions repressed until then by a social class anchored to rigid, austere principles of moral doctrine. Their "Surrealistic Pillow" was the generational manifesto of that era.

Meanwhile, this dreamy soap bubble enveloping much of California was pierced by a barrage of stray bullets: the assassination of Martin Luther King, napalm bombs in desperate wars, race riots, hatred flowing fast. In the meantime LSD had become illegal, and the lysergic dream had proven treacherous, ending up in narrow, grey hospital wards. All this, and more, shattered the Airplane's world. Only the desire for change remained the same, even if the means of achieving it were now "slightly" different.

“After Bathing At Baxter's” (1967) and “Crown Of Creation” (1968) followed the infamous cushion, but these works already seem so distant and out of step with their time for the messages they carry, given that time had begun racing madly toward nightmares that grew more tangible by the day. Suddenly the leading children of their era found themselves in an uncomfortable, unforeseen reality, out of place, dinosaurs of just 25 years old, already overtaken by a society moving faster than their riffs; Balin's and Slick's voices were no longer expansive and relaxed, but had turned into nervous, cracked throats seized by a fury unknown until then; dry, clipped rhythms replaced the soft, blurred ones of before; the guitar stopped caressing itself in gentle fingerpicked chords, and booming claws of feedback became its new guise.

In their own way, the band tries to keep pace with the new currents sweeping through music: only a few years earlier in Britain, “someone else” had, over the primitive notes of their own generation, screamed out the discontent and frustration of a generation toward an obsolete everyday existence, through chilling words recounting how much better it was to die young than to grow old. The Jefferson Airplane took up less apocalyptic themes, tackling everyday life by railing against it and urging rebellion, attempting to spark a revolution — but all of it had to happen right now.

“Volunteers” is the symbol of what once was, and what no one dared hope for. It opens with “We Can Be Together”: Kaukonen's screaming guitar, primitively raw, lavishes an enveloping riff before a two-voice vocal takes over, exalting rebellion against chaotic anarchy; words land like stab wounds in a vocal delivery slyly poised between dreamy and emphatic; the music underneath is gritty throughout, above all thanks to the lead guitar, which digs sonic trenches and spirals upward into ever sharper tonalities. The following “Good Shepherd” opens with a gorgeous acoustic-guitar introduction (Kantner) that counters an electrified dissonant wail (Kaukonen). Balin is introspective and deliberately restrained, with psychedelic choral touches backing the lead vocal. It's a classic example of a semi-acoustic ballad: the intro is clearly folk, while the backbone is rock. The track closes with a delightful, brief final solo built on wah-wah effects.

Faint pastoral colors project us into “The Farm,” a country-folk ballad masterfully embellished by the pedal steel guitar of their friend Jerry Garcia and Nicky Hopkins' Western-tinged piano. The song unfolds into one of the Jefferson Airplane's typical two-voice duets, the vocals chasing each other and creating a world of contrasting timbres. Slick, in particular, delivers a remarkably incisive performance, managing to balance the softness of the sound with her energetic singing. “Hey Frederick” opens with a piano and an ambiguous melody dueling against bursts of electric guitar charge; Grace immediately reigns supreme with that vibrant, emotionally charged voice of hers; the piano embroiders dreamlike notes in an instrumental interlude; Slick rises to higher notes, managing to keep her voice clear and powerful even at its most piercing: she is a queen, and the music bends to her will — except in the middle section, where Kaukonen breaks loose with his clattering, feedback-drenched, vibrato-laden sound, in a solo that starts sly and then turns fluid and more acidic.

It's Kaukonen, instead, who pens “Turn My Life Down,” and it shows: arpeggios and fingerpicking flourishes shape a more blues-leaning track, with a strongly gospel-tinged piano in the background, while Balin's vocal intertwines first with Slick's whispers, then with her moans. It's a small piece that steps away for a moment from Jefferson Airplane's politicized winds, thanks precisely to their most technically accomplished instrumentalist (Kaukonen), who retreats into his most beloved world, the blues. None other than David Crosby gifts the Airplane a gem called “Wooden Ships.” The version the Jefferson Airplane present is less compact and sinister than Crosby's, a personalized rendition tailored for other musicians; yet the opening psychedelic, gentle melody is stunning; the duet vocal, then, is deeply felt, chills creeping under the skin as the minutes pass, and the windswept ocean of an open-air bonfire becomes vivid in this multicolored, pictorial sound; Jorma's electric soloing is searing, and the rhythm section is soft, almost fearful of cracking this crystallized melodic shape.

Sinuous lysergic fumes also envelop “Eskimo Blue Day”: the melodies initially clash with each other, then proceed arm in arm through progressive, increasingly incisive notes, the piano and the guitar, softness and roughness of sound suddenly settling as if to welcome Slick's sung/spoken delivery. It's pure Californian mysticism. A honky-tonk piano ushers in the bucolic moods of “A Song For All The Seasons”: a hazy melody dominated by Hopkins, stringing together flirtatious notes and briefly shifting attention away from the sense of rebellious pioneering spirit that pervades the record.

“Meadowlands,” a small lysergic piece, marks a turning point: as if meant to make the listener forget, or better yet erase in one clean stroke, all that country and perhaps overly saccharine sound of the previous track, which had briefly diverted attention from the record's true purpose. The album thus closes with the anti-militarist anthem “Volunteers.” It's a genuine rebellious clawing, the rhythm both dry and heavy at once, the lead guitar roaring in the background, and the vocal an act of accusation, a declaration of war on the underhanded intentions of a bigoted, falsely respectable society. Any relaxed tone is far removed from these latitudes; Jefferson Airplane wield their weapons in the shape of instruments, viciously spitting out all their high-voltage regret over shattered dreams, while at the same time urging revolt. Full-throttle grit, for music never so lyrical in its politicized themes.

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31/10/2006