Thrifty Tunes 11.21.09: Jefferson Airplane - Takes Off
Posted by Paul Hollingsworth on 11.21.2009
To celebrate the one year anniversary of Thrifty Tunes, I look at one of the first albums which helped changed many of my opinions about what 'good music' really means. Hop on board as Jefferson Airplane Takes Off!
When I was in high school in the late 80's, hair metal and radio-friendly rap were the two types of music everyone listened to. There were a few goth weirdos into The Cure, REM and The Smiths, and a handful of outsiders into pre-black album Metallica and other thrash bands, but everybody who made mix tapes for Friday night crusing featured bands like Whitesnake, Def Leppard and rappers like Tone Loc and LL Cool J. Occasionaly, someone would ride around with a Led Zepplin tune blasting on their Alpine systems, but most any music made before 1984 was 'old' and 'dated.' If you dared listen to anything older, from the 70's or 60's, you were just asking to be laughed at mercilessly.
Even when I went away to college, it took me a while to admit to liking anything which wasn't current, or at least made by bands who were still releasing new stuff. My roommate turned me on to bands like The Pixies and Sonic Youth and eventually Nirvana, but when he tried to get me into The Beatles, The Kinks and other 60's bands, I resisted. In my head, this was the music of my parent's generation, and had nothing to offer me as a 20 year old, Generation X-er. I wanted nothing to do with smelly hippies, love-ins, or any of the other stereotypical things associated with the times, especially the music. (Except for Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix was exempt because he played guitar like a force of nature. Other bands, though, were full of lazy folk singers who didn't interest me at all.) Every one of my opinions changed the first time I heard "Blues From An Airplane", the first track off of Jefferson Airplane's debut album.
The girl who played the song for me slipped it in after we had finished hearing In Utero for the first time. I was hooked at the opening chord. The girl, a college classmate, smiled and kept me from getting a look at the record. (She had her ways, as all women do.) When she finally told me it was Jefferson Airplane, I was shocked, to say the least. I had heard the name, knew they were hippies of some sort and had reformed in the 80's to record the two fisted cheese sandwich of "We Built This City On Rock and Roll" and "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now." "Blues", though, was something different, something which sounded comfortable alongside Kurt Cobain's wailing, despite being made thirty years before.
"Bringing Me Down", shows the obvious influence of The Beatles, but it's also a more Americanized Byrds type of vocal harmony than Fab-Four-ish. The initial band didn't have Grace Slick as a singer, but instead featured Signe Anderson, who left the band shortly after the release of this record due to her pregnancy. Anderson, along with Marty Balin, had a chemistry every bit as good as the one Balin would later form with Slick, and there's no better example of this than on "It's No Secret", which was the albums only single. The tune's chorus is one of the highlights of the entire album.
Also appearing on this album, and on no other Airplane record, is Skip Spence, one of my favorite musicians of all time. Spence plays drums, quite respectably, on the album and also cowrote "Blues" and "Don't Slip Away". Spence left shortly after the record was released and formed Moby Grape, one of the best bands of the 60's. He later went insane, spent some time in a mental hospital, released an amazing solo album, attacked a former Grape bandmate with a chainsaw and disappeared from the music scene. (Beck is currently covering Spence's solo album with a bunch of other musicians on his record club project, which you can listen to on his website. Great stuff and worth a listen..)
Side one ends with a cover of John D. Loudermilk's "Tobacco Road". Originally a folk song, Airplane take the song in a new direction, adding elements of what came to be known as psychodelia into their interpretation. Anytime a band is able to cover a song and make it their own, they've accomplished a rare feat. No other version of this song, not even The Animals version, sounds quite as good as this one.
Side two opens with the ballad "Come Up The Years", which is more folk-y than the rest of the album, but it's far removed from the tame folk music which inspired it. It was obvious that music was undergoing a widespread change, and songs such as this were on the cutting edge of that wave of change. "And I Like It", which closes the album, is a highlight of the album, and lays the groundwork for the direction the band would take on songs like "Somebody To Love" and "White Rabbit."
Complete Track Listing: (1966 on RCA Records)
Side One:
1. Blues From An Airplane
2. Let Me In
3. Bringing Me Down
4. It's No Secret
5. Tobacco Road
Side Two:
1. Come Up The Years
2. Run Around
3. Let's Get Together
4. Don't Slip Away
5. Chauffer Blues
6. And I Like It
For years, I avoided the music of the 60's because I felt it had nothing to offer me. There's a tendancy, especially when you're a teenager, to reject the music which isn't current or popular at the time because it's seen as outdated or uncool. I was glad when I was proven wrong in my assumptions, and if you're a fan of music, you owe it to yourself to spend some time on the uncool, 'dated' stuff. You're sure to find some bands which can change your perceptions and ideals about what good music is.
