You can buy 'Wild Thyme - The Alan's Album Archives Guide To The Music Of Jefferson Airplane/Starship' by clicking here!
The Great Society featuring Grace Slick : Assorted Recordings
As a general rule, we've taken the 'extra' bits in this book to
include merely what Jefferson Aiplane/Starshippers got up to in their spare
time on their own, in addition to live albums and a few choice compilations.
What they did in their own time with a whole other band is up to them and left
there, otherwise this book would be another hundred or so pages long and by the
time we wrote it there'd probably be another endless stream of Jefferson
spin-off bands to write about anyway (Hmm, The Jefferson Bicycles has a ring to
it doesn't it?!) However, The Great Society are our one big exception: unlike,
say, Jorma's jazz trios or The Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation this band had a major
impact on the Jefferson Airplane sound and in starring both Grace Slick as lead
singer and featuring the two most famous Jefferson Airplane songs in their
repertory are essential hearing for Airplane fans.
This band's history is even more complicated and convoluted than
the Airplane's and hard to condense to a paragraph, but here goes. Grace and
her boyfriend Jerry Slick were keen music lovers and were there for the red
letter day when Marty's club The Matrix opened with Jefferson Airplane's debut
gig reportedly blowing everyone away and being raved about in the papers the
next week. The pair instantly wanted to start their own band, with Grace
replicating Signe's sassy stage presence but, typically, going a stage further
in aggression. Jerry was the drummer, his brother and aspiring songwriter Derby
was the guitarist and mutual friends David Miner became a co-vocalist and
rhythm guitarist, Bard DuPont became a bassist and Peter Van Gelder played
flute and saxophone. Naming themselves after a failed welfare reform in the
States in the post-war 1940s led by Lynon B Johnson, the band made their debut
at San Francisco's North Beach on October 15th 1965 and soon developed a
following, not quite as big as the Airplane's but big enough to get a recording
contract with Autumn Records (the small local label the Grateful Dead also signed
with the same year). The future Sly and the Family Stone leader, still working
under the name Sylvester Stewart, was the band's producer - but not for very
long. While the Airplane could be loose at times, the Society were even looser
than label-mates the Grateful Dead and it took multiple takes to record their
material (allegedly 109 takes for Derby's song 'Someone To Love', which with a
slight change to 'Somebody' will become the Airplane's biggest hit).
The fact that the band didn't last very long before breaking up
(just over a year before Grace's departure to join the Airplane) coupled with
the group's minor impact outside San Francisco and Autumn's smaller budget mean
that the Great Society recordings were released in a very haphazard manner. Officially
in their lifetime the band only ever released one single: the fun stomping
Derby Slick song 'Free Advice' (which sounds like early Big Brother and the
Holding Company' with Grace ooh-ing over a powerful, slightly psychedelic and
rather silly beat as Derby sings) with 'Someone To Love' on the back (the song
is played like a ballad with drums, slowed down to the tempo somewhere
approximating 'Today' and with a slight sense of an Indian raga in the way
Grace sings the words). However the band had recorded a full thirteen songs -
easily enough for an album - that went unheard until as late as 1995. In the
meantime, Grace's sudden success with the Airplane led to record label RCA to
have a check through their vaults - and they found by chance that they'd taped
a live album at Marty's own Matrix club in 1966 (possibly alongside a planned
Airplane set although what happened to that goodness only knows). Released at
the peak of Grace's fame in 1968, it sold rather well for an archive set and
the record company released a second volume soon after out of odds and ends
that wouldn't fit on to the running time of the first record. Both sets were re-issued under the name 'Live
At The Matrix' listed here. While clearly very raw, all these recordings are
actually very listenable and share a lot of the same excitement and magic as
the early improvisatory-heavy Airplane
. Although Grace isn't quite at full throat throttle yet she's
already a very good singer and Derby Slick is clearly a talented writer who
deserved much wider success than simply being known for his brother-in-law's
ex. 'White Rabbit' is by the way not just only the most famous song in the
band's setlists but easily the best, an extended instrumental 'Bolero' like jam
opening the start of the song to hypnotic effect so that the listener is
already 'spent' before Grace even starts singing her controversial, memorable
lyrics. Annoyingly though, and typical of this band and their lost
opportunities, they never recorded a 'proper' version of Grace's new tune -
alas all that exists is a cracking live version from 1965. The Great Society
sounded like a band to watch, much like the Airplane had been, but sadly not
all great bands get the chance to make it; thankfully the existence of these
rare great albums (especially the studio set) gives us the chance to compare
and contrast the two bands, the archeological equivalent of finding a roman
villa next to an Egyptian temple. The Airplane still win on points, thanks to
their sheer power and the brilliance of the guitar, vocals, bass and drums, but
it's closer than you might think.
1) "Conspicuous Only In Its
Absence"
(Columbia,
Recorded '1966', Released '1968')
Sally Go Round The
Roses/Didn't Think So/Grimly Forming/Somebody To Love/Father Bruce/Outlaw
Blues/Often As I May/Arbitration/White Rabbit 'The
eyes are wide and black and acid clear'. The
first volume of Matrix recordings, from either the end of June or early July
1966, packaged with a clever title and a nice portrait of Grace in green with
the other band members behind her in yellow. The sound is remarkably good for
such an early, primitive recording and at times sounds like a studio set, with
only a smattering of applause in between each track from a very quiet crowd.
Released more or less in the order the set was played, the band take a while to
warm up but are stunning by the end of the second half. Grace Slick's star
presence starts here. Three tracks to download: closer 'White
Rabbit' is a stunner, a wild Big Brother style intense jamming session with the
lead passing over between the guitar and the sax which lasts for a full intense
four minutes before Grace hits the first note. Faster and more frenetic than
the Airplane version, its closer to the 'new eave' style re-writes of the early
1980s but played on psychedelic instrumentation. It's easily the best thing on
any of these albums and a real peak for American psychedelia as a whole, if not
quite beating then possibly even drawing the compact two minute Airplane
version. Elsewhere Grace's early song 'Don't Think So' points the way forward
to the moody ballads of her solo career and seems to be an early damning
portrait of her first husband and her worry of having to follow someone else. 'Often
As I May' is a happier Slick song, more like the pop of 'Starship' that would
have slotted in nicely on 'Takes Off!' 'Grimly Forming, by the band's flute
player, is a great song too - very Airplaney in its paranoid angry twists and
sudden 'falls' into some lovely musical moments.
2) "Volume Two - How It Was"
(Columbia,
Recorded '1966', Released '1968')
That's How It Is/Darkly
Smiling/Nature Boy/You Can't Cry/Daydream Nightmare/Everybody Knows/Born To Be
Burned/Father
The
second volume of the Matrix days isn't
quite as good - certainly it's not as original with Grace sounding like she's
pretending to be Signe on these folky-Beatley pop numbers. There are also many
more cover versions this time around Three tracks to download:
The spacey 'Daydream Nightmare' is a hypnotic near-instrumental with an
occasional gruff Derby lead and Grace playing lead on a recorder. The funky
'Born To Be Burned' is very in line with what Signe was singing on 'Takes Off'
with its bluesy style although it's an original song. The pretty acoustic song
'Father' isn't that great as a song, another Big Brother style 'novelty'
record, but it's key as the earliest example of Grace's lifelong attacks on
religion and its gently rolling melody isn't in fact that far removed from 'The
Ballad Of The Chrome Nun' in 1973.
3) "Collector's Item" aka "Live
At The Matrix"
(Edsel,
Recorded '1967', Released '1971' and again in '1989')
Sally Go Round The
Roses/Didn't Think So/Grimly Forming/Someone To Love/Father Bruce/Outlaw
Blues/Often As I May/Arbitration/White Rabbit/That's How It Is/Darkly
Smiling/Nature Boy/You Can't Cry/Daydream Nightmare/Everybody Knows/Born To Be
Burned/Father
A straightforward re-issue of
the two above albums, first as a double vinyl LP and then as a single disc CD.
4) "Born To Be Burned"
(Sundazed,
Recorded '1965', Released '1995')
Free Advice/Someone To
Love/You Can't Cry/That's How It Is/Girl/Where?/Heads Up/Free Advice/Father
Bruce/Born To Be Burned/Double Triptamine Superautomatic Everlovin' Man/Love
You Girl/That's How It Is/Right To Me/Where? #2/Free Advice/Daydream
Nightmare-Love Still the one Great Society set to have - as long as you
download 'White Rabbit' as well. Yes the band are all too clearly nervous and
are not a 'natural' studio band in the same sense the Grateful Dead never were.
But in here somewhere is a cracking album that never was right on the cusp of
folk-rock and psychedelia and alternately falling one way then the other. Guitarist David Miner proves to be the band's
hidden weapon, the writer of a majority of the material and while it's not
'White Rabbit' good it's so much better than what most bands were making even
in this period. Key tracks to download:
'That's How It Is' is a pretty Beatley ballad with a nice melody and some
cracking Grace harmony vocals even if the lyrics could do with a bit of a
polish. David's pretty song 'I Love You Girl', with Grace's recorder
accompaniment, is another gorgeous Beatley ballad. Grace's otherwise
unavailable 'Heads Up' is an early go at 'Two Heads' with that Big Brother
style stomp again, with Grace singing a retro fifties rocker with real
aggression. Finally, who could speak against 'Someone To Love?' Yes this
version of the song is much 'safer' than the Airplane, without any of the added
power or menace Grace later brought to the song and the band are clearly
struggling to keep it together even after 109 takes. But it's already a great
song even without it's future coat of pretty colours and the band deserved to
be big stars from this recording alone, senselessly released as the B side
rather than the A side. It could have been all so different - and no doubt
there'd be a 'Great Society' book in the AAA canon as well instead of a mere
chapter.
"Live
At The Fillmore 1966"
(Document Records, Recorded November
1966, Released '2014' )
CD One: Plastic
Fantastic Lover/High Flying Bird/Bringing Me Down/DCBA-25/Go To Her/My Best
Friend/White Rabbit/It's No Secret/She Has Funny Cars/3-5ths Of A Mile In Ten
Seconds/The Other Side Of This Life/Tobacco Road/JPP McStep B Blues/She Has
Funny Cars/Fat Angel/Plastic Fantastic Lover/In The Morning
CD Two:
3-5ths Of A Mile In Ten Seconds/White Rabbit/Plastic Fantastic Lover/In The
Morning/Let Me In/High Flyin' Bird/She Has Funny Cars/Today/It's No Secret/My
Grandfather's Clock/The Other Side Of This Life
"Time goes on and I don't know just where you
are or how I'm going to find you"
A surprise late entry to
this book - which has led to rather a lot of hurried re-writing of both our
unreleased article and our index! - revives the Jefferson archives series some
seven years after we left off and goes back right to the very beginning. Subtitled 'We Have Ignition', this double disc
set covers the Airplane a couple of weeks on from Grace's debut with the band
and captures the band at a particularly fascinating point in their history.
'Takes Off' and folk songs are still the backbone of the setlist but there are
a total of six songs here that will be recorded the following year for the
classic album 'Surrealistic Pillow'. All sound a lot more timid than the bedded
in material the band have been playing with Signe and Grace is muted compared
to her later strident vocal parts, but the band have already meshed in well
with a heavier, powerful sound and a handful of great performances. Highlights
include a surprisingly slow and still faithful-to-the-folk-original 'High
Flyin' Bird', an early preview of 'DCBA_25' which by contrast sounds rocky and
raw compared to the record, a slightly more woolly and wandering 'White Rabbit'
more like the way the Great Society played it and an astonishing seven minute
version of 'The Other Side Of This Life' - not as psychedelic and out-there as
some performances to come, perhaps, but still way ahead of it's time for the
Thanksgiving Weekend 1966. A fascinating set, both because of Grace finding her
feet within the band and the fact that only about half of this setlist will
last in the Jefferson's live show for much longer, this is a nice set for fans
and recorded in gorgeous sound too, even if the band are a tad slow and down on
sheer oomph throughout most of the gig. Why did it take so long to come out?
"Live
At The Monterey Pop Festival"
(Document Records, Recorded June 1967,
Released '1989' and '1991')
Somebody To
Love/The Other Side Of This Life/White Rabbit/High Flying Bird/Today/She Has
Funny Cars/Young Girl Sunday Blues/The Ballad Of You And Me And Pooneil
"My whole world is in an uproar, my whole
world is upside down, I don't know where I'm going next but I'm always bumming
around"
Unlike
so many of the 'big success' stories of the Monterey Pop Festival (Janis
Joplin, Otis Redding and Jimi Hendrix) Jefferson Airplane were already a big
name with two hit singles and two hit albums behind them by the time they the
stage of the world's first real outdoors rock and roll festival. The headliners
of Saturday June 17th 1967 - the middle of the three day event - the Airplane
turned in one of their best shows (this band always seem to thrive on pressure
and big crowds). Their set is an excellent one full of the past, ('High Flyin'
Bird' - a rare performance with Grace rather than Signe) the present (the band
were still riding high in the charts with 'Somebody To Love' and 'White
Rabbit') and the future (the band take the brave move of playing two new songs
that won't be out for six months yet - its interesting in fact that both 'Young
Girl Sunday Blues' and 'Ballad Of Pooneil' have been written at all this early
on in the band's career). Still young enough to be hungry for all the fame and
applause before the cynicism begins to set in at the end of the year but old
enough to be at their tight powerful peak, the Airplane but on a mesmerising
show. Marty is at the end of his peak as the band's role model but Grace is at
the start of hers(with Paul not far behind) and the vocal interplay across this
show is mesmerising at times. The instrumental work isn't far behind either,
with Jorma on particularly fine fettle to the point where his psychedelic solos
sound other worldly (small personal aside - while I've bought the whole set
since I first got to know half of this concert thanks to the excellent 20th
anniversary re-broadcast of eight odd hours' worth of Monterey performances on
radio one, about the last time they catered for 'my' tastes despite being
within their demographic. Having dubbed the show to cassette I listened to it
endlessly - to the point where the tape broke and started playing 'backwards'
during 'The Other Side Of This Life' - so mesmerising and other-worldly (and
long!) is the instrumental break in that song that I didn't notice for a full
two minutes; it's that kind of a topsy-turvy show!)
'The Other Side' is indeed the highlight of
the set, played more aggressively than usual even by this band and snapping
left and right like a car with understeer as the band hang on for all its worth
to get to the end. 'High Flyin' Bird' too is hypnotically powerful - no wonder
they used that track (and 'Today') to represent the Airplane in the D A
Pennebaker film of the event as Marty and Paul out-stare and out-dare each
other throughout the song (you wouldn't have caught poor Signe doing that!)
However everything from this set is wonderful, the band switching from fierce
rockers to singalong pop to pretty ballads to radical reinventions of rock and
roll all under a running time of 40 minutes. Jefferson Airplane at perhaps
their highest altitude with one of the world's most exciting band's most
exciting concerts which even the slightly muddy sound (even compared to other
Monterey acts) can't ruin. This show, last heard of back in the early days of
the CD era, desperately needs re-issuing again sometime soon for younger fans,
although it's worth mentioning that five of the songs appear on the various
artists four CD Monterey box set originally from 1997 and re-issued with
different packaging but the same tracks in 2013 and a two-CD various artists
set from 2007 that includes 'Somebody To Love' and 'White Rabbit', both of
which are far more common for collectors.
"Live
At The Fillmore East"
(RCA Victor, Recorded May 1968,
Released '1998')
Intro-The
Ballad Of You And Me And Pooneil/She Has Funny Cars/It's No Secret/Won't You
Try?-Saturday Afternoon/Greasy Heart/Star Track/Wild Tyme/White
Rabbit/Thing/Today/The Other Side Of This Life/Fat Angel/Warch Her
Ride/'Closing Comments'/Somebody To Love
"We got busted here last time we came, which
might be why it's taken so long for us to come back. We were on the turnpike in
New Jersey, looking worried..."
Released
on near-enough the 30th anniversary of the local San Francisco gig taking
place, this live album captures the Airplane somewhere in the middle of their
transition from folk-psychedelia in 1967 to rock powerhouse in 1969. With
'Crown Of Creation' still four months away, the band's setlist is in transition
with previews of Grace's 'Greasy Heart' and Jorma's 'Star Track' to go
alongside most of the usual highlights heard from the Airplane's 1967 shows. As
so often happens in Airplane gigs of this period, there's also an exclusive jam
session which never turned into a 'proper' song and is here dubbed 'Thing' -
it's one of the better examples around, although it's not quite good enough to
warrant taking up a full eleven minutes of the concert. As usual with the band,
it's hard to say how well they play - the Airplane go from being totally on top
of everything, to six players all playing different things, to making mistakes
to suddenly sparking off into some jaw-dropping solo within the space of the
same song, never mind across the entire 75 minute concert. I can say though
that this is a good gig for Jorma, Jack and Spencer in particular who have
really meshed into a great rhythm section by now - it's Paul, Marty and Grace
who struggle a little to keep up. Highlights include a nicely together 'Won't
You Try?>', a rare if rather chaotic 'Wild Tyme' and a 'Greasy Heart' with a
magnificently fat guitar sound even if Grace is uncharacteristically
breathless. Everything else comes across sounding slightly half-cooked, but
then that's half the fun of these Airplane shows - the band were so on the edge
and every show was so different that it's an inevitable side effect of the
band's setlists that there'll only be on it at full wattage a few times across
the show. Not exactly essential then, but a nice souvenir, nicely matched with
the Egyptian front cover (with a Cleopatra type clutching a guitar) which hints
at the mystery and other-worldliness within.
(RCA Victor, Recorded October 1968,
Released February 1969)
Clergy/3-5ths
Of A Mile In Ten Seconds/Somebody To Love/Fat Angel/Rock Me Baby///The
Other Side Of This Life/It's No Secret/Plastic Fantastic Lover/Turn Out The
Lights/Bear Melt
CD Bonus
Tracks: Today/Watch Her Ride/Won't You Try?-Saturday Afternoon
"It wasn't the Airplanes, it was beauty killed
the beast!" or "You can listen to a thousand different reasons why
you can't go" or "We are flying at an altitude of 39,000 feet!"
Like
many a San Franciscan band before them, the divide between the Jefferson
Airplane on record and in concert was getting bigger all the time. By the
band's tour in late 1968 they'd really turned into a fine fluid live band,
driven by Jack's powerful bass, lifted on Jorma's flying guitar solos and with
a three-way vocal soar that few other bands could match. While you could make
claims that the gentler 1967 and the even heavier 1969 tours were better, 1968
was still a great period with the Airplane still enough of a band to tackle
their trickier, most complex songs and with lots of 'exclusive' songs still in
their setlist that never made it to record - not until this album anyway. Even
more astonishingly, the Airplane are still full of such confidence and fizzing
with such tremendous creativity that they are regularly making songs up on the
spot: that's where this album's 'Turn Off The Lights' and 'Bear Melt' came
about, although sadly a Marty improvised classic from the same era didn't make
it to the album. All of which means 'Bless It's Little Pointed Head' is a great
little live set, harder-edged and louder than the band ever were on record and
in many ways it's a last hurrah for the Airplane as a fully functioning 'band'
- from this point on both Marty and Spencer are preparing to leave and great as
the post-'Volunteers' Airplane are they never again had quite the same telepathy
as here.
Of
course 'Pointed Head' will still be a shock for fans who only know 'Somebody To
Love' and 'White Rabbit' and run straight here seeing as 'Pointed Head' is
about the only Airplane release to receive glowing reviews right across the
ole' board. It's a much more raucous and raw Airplane than the studio
incarnation even at their most out-there, with the band's more ferocious
no-holds-barred side left free to wander and roam around the stage. Only 'Blows
Against The Empire' features more in terms of pure noise than this album and
that came with melody as well - in true Airplane style the whole of this record
is 'real', which means that on their journey you get a view not just of the
pretty mountain peaks but the troughs and valleys as well. Few live albums fall
apart quite as consistently as this record does and nay-sayers would no doubt
complain that the band were under-rehearsed. There's also precious little Marty
even here, though thankfully that's corrected to some extent on the CD bonus
tracks with an exquisite 'Today'. But then that's not what 'Pointed Head' is
trying to do: this is a record about seeing how adventurous and far-reaching
the band can be and the mistakes and collapses in the journey are as much a
part of this story as the destination. If you're new to the Airplane then the
eleven-minute made up on the spot 'Bear Melt' may well be the most worst
Airplane recording you've ever heard - but if you stuck with the Airplane
journey long enough to get how brave and powerful this improvisation is, how
unadulterated and unedited the act of creativity flooding through Grace, Jorma,
Jack, Paul and Spencer is, how much this song represents everything that made
the Airplane both ghastly and great, then it may yet become your favourite
'song' (although 'song' hardly seems the right word in context).
In
many ways this is the most 'Airplane' of all the band's records. That quirky
title, paraphrased by Grace from a piece by Roman poet Phillip Whalen,
celebrating differences and sarcastically side-swiping prejudice with layers of
irony, is the madcap anarchism of 'Baxters' run wild. That cover, with a
massive banqueting table spread out of something posh, but then taken over by
the sight of Jack hungover and out of it clutching a bottle of something
strong, is a very Airplane image (it
also gives rare recognition to the fact that, particularly live, Jack was the
heart and soul of this band, the shy and taciturn bassist musically turning
into a bedeviled monster who chases everyone else round the stage waiting to
pounce; it wasn't meant to be the cover, it was a jokey 'preliminary' shot at a
launch party for 'Crown Of Creation' taking place at the band's mansion). The
opening track 'Clergy' isn't really a new 'song' at all but audience noises
heard beneath an audio clip of the film King Kong in which the band effectively
tell the crowd that the 'real' change to be made in society is up to them not
the people on stage ('It wasn't the Airplanes, it was beauty killed the
beast!') The track listing too reflects
not just late 1968/early 1969 but all eras of the band: the folk-rock
beginnings of 'It's No Secret' (but with a rock engine attached to the back),
the psychedelic years with an astonishing 'The Other Side Of This Life',
'Somebody To Love' transformed from cute singalong pop single into a
death-or-glory struggle between the light and the dark, 'Plastic Fantastic
Lover' turned from quirky knees up into a boxing match, '3/5ths Of A Mile'
turned from a snarky hippie put-down of capitalism into a howl of pain that can
be heard way past the back row. As for the 'new' songs 'Rock Me Baby' is
perhaps the lowest moment in the set, a Jorma blues song that doesn't really
get anywhere and isn't up to his other songs of the period (it's great for the
Hot Tuna audience who come to expect this sort of thing, but too slow for a
boogie-ing Airplane audience who've just been driven to their feet). 'Fat
Angel' is a Paul-led Donovan cover the band had been doing since their earliest
days, mainly because of the name-check they got in the song ('Fly Jefferson
Airplane, gets you there on time!') - about the only listenable Donovan song
there is although even his original is rather embarrassingly twee without
Airplane power. Jack plays rhythm guitar for once, Marty plays bass. 'Turn Out
The Lights' is Grace going all music hall, improvising a song to get the
lighting engineers to follow her instructions to put the band and audience into
darkness so they can think. And finally 'Bear Melt' is a snaky, psychedelic
improvisation with Grace's sub-conscious working on over-time as Jorma Jack and
Spencer go from 0 to 60 in the space of seconds.
The
result is an album that won't be for everyone: for detractors it's evidence
that the Airplane are loud, unfocussed, undisciplined and sloppy. For fans it's
evidence of the same thing, but with kudos for all the courage it takes to let
yourself truly go into that 'other' place on stage and all the freedom that
represents. There never was a band like the Airplane and even they couldn't
keep it up, with the wheels gradually falling off the wagon (or the wing struts
falling off the plane) as the years go on. However 'Pointed Head' is a worthy
souvenir of a period when the band could no wrong, even when they were doing
wrong if that makes sense. Exquisitely recorded, this is one of those rare
albums that offers modern fans like me who never got the chance to see the band
live an insight into what was happening on stage and which is an album to be
treasured, quite unlike any other concert album ever made.
(Columbia, May 1969)
Little Hands/Cripple
Creek/Diana/Margaret-Tiger Rug/Weighted Down (The Prison Song)/War In
Peace/Broken Heart/All Come To Meet Her/Books Of Moses/Dixie Peach
Promenade/Lawrence Of Euphoria/Grey-Afro
"I
am in pain!"
Nothing about Skip Spence's career was
straightforward and the same goes for this album. Ignored on release, laughed
at for being 'weird' by the few people who bothered to listen to it and sinking
like a stone (mainly because Skip couldn't promote it - he'd been committed to an
insane asylum at the time) 'Oar' has now come to be seen as the work of a
fragmented genius unappreciated in Skip's own lifetime. Much like the
renaissance of the careers of Nick Drake and Syd Barrett in recent years, it's
a tragedy that more fans didn't see the worth of these albums in their
creator's own lifetime (when they could have done with the royalties). Can the
same album really be this good and this bad all at the same time? Well, yes and
no. Skip's deeper voice is tough to take without any harmonies from either the
Airplane or Moby Grape to soften the blow and his Syd-like love of breaking all
rules (even the ones that make music easier on the ear - such as sticking to
the same key or only changing the tempo every few bars instead of every one) is
wearing on the ears. You can see why so many fans would have 'missed' this
album at the time. However Skip was always an under-rated writer and while his
lyrics get more and more surreal, his melodies if anything get prettier. What's
more this album isn't quite as far 'gone' as people think it is - unlike Syd
who couldn't or wouldn't play by other rules the basic songs here could easily
be covered by other artists and 'normalised'
in the way that so many Bob Dylan covers sound largely normal (indeed, a
popular tribute album 'More Oar' does just that and is much easier to hear all
round).
To be honest had this record been made in other
circumstances it wouldn't have much of a splash at all - most of it is pretty
but pointless folk-rock closer to the archness of 'My Best Friend' than the joy
of 'J P P McStep B Blues' or 'Blues From An Airplane'. However as a listening
experience the mixture of Skip's struggling hoarse vocals and the occasional
lucid, emotional song can be a powerful listening experience. 'Saints' and
'Demons' are at war throughout the album's lyrics as Skip tries to take the
side of the one before being over-ruled by the other, with the music taking on
the resemblance of a fight. Just take album highlight 'Diana' where Skip can
barely spit his words out: 'Oh Diana these tears fall like rain, oh Diana I am
in pain!' This isn't mere descriptive singer-songwriter blocking either - Skip
really does sound like he's in pain. Skip, who so folk legend has it recorded
all of this album in his pyjamas, is a long way past the point of no return and
unlike even Syd's sudden return to health in 1970 (when his two solo albums
were made) you kind of know that there's no way back from Skip's drug-addled
schizophrenic torture. This is a tough album to listen to, and a tougher album
to make, and it isn't always as worthy of our time as some fans say it is
('Margaret-Tiger Rug' would be nonsense whoever recorded it, the ten minute
'Grey-Afro' might be interesting but the decision to treat Skip's voice with
echo and overpower it with drumming means we'll never know and only Skip's
influence gives it any weight, whilst 'Broken Heart' might well be the worst
cowboy-style song in musical history; Lee Marvin without the irony). However
there's much to love as well: as said 'Diana' is truly moving even without the
baggage that comes with this record's background, the acoustic song 'Weighted
Down' is stunningly beautiful as if all sorts of folk songs have been boiled
down to their simple essence, and the eerie 'War In Peace' sounds like The
Byrds having a meltdown. I'm still not quite sure what I think of 'Oar', but
then I'm not quite sure really is anybody knows what 'Oar' is all about apart
from it's creator and this is clearly one of those records best labelled 'not
for everyone'. However there's clearly a talent in there, as unhinged and
deranged as it might be and I weep for the lost opportunities that drugs and
ill health took away from this kind and talented man. This book should be full of
Skip's solo records, perhaps even an Airplane reunion or two and it's one of
rock and roll's saddest ironies that Skip's fame only spread after he died so
the hapless drummer, who spent the last few years of his life homeless and
penniless, never got to hear just how talented he was. Unavailable and
forgotten for so many years, Sundazed finally re-issued the album in 1991 and
again in 1999 with ten more bonus tracks between them. ost of these unfinished
bits and pieces aren't very interesting but a few are well worth hearing, such
as the fun 'It's The Best Thing For You' (the most 'normal' song of the lot)
and the soulful fragment 'I Think You and I'.
"At
Golden Gate Park"
(Charly, Recorded May 1969, Released
October 2006)
The Other
Side Of This Life/Somebody To Love/The Farm/Greasy Heart/Good Shepherd/Plastic
Fantastic Lover/Uncle Sam Blues/Volunteers/White Rabbit/Won't You Try?-Saturday
Afternoon
Hidden Bonus
Tracks: Jam/We Can Be Together/3-5ths Of A Mile In Ten Seconds
"Now it's time to finish your dope!"
"What do you mean finish? It's never finished!"
Jefferson Airplane's homecoming San Franciscan
set on May 5th 1969 was always a bootleggers favourite for good reason -
despite having been clearly recorded by a taper in the audience, complete with
pops and crackles in the recording, this is vintage live Airplane. This version
is in the grey area between what's still a bootleg and is 'official' - for the
record this is a legitimate release on a legitimate label, although the
Airplane themselves have had no say in releasing it (there's some tedious
technical detail under the recorded rights under the copyright act, but all you
need to know is that there was just enough of a loophole in the law for this
set to come out which the band can't challenge; although by the same token you
won't see this set listed on official discographies). Recorded three months
before Woodstock, the band aren't quite as tight as there and are in fact their
usual sloppy selves for long passages of the set. However the sheer joy of
being able to hear a full 80 minute set from the less covered year of 1969
(including the earliest available live version of 'Volunteers' almost six
months before release as well as previews of 'Good Shepherd' and seemingly the
only live version of 'The Farm' to exist) is still a delight, flawed or not.
Marty at the start of his last tour with the band is on especially good form,
the effort he puts into his parts at odds with the usual story that he was fed
up with the band at this time and them with him. A fascinating 'The Other Side
Of This Life' starts things off in brilliant fashion, a tad faster and slightly
more 'normal' than the psychedelic arrangement performed in 1967, with other
highlights including a tasty version of 'Greasy Heart' and a 'Won't You Try?'
that's less of a rollercoaster ride than the Woodstock version, with less falls
but less peaks as well. Only a hideous version of 'Somebody To Love' slowed
down to a blues crawl and a rather dull and actually unlisted ten minute jam
that starts off too slow lets the side down.
Curiously the CD compilers have added three
bonus tracks in total, unlisted on the sleeve, that are amongst the best things
here: a blissful 'We Can Be Together' which is more about the brotherhood than
the revenge and swearing and a snaky '3/5ths Of A Mile In ten Seconds' which is
somehow faster yet more in control than usual. All in all a good set and a
welcome one that should have been released officially whether the artists owned
the rights or no (surely there should be an addition to the law whereby if a
member of an audience recorded you the tapes should still belong to you even if
you weren't the ones with the tape recorders - preferably with the addition
that all these recordings become public property anyway after a set certain
number of years; the Grateful Dead and fans can manage all that so I don't see
why everyone else can't).However you can tell that this tape has been cruedly
cut to get it to length: Grace baits Nixon ('Dick's in the White House!') and
Paul announces 'Mexico' before the band instead swing into '3/5ths' and the CD
also ends mid-sentence as Kantner promises 'another song' which sadly never
comes.
"The
Woodstock Experience"
(Sony/Legacy, Recorded August 1969,
Released June 2009)
Note: this is
a two-disc set with the CD Re-Issue of the album 'Volunteers' as the other disc
complete with bonus tracks
'Introduction'/The
Other Side Of This Life/Somebody To Love/3-5ths Of A Mile In Ten
Seconds/Won't You Try?-Saturday Afternoon/Eskimo Blue Day/Plastic Fantastic
Lover/Wooden Ships/Uncle Sam Blues/Volunteers/The Ballad Of You And Me And
Pooneil/Come Back Baby/White Rabbit/The House At Pooneil Corners
"Now you have seen the heavy groups it's time
for morning maniac music, yeah believe me, it's a new dawn...good morning
people!"
'The
Woodstock Experience' was a range of double disc CDs featuring all the acts who performed at the
August 1969 festival that Sony could get the rights to (others inclue Janis
Joplin and Santana), with a release not only of the whole unedited concert by
each band but the 'period' studio album as well. Sometimes in the series that
principal comes unstuck (some bands only perform their 'new' release anyway)
but in the Jeffersons case that actually works quite nicely as the tie-in album
is 'Volunteers' released three months down the road which contains much of this
stage set's spirit if not many of the actual songs (there are in fact just two 'repeats' and as
one of them is the highly charged 'Volunteers' itself made famous from the film
of the event that's no bad thing). Performed at 'breakfast time' (actually 5
am!) on the Sunday morning after delays the night before meant they couldn't
fit the second day's headlining act in anywhere! Not that the bleary-eyed crowd
in the film seem to mind: the Jeffersons always did well at big events (they
played better as the crowds got bigger - the opposite of rivals the Grateful
Dead) they were generally agreed to have aced it at this festival and along
with CSN, Hendrix and Joe Cocker vocally murdering The Beatles were much talked
about as the 'big hit' of the festival. The band are on great form too, joined
unusually by guest pianist Nicky Hoplins (who appears with practically every
AAA band at one time or another, though his most famous Jefferson moment is the
title track of 'Volunteers').
Grace
is particularly on fire as she delights in her role as the nation's
counter-culturalist icon and even though the visuals reveal just how wiped out
of it on something the singer is, the audios don't agree; this is a spiky,
aggressive, tremendously exciting performance. Only poor Marty, increasingly
sidelined as the band's career does on, has any reason to feel aggrieved,
relegated to just four lead vocals not shared with the others which only goes
to show how marginalised the band's founder had become by 1969 (he'll only get
two lead vocals on 'Volunteers'). At
least he's in the film this time though, unlike 'Monterey' when the camera
stared at Grace mouthing the words all the time he was singing! For almost the
last time, though, the Airplane are still a 'band' firing on all cylinders when
needed, highlighted by the thrilling
hippie anthem 'Won't You Try?' heard at its best as in true Airplane fashion it
nearly falls over several times with the six players going their different ways
before suddenly magically reuniting them all somewhere towards the end in a wonderful
mesh of togetherness and brotherly love. It may well be the most 'Woodstock'
moment actually performed at 'Woodstock'.
What's
more the Jefferson set is one of the better value released in the series. Most
bands were restricted to about an hour that August weekend but partly as a
'sorry' to being messed up the day before and the earlier-than-billed start the
Jeffersons got to play for 90 minutes (sadly a bit of a pain as the concert is
split between the two CDs but great value for money all the same). Whilst quite
a lot of this set has come out before ('Volunteers' is on the various artists
double set 'Woodstock', 'Eskimo Blue Day' and 'Won't You Try?' on 'Woodstock
Two' and 'Volunteers' 'Won't You Try?' and 'Uncle Sam's Blues' are all featured
in the director's cut of the film), fans have had to track down many different
sources to hear it, so it's nice to have it all in one place. Two songs remain
largely exclusive to this set as well: 'Come Back Baby' and 'Uncle Sam's Blues'
are both Jorma songs unreleased in the band's lifetime, the former since
released on the 'Surrealistic Pillow' CD but the witty draft-dodging second
track was only ever played live across 1969 and only ever released here. All in
all an excellent release even for those who already own 'Volunteers' and one of
the better 1960s Jefferson live releases around. And just think - maybe if we
chant really loud we can forget that the reunion album never happened. No
reunion! No reunion! No reunion! No reunion!...
"Live
At The Family Dog Ballroom"
(Charly/Snapper, Recorded September
1969, Released October 2007)
The Ballad Of
You And Me And Pooneil/Good Shepherd/We Can Be Together/Somebody To Love/The
Farm/Crown Of Creation/Come Back Baby/Wooden Ships/Volunteers/Jam
"We are obscene, hideous, dangerous, dirty,
violent, lawless - and young"
Taped a month after Woodstock and two before
'Volunteers', this live recording features the Airplane at an important time in
their career. While the show is perhaps not as tight as some and tends towards
longer, sloppier jams overall its one of their better live sets, with an
especially hard rock and roll adrenalin coursing through the band's veins
throughout (especially Spencer whose on great form tonight driving the band
ever onwards) and some of the band's more daring material. The opening 15
minute 'Pooneil' is the best live version of the song around, knocking spots
off the woolly 1967 version intended to kick-start the 'Baxters' album and
ending up into some lyrical fragments from what will become 'Blows Against The
Empire' in a year's time, heard here long before that first Starship project
ever got off the ground (and great to hear a s historical moment, never mind a
musical one!) That's easily the highlight of the set, but there are other
strong performances to enjoy: a rare performance of 'The Farm' played with
good-natured bonhomie, a nicely tight 'Crown Of Creation' that doesn't get as
out of hand as some live versions around and one of the better 'Wooden Ships',
a fraction slower than even the 'Volunteers' version. Only the closing
self-indulgent 26 minute jam is truly bad and even that isn't quite as bad as
some - just a bit uninspired and a good twenty minutes too long. Poor Marty is
clearly being sidelined in this period - he gets no actual lead vocals although
he shares the spotlight a few times - but fans of the Grace 'n' Paul period
will like this set a lot and it's ever so nearly the last hurrah for the
'classic' Airplane line-up. To date the last in the Airplane archive concert
series released (the now ten year gap makes it unlikely there will be anymore)
is easily the best, though still a shade behind both the Monterey performance
and the 'Bless It's Pointed Head' set for sheer power and consistency.
"Sweeping
Up The Spotlight: Live At The Filmore 1969"
(RCA/Legacy, Recorded November 1969,
Released '2007')
Volunteers/Good
Shepherd/Plastic Fantastic Lover/Uncle Sam's Blues/3-5ths Of A Mile In Ten
Seconds/You Wear Your Dresses Too Short/Come Back Baby/Won't You Try?-Saturday
Afternoon/The Ballad Of You and Me and Pooneil/White Rabbit/Crown Of
Creation/The Other Side Of This Life
"I'm going out of my mind - baby!"
A live performance of the band on their
'Volunteers' tour, a few weeks after that album's release, this is the last
available recordings featuring the 'classic' Marty 'n' Spencer line-up. Like
many a Jefferson live release it has it's great and ghastly moments (often
within the same track) but is perhaps on balance a little behind the other
releases of 1969 and not all that different from them (if you combine 'The
Woodstock Experience' and 'Family Dog' you virtually have this show anyway).
Jorma seems on especially good form at this show, with an added bite and power
into his guitar solos and the addition of two rarely heard songs at this gig (a
much quicker and sharper 'Uncle Sam's Blues' than the one played at Woodstock
and a nicely grooved-in 'Come Back Baby' without the speed or fireworks of some
but intense and lengthy all the same. Marty gets 'his' improvisation to go
alongside Grace's 'Bear Melt' in 'You Wear You Dresses Too Short' - previously
released on the 'Jefferson Airplane Loves You' box set - but it's a nicer idea
than it is a song, especially dragged out to nine torturous minutes. Marty
sounds as if heart really isn't in this band any more, in fact, which makes it
all the more understandable why he leaves so soon afterwards, although on the
plus side at least he gets a few lead vocal this time unlike 'Family Dog'.
Overall, however, despite several strong moments, this is clumsy by Airplane
standards: even old war horses like 'Won't You Try?' and 'Pooneil' sound
under-rehearsed and are at times a struggle to sit through even for an Airplane
fan with a season ticket like me. Still, if the Grateful Dead can get away with
releasing so many similar gigs from their career then we can surely forgive the
Airplane this one and it's a shame that their 'archive' series seems to have
ended after the release of this set - some more shows, especially from the
1966-68 period would be highly welcome.
(RCA Victor, November 1970)
It's No
Secret/Blues From An Airplane/Somebody To Love/Today/White Rabbit/Embryonic
Journey/Martha/The Ballad Of You and Me and Pooneil//Crown Of
Creation/Cushingura/Lather/Plastic Fantastic Lover/Good Shepherd/We Can Be
Together/Volunteers
"It's no secret how strong my love is for you,
it's no secret - because I love you yeah I love you!"
Only
Jefferson Airplane could nickname their first best-of 'the worst of' but they
are joking through - I think. Apart from sheer cheek and the usual ruffling of
feathers the title probably came about because this is basically a 'singles
collection', including every A side (and most B sides) the band released during
their first four years together. In one sense it's a 'worst of' because as
every fan knows you can't find all the magic of a band as eclectic as the
Airplane into one three-minute single and in another it's the 'worst of'
because only two of these releases ('Somebody To Love' and 'White Rabbit') ever
charted, which might make this one of the lowest hit ratiod compilation record
of the 1960s (well, technically 1970 but you know what I mean). However forget
all that - the music is almost all wonderful whether it sky-rocketed up to the
top of the charts or sank like a led zeppelin to the bottom and stayed there.
All the songs that every decent Airplane set need are here along with some of their better known rarer
songs from the wonderfully dramatic 'Blues From An Airplane' to the sheer
out-there ness of 'Pooneil' to the prettyness of 'Good Shepherd'. Only the
instrumental 'Cushingura' (perhaps added to give drummer Spencer Dryden some
royalties on a par with the others) seems out of place, while having these
songs in the order they came out would have been nice.
Still,
this is an impressive compilation with a full 46 minute running time (long in
the days of vinyl) and at the time seemed an ominous one: with Marty and
Spencer both gone, Paul and Grace expecting a baby together and Jorma and Jack
spending more time speed-skating than making music it seemed as if the end was
nigh. It wasn't, not quite, but this seemed as good a time to look backwards as
any and the compilers seemed to realise it too with some witty Airplane-themed
artwork fully in keeping with the ethos of the band (RCA dusted off the old
1920s 'His Master's Voice' logo for the set, whilst the billboard logo for the
album featured an early 20th century jet planted into the ground like a 'family
tree'!) The compilation ended up doing what all good compilations do -
introducing the band to a whole new audience who'd either missed or been too
young for the psychedelic years and became a firm favourite with the 'second
wave' of Airplaners. AS a result the compilation is one of the few Jefferson
best-ofs to make its way to CD - twice in fact, in 1997 and again in 2006 with
the bonus tracks 'Greasy Heart' and 'Watch Her Ride'.
"Hot
Tuna"
(**,
*** 1970)
Hesitation Blues/How Long Blues/Uncle
Sam Blues/Don't You Leave Me Here/Death Don't Have No Mercy/I Know You Rider/Oh
Lord Search Your Heart/Winnin' Boy Blues/New Song For The Morning/Mann's Fate
"Cracks
in the sand pulled me into the sea, washed my cares away"
While Paul and Grace were trying to save
humanity in the future via a sci-fi epic, Jorma and Jack were being much more
grounded with a live LP no less from a band who didn't yet have an audience.
Created as a spin-off that could give Jorma and Jack the chance to play 'blues
songs' closer to their natural interests, the band was given an opening slot in
many Airplane gigs and were an obvious signing to the Airplane's new record
label 'Grunt' (designed to show off as many factors of the band's sound as possible,
though in the end only Paul, Grace and Papa John ever used the label down the
years for the purposes it was built). At the time it very much wasn't an
attempt to 'split' the band - in fact it
was one way the Airplane though they could dodge what had happened to so many
other bands and allow them to reunite every year having got various
'distractions' out of the way first. At the time Jorma and Jack making an album
away from the band was as natural as Paul making one with Grace.
In many ways this 'Hot Tuna' record is unlucky
in having come out hot on the heels of such a well-regarded classic as Paul's
'Blows Against The Empire'. The fact that two such records could be released as
the spin-off of the same band in the same year says much for how the Airplane
were splintering in this time: half of California appeared on 'Blows', a record
with two pull-out booklets packed with squiggles and unused ideas that's
something ofg a musical banquet; 'Hot Tuna' was recorded with just Jorma and
Jack with harmonica player Will Scarlett the only addition to their band of
merry men, a tuna sandwich best taken between more substantial meals. Those who
saw Hot Tuna play as the 'warm-up' band for the Jeffersons will have known what
to expect but to anyone else this record must have been a shock: while Jorma's
contributions to the band often verged on the bluesy, they'd never been quite
this full-on before. Interestingly this first Hot Tuna record is an
all-acoustic affair: virtually all later Tuna albums will be 'plugged-in'.
To be honest this self-titled debut record
lacks later album's 'electricity' in all meanings of the word: it's not that
this album is boring, but having only two, sometimes three musicians playing
very similar blues songs with very similar dynamics and arrangements does make
this one heavier going than later records. Having so many cover songs (Jorma
only writes ** on this first LP) also means that there's less of a 'vision'
here; less of a sense of what Hot Tuna can offer outside the band other than old
blues standards warmed up for the present day. For the moment Hot Tuna are very
much the younger, jealous brother of the Airplane not getting the attention it
craves: the fact that Jorma and Jack chose to make a 'live' album their first
release says much about how this record was done on the 'cheap' and to take up
as little time (and as few songs) as it could. Jorma is in fact on a creative
roll, with his songs for 1971's Airplane LP 'Bark' some of his best, but you
wouldn't necessarily know that from hearing this record. In the end the biggest
difference between this record and 'Blows' is commitment: Kantner had never
sounded more alive than he did imagining the future: Jorma just sounds like
he's having a bit of fun before a more interesting project comes along. Jack,
meanwhile, barely gets a chance to be heard: his powerful bass rumble sounds
less 'right' here than it does here rooted to the ground than it did propelling
the Airplane to the stars and in addition it's mixed far too low (a lot of the
Airplane records are built around the bass, which is why they sound so good,
for the most part, compared to their contemporaries).
That said there are at least three things that
make this record worthwhile. The first is how much of the spotlight it sheds on
Jorma, a vastly under-rated talent who really shines now that he's been given
the chance to effectively have a full album to himself. We always knew he was a
sensational, groundbreaking electric player - the surprise is that he's a
sensational, groundbreaking acoustic player too (the two don't always
necessarily go together). Considering that this album is life, it's impressive
that he doesn't put a foot wrong throughout. The second plus point is the
presence of Will Scarlett who is more than just a funny name: his blues
harmonica is excellent throughout this record, in actual fact the closest thing
on this record to 'pure' blues (at times Jorma sounds too excited to be a true
blues player). The third plus point is the semi-regular traditional song 'I
Know You Rider'. A regular in the set-lists of many AAA bands (including The
Grateful Dead and The Byrds), this driving folk tune has never sounded better
than it does as a simple acoustic blues pared back to the bones as a trio for
guitar, bass and harmonica. While a lot of the other material sounds more
ordinary, this song is worth the price of the album alone. Whether by
coincidence or several weeks of fevered thought, you can also tell a difference
between the two sides: the down-trodden sadder bluesy first side (where most
song titles end in 'blues') and the more hopeful second side, the album
gradually passing from blackest night to brightest day if you listen to it in
order, something that if deliberate is rather clever (and if not is simply very
lucky!)
The traditional ** 'Hesitation Blues' sets the tone for most of
the album: a tricky acoustic blues that Jorma handles with aplomb about a man
who keeps hesitating when he's on the verge of a good thing. The audience seem
to like it, with quite a few cheers, and there's a terrific middle instrumental
section when Jorma and Jack suddenly speed up to double time, but by Jorma's
Airplane standards this is decidedly ordinary stuff.
After a brief question about whether the
monitors are really working - how typical of Hot Tuna that they should keep
this bit on the record! - Jorma and Jack combine on the slow 'How Long Blues'. A blues of
the 'how long since the sun went down?' bad luck type, this song gives Jack
more to do than usual but isn't the greatest thing either of them have ever put
on record. Jorma seems to have stepped away from the microphone too (or is it
that pesky monitor confusing him about how loud he's singing?) making this one
of the less appealing moments on the record.
'Uncle Sam
Blues' is a Jorma original well
known to fans who'd seen the Airplane live over the past year (you can see the
full band playing an electric version on the director's cut of the Woodstock'
film, although it sounds rather better here). An angry put-down of the Vietnam
Draft, this song was originally something of a blues parody with lines like
'Uncle Sam ain't no woman, but he sure can take your man!' but is sung straight
here. Scarlett's harmonica playing is the highlight of the recording, even
breaking out into the sound of a police siren at one stage while Jorma, on the
run, tries to stay one step ahead of him. Jorma's written better songs than
this, though and this track is conspicuous by its absence from the Airplane's
'Volunteers' album suggesting they didn't rate it all that highly.
'Don't You
Leave Me Here'
is a more reflective folkier song that sounds like something Pentangle would
have done rather well. The narrator wants to make an old lover jealous: 'I never had one woman at a time' he admits
to us, 'but if you see her tell how I had eight or nine'. That seems to have
done the trick - by the end of the song he's been invited over 'to taste my
fricassee'. A clever song with a nice riff and lyrics a cut above the album
average.
The horrifying 'Death Don't Have No Mercy' is one of the bleakest
songs in the entire AAA catalogue, telling how death can strike at any time,
rich or poor, man woman or child, often without warning. In The Grateful Dead's
hands it was the sombre warning snuck into the band's late setlists in between
the rockier songs; Hot Tuna is slightly more upbeat, turning the song into a
light jazz-folk-blues fusion that's almost jolly. Casady's bass purrs like a
kitten throughout, but his death rumbles go unheeded by Kaukonen's guitar-work,
which sounds like he's having a Sunday stroll.
The glorious 'Know You Rider' (usually titled 'I Know You Rider')
is head and shoulders the best song here. Jorma's fast-flying acoustic guitar
is perfect for this breezy traditional folk song and Scarlett's harmonica is
eerily telepathic in guessing where his acoustic runs are going to be. Slower
and more reflective than cover versions by The Byrds and the Dead, it's a
pretty little arrangement of a great song about never being denied and looking
forward to better times in the future, when 'the sun gonna shine in my back
door some day'.
'Oh Lord,
Search My Heart' is a spiritual that runs for a full 45 seconds before Jorma
sings. Telling us that he usually knows right from wrong, Jorma's narrator
admits that for once in his life he's confused and that his head and heart are
pulling in two very different directions. The bass and guitar do seem to pull
in two different ways across this song, which is another of the album's better
tracks.
Winnin' Boy
Blues' is a slightly irritating
song about a smug bloke whose good at everything in life - one of the 'David
Watts'es of the world if you're a Kinks fan. The melody is nice, though, with
some more excellent ensemble playing.
'New Song
(For The Morning)' is another of the album's better songs. The narrator is torn
between two lives with two different women and is forever looking to spending
time away from one or other of them. Given Jorma's immediate future writing
about the Airplane as if it were a 'couple' breaking up, it's tempting to view
this song as being about the two different pulls of the Airplane and Tuna.
'Looks like you're here to stay' Jorma sings to his 'first' girlfriend, happily
at first but then with annoyance, while the chorus says that he can't decide
between them: 'What am I gonna do?' However there's hope by the end of the song
as new love blossoms from sad beginnings: 'like flowers from under rain'. The
result may well be Jorma's best song of 1970, Airplane or Tuna** is it his
song?**
The curiously titled instrumental 'Mann's Fate' comes not only
with an extra 'n' but also with a more urgent, explosive sound which makes this
song the closest here to the traditional Airplane power and drive. Jack
especially sounds much happier on 'home' territory and turns in his best
playing on the album, while Jorma is as fast and capable as ever - the two
truly showing off a telepathic bond. Like many instrumentals, though, this one
would have sounded better still with words.
'Hot Tuna' is far from an essential purchase if
you're a Hot Tuna fan, never mind an Airplane one, with much better yet to come
from the duo. However there's much to be said for a debut that's bravely taped
live in front of an audience and while most concert recordings are never recorded
in the order re-created on vinyl, this one sounds as if it is, in which case it
speaks volumes that the second half is infinitely better than the first. Hot
Tuna's just taking a little time to heat up, that's all, and much more is to
come.
"Papa
John Creach"
(Grunt/RCA, December 1971)
The Janitor Drives A Cadillac/St Louis
Blues/Papa John Down Home Blues/Plunk A Little Funk/Over The Rainbow//String
Jet Rock/Danny Boy/Human Spring/Soul Fever/Every Time I Hear Her Name
"I
really don't fear a whole stormy day, and then again I never run from sun to
shade"
Welcome
to our story Papa John. Guest with Hot Tuna, honorary Airplaner on 'Bark' and
now the first 'guest' artists on the band's 'Grunt' label, the by now
54-year-old Creach must be the oldest rock and roll musician ever to start
their solo career - certainly amongst fiddle players! Papa John will be a
recording regular up to the end of his life in 1994 and almost all his records
will feature the same template featured here: funky violin-driven
instrumentals, bluesy originals featuring Papa John's rather effective
weather-worn voice, the occasional curio cover just to remind us that Papa
John's influential teenage years were spent with the Tin Pan Alley songbook and
the occasional guest star just to keep us on our toes. This time round that
element is filled by none other than Grace Slick, who duets with papa John on
the fiery opening track 'The Janitor Drives A Cadillac', a clever song about
class and social structure written by the Airplane's old drummer Joey Covington
(who was his first contact within the band). Even though Papa John released
eight solo records in all and played with many great bands, it's arguably this
opening track on this first album for which he's best remembered - it became
his only chart single peaking at #14 in the Billboard charts. Joey naturally
guests on his own track alongside another two songs on the album, while other
guests on the album include Paul, Jorma, Jack, future Hot Tuna drummer Sammy
Piazza and playing bass on the 'Janitor' sessions is future Jefferson Starship
member Pete Sears - Grace and Papa John got on with him so well that he
remembered his name when putting the band together in 1974. Other album
highlights include the funky if slightly moany 'Papa John's Down Home Blues'
(co-written, like many of the album songs, with Roger Spotts who'll go on to
co-write 'Milk Train' with Grace and Papa John), the Hot Tuna style
instrumental 'Plunk A Little Funk' (which is way better than 'Wild Turkey, with
lots of great Jorma guitar) and Spotts' traditional sounding crooner ballad
'Human Spring', which sounds like more of a standard than the album's true
'standards'. Talking of which all of the songs pre-dating 1960 are sadly
horrendous: the instrumental version of 'Somewhere Over The Rainbow' sounds
like a bad night at a school talent show and is a cover only a munchkin could
love, and a most peculiar 'Danny Boy'. Still, if Papa John's 'on the fiddle'
for some of this album and takes the easy way out, who could blame him after
waiting so long to make the record he wanted to make? Overall, this is one of
the better Papa John records, though not the best like so many say (mainly
because it's the only Creach album they know), featuring a typically eclectic
and variable quality set that's great and ghastly with every throw of the dice.
(HT): First Pull Up, Then Pull Down
(1971).................................
Hot
Tuna "First Pull Up, Then Pull Down"
(**,
*** 1971)
John's Other/Candy Man/Been So
Long/Want You To Know/Keep Your Lamps Trimmed And Burning/Never Happen No
More/Come Back Baby
"The
way we've been doing things, babe we can't do that no more"
Hot Tuna album number two is a much more
serious attempt at a 'standalone' career away from the Airplane. As that year's
album 'Bark' and the song 'Third Week In The Chelsea' will show, Jorma for one
was fed up of the mind games being played and the way the band seemed to be on
permanent hold. Hot Tuna, once a hobby made to keep things fresh and
interesting with the parent band, now seems like an alternative career. While
both Jack and Jorma will stay with the Airplane until the end of the next year,
you can tell that they're putting at least as much effort into this record as
they did to that year's 'Bark'. Jorma and Jack and Will have plugged in and
gone electric as well as hiring the services of the Airplane's new friend
violinist Papa John Creach as well as new drummer Sammy Piazza. The result is a
much heavier, tougher sound which isn't quite so reliant on Jorma and gives
different members of the band a chance to shine. The material is still very
much based around old blues songs but thanks to the 'heavier' playing these now
sound like they have more bite to them and sound very different to the
originals as opposed to slightly. For now the band are still playing live
rather than in the studio, but by now the band have such a 'full' sound they
can get away with things they couldn't on the first album (although there's
even less audience noise this time). The result is a much more entertaining
album all round, one which sounds like Hot Tuna have a proper date with destiny
rather than \a spot of flirting.
Many fans have commented that 'Bark' would have
been a far better album had Paul and Grace not been saving all their best songs
for 'Sunfighter'. The same applies here: while only two songs are original
compositions that's still higher odds than on the first album** (if only
because this album has just seven tracks!) 'Been So Long' is better than all of
Jorma's compositions for the Airplane that year bar 'Chelsea' while Papa John's
instrumental 'John's Other' - presumably titled because it was John's 'other' song
aside after 'Wild Turkey' included on 'Bark' - is a much more interesting
number than his first. Even the cover is more interesting, a dotted sequence of
dots gradually extending to crosses and kisses designed by Jack which is very
like the doodles the Airplane used to do circa 'Baxters'. The one thing that
isn't quite there yet is the running times: each of the seven songs have a
tendency to ramble compared to the first album's pounce and whole all seven
songs are in themselves rather long the album as a whole is rather short. With
only seven songs for an album each one has to be first-class for an album to be
truly special: 'First Pull Up' is only half there, with one too many
instrumentals and the rather bland 'Want You To Know', which is the sort of
thing you fritter away with on a B-side rather than dedicate a precious seventh
of your all-important second album to. Jack's bas is still mixed awfully low
too, drowned out now by Papa John's violin and Sammy's drums as well as Jorma's
guitar even if he does now get top billing on the record (which isn't just
alphabetical or Creach would be next not Jorma). Still, you can see why the band would want to
stretch out compared to the restrictions of the Airplane (who only ever got
this carried away with running times on live albums) and the fact that the band
are playing more or less live (something the Airplane were doing less and less)
does give this record a frisson of excitement that the quirky, inventive,
under-rated 'Bark' can't match. The
result isn't perfect but is one of Hot Tuna's better albums, with a soul and
energy that belies the ancient age of many of the songs (and indeed the
players: Papa John was in his 60s here).
John's
Other' is the finest of the
three songs Creach gets sole credit for in this book, an eight minute
instrumental that's a cross between a fiddle jig and a 12 bar blues. Jorma is a
whole new player now that he has another 'lead' musician he can bounce off
rather than a rhythm section and his distortion-drenched leads are a delight.
Like many instrumentals, though, this one goes on far too long and would have
been better still with some words attached.
'Candyman' is one of five songs by
the Reverend Gary Davis that Hot Tuna recorded and a rather more obscure choice
than 'Death Don't Have No Mercy'. Like many AAA songs about a dealer offering
up sweets, the candy is probably made of stronger stuff than sugar (and yes he
was a real vicar before you ask!) This isn't the best version of the song
around: everything seems to be a bit chaotic to be honest with the band not
quite up to speed with the material (it's a hard song to play with an irregular
time metre and lots of stops and starts).
'Been So
Long' is the album highlight, a
mournful Jorma original about his current career crossroads. He's feeling
'lost' and has for years, having once had 'something special to give'. All he
wants is to see his loved one 'smile' like they used to and be asked to 'stay'
but everyone seems to be lost in their own problems. The song must surely be written
about the Airplane, given the similarities with 'Third Week In The Chelsea' and
the references to 'losing direction' (which make more sense when in the context
of a band named after a mode of transport). The music, however, is much tougher
than 'Chelsea', sounding more like 'Feel So Good' though not quite as tight
(and with a heavily rambling instrumental section). It's a good song well
played, though, with Creach getting something to do other than screech.
Bo Carter's 'Want You To Know' is a lesser song, a simple
gutbucket blues livened a little by some heavy drumming and some bouncy violin
work. With barely any lines, this is the kind of song you learn early while
trying to master an instrument - and then never play again once you've got the
hang of it.
Rev Davis is back again for 'Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and
Burning', extended by Hot Tuna into an eight minute showstopper. A more
overtly Christian song than the others, it's loosely about the importance of
faith and how it can never be taken for granted. An unusual song which isn't
quite heavy enough to rock or melancholy enough to be 'pure' blues, it does
suffer from Hot Tuna's worst excesses of dragging out a good idea to double its
natural length but the guitar-drum interplay in particular is rather good.
Never Happen
No More' is the shortest track on
the record at 3:42 and sounds more like the first album, an acoustic blues by a
blues guitarist named 'Blind Blake'** that takes a full 90 seconds for the
vocals to kick in and doesn't even go anywhere interesting then. Jack's bass is
at last the rumble of old, though, and this song is the sort of thing he can
really get his teeth into.
The album ends with the whopping ten minute 'Come Back Baby', a favourite
of Jorma's that he'd been playing with the Airplane throughout most of their
career and once recorded with them for 'Surrealistic Pillow'. You can see why
Lightnin' Hopkins' song should have fascinated Jorma so: it's hypnotic riff and
relentless urgent lyrics are very much rock and roll ** years early and the
template is loose enough that the song can be performed in a variety of ways.
This is the 'slow' version, stretched out past breaking point, compared to the
short and snappy fast-paced Airplane one. The song will be heavy going for any
Airplane not deeply steeped in the blues but is one of the best things on the
album, with a nicely tough gritty feel to it.
Overall, then, 'First Pull Up, Then Pull Down'
is an interesting album - not exactly essential but with more of a 'flavour' of
Hot Tuna than the first LP and clearly released as a more 'serious' career
trajectory. Jorma shines as brightly as ever and Papa John is at his best and
anyone who enjoys Jorma's bluesier material in the Airplane could do a lot
worse than give this album a listen.
(Grunt/RCA, October 1972)
Filthy Funky/No More Country
Girls/Don't Tell It To No One/Mother's Day/Walking The Tou Tou//Everyone Wants My
Good Thing/Far Out/Give Me An Hour In My Garden (And I'll Show You How To Plant
A Rose)/Time Out For Sex/Up In The Valley
"There
ain[t no country girl no more - think they all done got hip!"
Papa
John's second is a typically wide-ranging mix of blues, rock, funk, folk, blues
and jazz that will either thrill or confuse Airplane fans. Though nowhere near
the fiddle player's best work, it is perhaps the best introduction for curious
Airplane fans, without as many throwbacks to Papa John's roaring twenties youth
and with the bonus of a Hot Tuna guest appearance on the track 'Walking The Tou
Tou' (also played by the Airplane in concert in 1972). The songs are also
slightly more 'complete' than usual, thanks to the presence of lyricist Roger
Spotts, who collaborated with Papa John and Grace on the Airplane's 'Milk
Train' the same year. Many of these songs are in a similar vein, which is
really odd to be honest with the by now fifty-five-year-old milking the
euphemisms of 'Rose Garden' and the not-even-that-covered-up 'Time Out For Sex'
for all they're worth. Neither are quite as convincing or as memorable as 'Milk
Train' but both are OK. Instead the album highlight is the most retro song on
the album, the charming 'No More Country Girls', a wistful Hot Tuna-style blues
with jazz overtones which really suits Papa John's world-weary vocal and with
guest harmonica by the nearest to a contemporary to ever appear on a Creach
album: Harmonica Fats aka Harvey Blackston (a mere decade younger - but till
twenty-odd years older than the Airplane at the time). Yes there's plenty to
love on this album, but also more trying fiddle instrumentals or
near-instrumentals than normal which will try even the patience of an Airplane
fan. Also, as hard and as funky as the band try to be they don't quite achieve
it as well as on later Papa John albums: this is one of those albums that just
isn't quite 'filthy' enough.
(HT): Burgers
(1972)............................................................................
Hot
Tuna "Burgers"
(**,
*** 1972)
True Religion/Highway Song/99 Year
Blues/Sea Child/Keep On Truckin'/Water Song/Ode For Billy Dean/Let Us Get
Together Right Down Here/Sunny Day Strut (H)
"We
see each other in confusion, wonder why we came today"
Released hot on the heels of the Airplane's
last long player, 'Burgers' - the third Hot Tuna album but their first studio
set - is very much intended as the release of a band going places and there's a
lot less rambling and a lot more musicianship packed into these nine songs. The
line-up is much the same for once, although sadly Will Scarlett on harmonica
has bailed out (perhaps only four could fit into the car depicted on the front
cover?!) Recording in the more forgiving, finessed constraints of the studio
Hot Tuna don't have to play quite so loud so much of the time and at times
sound like a completely different band to the first two albums, more concerned
with the lyrics than the instrumental jams around it. For all the softer
sounds, however, 'Burgers' still comes with the same heavy undisciplined roar
of most of 'Silver', even the ballads. Part of this is the presence of Papa
John who plays on everything - whether suitable or not - partly it's the
presence of so many songs based around riffs compared to before and partly
because someone in the mixing desk has finally discovered that, yes, the
Airplane were right and Jack really does sound better when his bass is up
LOUD!!!
This is Jorma's album, though, the greatest
showcase yet for his talents and he shows off all sorts of skills we didn't
know he had before - he doesn't warble these songs, he sings them cleanly; his
guitar doesn't just fly in fast sparks like the days of old, his more careful
acoustic picking is every bit as good; best of all his songs reveal a major
development in his songwriting. Jorma puts a lot more energy and passion into
this record than he did on 'Long John', with a full six songs to his name. Most
of these are variations on the bluesy-rocky hybrids Jorma's best known for but
some of these tracks represent a real development in his songwriting: 'Highway
Song' and 'Water Song' are the start of an interest in folk-rock that will for
a time rival blues as the lynchpin of the band. 'Sea Child' however is the
album's best moment, a song that manages to make peace with the 'old' Jefferson
sound and takes it a whole new prog rock level, the equal of anything the
Starship will go on to do. This being the Tuna there are several bits of
gristle in this burger again - blues covers that don't really go anywhere and a
closing instrumental that once again would have been all the better with words
. For the most part, though, 'Burgers' is a more than decent meal and while
'Tuna' and 'Burgers' might not seem like the most obvious bedfellows (why does
this album have such an odd name?!) they result in one of the band's most
successful and consistent LPs, one with more character and flavour than
anything the Airplane could offer at the very end.
The album starts with 'True Religion', a Jorma original that sounds
like it could easily be an old blues song. Starting with a neat 30 seconds of
his lone acoustic playing, it's immediately clear that this album has a very
different sound to the last one. The repetitive lyrics about waiting to die
aren't the song's best feature ('I take the pill from under my head, Jesus
gonna take up my dying bed'), but the musical stomp - not that far removed from
Jack's title track for 'Long John Silver' - is very good. The lyrics suggests
that it wasn't only Grace and Paul who were doing a bit of bible-bashing in
this period either.
'Highway
Song' is one of the last
productions to benefit from the Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra, the 'San
Francisco Supergroup' made up of various members of the Airplane, Dead and CSNY
families. This time it's David Crosby guesting on a folk-rock song that's
dressed up with a fierce beat from the rhythm section and a fight between Papa
John and two screeching Jormas. For all that, this is a sweet little song
that's musically similar to 'Trial By Fire' but with much more hopeful lyrics
about having new destinations to travel to and enjoying the moment 'not
worrying about tomorrow'.
'99 Year
Blues' is one of the album's
lesser moments, an acoustic hop by Julius David that rather plods compared to
the better material elsewhere on this record. Once again this sounds like the
'twinkly bits' from 'Trial By Fire' and has Jorma mis-cast as a murderer,
'shooting at everyone I don't like at all'. Perhaps they should have murdered
the violinist as well: this isn't one of Papa John's better moments.
'Sea Child', however, is tremendous,
a classy song that really makes the most of the studio. Jorma's familiar jagged
Airplane style is matched by Jack's glorious resounding bass and Piazza's best
drumming (he's clearly more of a rock drummer than a blues one) and suddenly
the 'old' sound doesn't seem so bad after all. The lyrics deal, naturally
enough, with the last days of the Airplane 'everyone sat in their prisons'.
Jorma's surprisingly mystical lyrics really capture Paul Kantner's spirit,
although the song is more obsessed with the deep ocean than outer space. A
terrific jamming session raises the song to new heights, though, until Jorma
finally crashes in with a much delayed final verse that along with the
Airplaney backing seems to offer some pleasing reconciliation with Jorma's
past: 'Through your hair, across my eyes, the twilight shatters song' surprise,
reminds me once again how nice it is to be with you'. The result is either one
of Hot Tuna's greatest songs or the Airplane classics that got away.
Bob Carleton's 'Keep On Truckin' is a fun but inconsequential
number about a 'mama' who 'rocks my blues away'. The band presumably chose it
because of their own blues-rock hybrid roots and Papa John in particular is
away on this song's tight ensemble groove playing. This is a minor rather than
major work, though, with an odd second verse about the narrator's girl
'smelling of fish' - perhaps she'd bought the Jefferson Airplane record
'Bark'?!
'Water Song' sounds more like the
calmer Hot Tuna of the first record, a lovely flowing folk-rock number from
Jorma that's really pretty. However, like many instrumentals this one would
have been better still with some words attached and sounds like its crying out
for them what with the often repeated song structure. Casady's bass is great to
hear, though, booming across the speakers the way it should always have been.
'Ode For
Billy Dean'
is the bluesiest moment on the record, not unlike the sound of Big Brother and
the Holding Company, although its another Jorma original. I can't find any
reference to who Billy Dean is** but he sounds like a friend Jorma knew from
way back, encouraged to sign up to a war he died in (given the period probably
Vietnam). Jorma seems to be suffering from 'survivor's guilt', asking him
departed friend to effectively keep him honest and make sure that he has a
purpose in life rather than merely surviving. Hot Tuna play out of their skins
on another album highlight, enjoying the paranoid atmosphere - especially
Piazza who relishes another chance to sound like a member of the Airplane and
Jorma who turns in some exhilarating extended guitar solos.
If you've been wondering where the Reverend
Gary Davies has gone, do not despair for the old blues writer pops up on his
fourth song covered by the band, the slight but nicely hippie-ish 'Let Us Do Our Living Right Down
Here'. With little more than the chorus repeated over and over this two
minute dance doesn't have much time to get going but is clearly a message that
resonates with a band that did more than most others to fight against petty
human systems.
The album then ends on a rather down note with 'Sunny Day Strut'. While this
Kaukonen instrumental starts off quite happy, it gets more and more tense as
more musicians join in (especially an outrageous Casady bass line that nearly
splits the song in two with every change of note). Again this song seems to be
crying out for words (just imagine a vocal part where Jorma's electric part
goes), with some very interesting chord changes that would have been the basis
for a very interesting song.
Still, even if 'Burgers' needs flipping from
time to time it does show off something of a well balanced meal of an album:
instead of concentrating on blues to the exclusion of all else there's a good
equilibrium between the three basic food groups: rock, folk and blues and
Airplane fans who loved Jorma's guitar rattle and Jack's teeth-shaking bass
will find much more to their taste across this album. I'd have liked a couple
more excellent songs to turn this album into a first class gourmet meal, but
'Burgers' is still an excellent release that's loved by quite a handful of the
faithful who bought it at the time (or on its first much belated CD release in
2012) and deserves to be loved by many more.
"Thirty
Seconds Over Winterland"
(Grunt/RCA Victor, April 1973)
Have You Seen The Saucers?/Feel So
Good/Crown Of Creation//When The Earth Moves Again/Milk Train/Trial By
Fire/Twilight Double Leader
"So
now I go to where I come from, now I go home to the sun"
And
so it ends, the final Jefferson Airplane release of new material until 1989,
not with a bang but with a toaster. What's that? Why yes I did say toaster -
for this under-rated live album's biggest claim to fame is surely it's very
Jeffersony front cover full of flying toasters with angel wings soaring past a
cloudy sky. I have no idea why the cover fits, but it does and it's not the
sort of thing any other right minded company would do is it? Well, actually,
that's what computer firm Berkley argued when they invented a very popular
screensaver of a toaster with wings in 1989 and they said in court when the
Airplane sued in 1994 that they had no idea that this obscure album with the
weird cover art existed. Understandably the judge agreed with Berkley and also
ticked the Airplane off for not copyright registering their cover - their
official response understandably said that they didn't think anybody else would
ever think of using the same idea but them!
Despite
the title, a good proportion of this second live Airplane hails from a gig
taped in August 1972 at Chicago's Auditorium Theatre a month before the
Winterland show (the band's last gig ever until the 1980s). It features the
Airplane in disarray, on their last tour before taking off for goodness knows
what and with David Freiberg and Johnny Barbata added to the line-up in place
of Marty and Spencer/Joey, plus a guest spot from Papa John Creach and his
flying fiddle. The band sound a little sluggish at times and group clearly lack
the spirit and brotherhood of 'Bless It's Little Pointed Head' (not to mention
the sheer power and oompah) and you do wonder why the band decided to record
such a sad and less than perfect moment of their history for prosperity. The
sound too is terrible, the band playing echoey arenas that make them sound as
if they're playing down a tunnel (or possibly an aircraft hangar?!) The fact
that all the best Airplane favourites appeared on that earlier album also put
many fans off owning this forgotten LP. However, it is worth having despite all
that, with Jorma on especially good form as he grooves out on an extended
eleven minute 'Feel So Good' that's less tight but just as intense as the
'Bark' version and a great 'Trial By Fire' where the rough live edges really
suit the song. Paul, though, sounds like he's having an off day, struggling
through his recent sci-fi material and Grace gets barely anything to do, with
just a fiery 'Milk Train' featuring her lead vocal. I understand that the band
struggled to re-create the songs that used to use the Marty-Grace-Paul dynamic
so well, but it seems a shame that only one song here ('Crown Of Creation')
dates back further than the last couple of years back when so many interesting
older songs were still in the set-list. The full concert was later released in
2007 as 'Last Flight' ('Thirty Seconds' having only ever been released on CD
once, briefly, at the start of the 1990s) and arguably the wrong songs were
dropped from the set: the folk song 'Blind John', an early version of 'Diana'
from 'Sunfighter' and any of the fiery Papa John improvisations would all have
been more interesting than what made the album, if only because they are
exclusive to these run of shows. Also, 'Eat Starch Mom' ought to be here, if
only for the amount of toaster-puns reviewers like me could have had. A rather
insipid version of 'Twilight Double
Leader' seems a particularly anti-climatic place for the Airplane's career to
end after so many ups and downs along the way. Over all, then, slightly
overcooked and occasionally burnt, but if you use your loaf and realise the
Airplane mainly did this album to make bread/dough, adjusting your expectations
in the process, you'll soon realise that this record needs to be part of your
staple diet and isn't actually anything like as crusty as crusty reviewers
claim it is.
"Last
Flight"
(Charly, Recorded September 1972, Mixed
April 1973, 000042Released February 2007)
Introduction/Somebody To Love/Twilight
Double Leader/Wooden Ships/Milk Train/Blind John/Come Back Baby/Son Of
Jesus/Long John Silver/When The Earth Moves Again/Papa John's Down Home
Blues/Eat Starch Mom/John's Other/Trial By Fire/Law Man/Have You Seen The
Saucers?/Aerie (Gang Of Eagles)/Feel So Good/Crown Of Creation/Walking The Tou
Tou/Diana > Volunteers
"Gotta
move out on the highway, make this moment last, till it closes with the future
and evens out the past"
And
so the Airplane flies off into the sunset, with a complete gig from the same
final tour sampled on the 'Thirty Seconds Over Winterland' tour. The set is a
useful means of hearing more of the band from one of their lesser known moments
when they had David Freiberg doing Marty's parts, Johnny Barbata filling in for
Spencer/Joey and Papa John Creach on occasional fiddle. This line-up of the
band clearly aren't as tight or as well drilled as the Jeffersons just gone but
they're still on generally good form, especially on the noisy rockers which
thrash wildly away without any need for subtlety. This may be a noise, in contrast
to the glorious shades and hues of the previous years, but it's an enjoyable
infectious noise at least with everyone sounding pleased to be there (unlike
some shows from 1969). The ballads suffer a little more, Grace attacking
'Wooden Ships' as if it's another rock epic and a brave stab at a harder-edged
'Crown Of Creation' doesn't quite come off. Three performances by Papa John is
perhaps two too many (maybe even three) and we soon hear why 'Long John Silver'
is such a rarely heard album live, with a rather generous helping of six songs
from the record, of which only three made the original album ('Aerie' is the
best of the 'new' songs, with an unfocussed 'Eat Starch Mom' and a ramshackle
'Son Of Jesus' the worst of the set). There's also not much Jorma - well, not
much 'new' Jorma as so much was heard on the original LP, with only a rather
clunky 'Come Back Baby' in addition to what are still the album highlights
'Trial By Fire' and an epic 'Feel So Good'. By contrast this song's
semi-exclusive (or at least rarity) 'Blind John' is fabulous, Paul and Grace
reprising the now rather apt traditional folk tune they first played on
Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart's 'Rolling Thunder' album, with Papa John the
fiddle player on tow (though for the record his eyesight is just fine). There's
also a preview of 'Diana', a song later to be split in two for Paul and Grace's
'Sunfighter' album, although it's a
fragment rather than anything to get too excited about. Overall I certainly
wouldn't recommend this set as your first Jefferson live experience - with the
thought that if it is it will probably be your last. However the long goodbye
suits the Airplane, with the band half-returning to their beginnings at the end
when they played hard and fast and simple and got by on sheer charisma as
opposed to daring or brilliance. With a track listing far more varied than any
other Airplane live album, this is a treat for long term fans and anyone who
liked 'Winterland' should love this longer extension of the album.
Grace
Slick "Manhole"
(Grunt/RCA, 1973)
Jay/Theme From The Movie
'Manhole'//??Come Again Toucan??/It's Only Music/Better Lying Down/ Epic (#38)
"Seemed
like it might be the right thing to say at the time, and I'd probably say it
again if you give me just a taste more wine..."
Not so much a 'solo' album as the fourth in the
run of Grace/Paul/sometimes David Freiberg solo projects, 'Manhole' is also the
last of the 'Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra' various artists projects
with appearances from David Crosby and a few names from the Jefferson past. **
Celebrated at the time as the flowering of one of the 60s greatest talents, the
record's strong response seems to have caught Grace by surprise (she was
already in the middle of Jefferson Starship's debut LP by the time of release).
I've always been surprised by the high affection felt by fans for this album
over the years too: in many ways its the heaviest going Jefferson-LP of the lot,
with one near-enough side-long song that doesn't go anywhere and one song (the
Kantner-Freiberg co-write ** 'It's Only Music') that doesn't even feature Grace
on the song at all (even on backup vocals). None of the songs here are anywhere
close to the heights Grace had so far reached with the Airplane or on the other
three LPs the trio had worked on together (although 'Epic #38', another
Kantner-led song, comes closest). While I've yet to hear a recording of Grace's
singing being anything less than special, this album isn't the specialist.
While I'm all in favour of fans liking it because they get a whole LP (nearly)
of Grace, the truth she doesn't sing for long periods of the record and the
long-delayed follow-up 'Dreams' (her masterpiece from 1980) reveals much more
of the 'real' Grace. Compared to her usual high standards, whoever she sings
and writes with, there's about as much 'art' in this album as a 'manhole'
cover.
That said, there are certain things 'Manhole'
offers fans that you can't get to hear anywhere else. Who else but Grace would
be as daring as to release a film score to a movie that doesn't exist? (The
15-minute title track). Who else but Grace would sing part of said movie
soundtrack in Spanish? (remember, it was only two years earlier Grace was
singing a n entire song in German!) Who else but Grace would use an album title
so overlaid with meanings ('Manhole' is actually 'about' a manhole cover, as
much as its about anything, and mankind's ability to pull himself out of a
darkened hole and point towards the stars but I'm sure I'm not the first fan to
assume that the ever-provocative Slick was making a feminist/sexual point).
Nowhere else can you hear Grace wordlessly soaring across a delightful acoustic
guitar backing, David Crosby-style, as she does on 'Jay'. Nowhere else can you
hear the raucous hi-fi-shredding laugh she gives at the start of 'Come Again
Toucan' (which still has the power to make me jump, even when I know it's
coming). 'Better Lying Down' - which is a song about sex, via dancing - isn't
the only place where you can hear Grace singing about one of her favourite
themes but does make good on the sketchy promise of her earlier 'Fishman',
portraying her as some of saloon-bar singer. And nowhere else can you be fooled
by the many false endings of 'Epic #38',
a finale which delights in making you get up to turn the record off only to
have to sit down again when it bleeding begins up again (and nowhere else do
you get to hear bagpipes as part of the Jefferson sound). 'Manhole' is a fun
album, which bends the ideas of what the world was expecting from a first Grace
Slick solo album (not least because she only sings lead on 5/7s of the record!)
It's meant to be a 'second division' number - the sort of LP you take to
parties to say 'have you heard this?' (not that I did at any of my parties - my
friend's record players were too clogged up with Take That and Spice Girls;
needless to say I didn't stay very long at any of them). It's not meant to be a
fully fledged artistic statement, or the launch of a solo career, or anything
but fun. Inevitably 'Manhole' is less fulfilling than the Grace-involved albums
either side of it, but sometimes a snack is as good as a dessert...
The record begins with 'Jay', a lovely lilting peaceful, tranquil,
blissful little instrumental where Grace rolls her voice around like an
instrument over some nice sparring acoustic guitars. Presumably the song was
inspired by someone of that name (or perhaps the bird) but as an instrumental
we don't have enough clues: it clearly wasn't written about the Jay that I
knew, or it would loud and disruptive. While evidence of what a fine singer
Grace can be, this sounds more like the beginning to a nice song than a nice
song itself and ultimately seems like a waste of 2:45 on a short 37 minute
album that can't afford to give precious minutes away.
The title track, the 'Theme From Manhole' is a really odd song: not
because of the 15 minute length (Grace's songs had been getting longer and
longer during her time with the Airplane), but because it uses that time so
oddly. The song doesn't slide us into the track, it gets heavy from the opening
second and only later flowers into a prettier orchestral piece. Grace sounds
terrific singing in Spanish (rolling her 'rrs') but, really, even the words in
English don't make much sense. David Crosby and Paul Kantner pop up on the
chorus ('Give her the sun, she wants to run!') which appear to make this song a
feminist statement, but mere seconds ago we were talking about love and how
'the more your heart sings the more it will show you freedom'. An oddball song
that fades to a full-stop several times before going again, this piece of music
has some lovely moments (generally when the orchestra cuts in, particularly
9:45 to 10:45) but really doesn't tie together and really shouldn't have lasted
a full 15 minutes (the longest studio song in this book).
'Come Again
Toucan' may start with that
blood-curdling laugh ('rrrRRRRRRRRRRRRIBA!'), designed to jolt the
listener at the start of the second side, but otherwise is the most
audience-pleasing song on the album. Grace is all things to all men and is
already having second thoughts about her relationship with Paul, but she stays
out of loyalty, the distractions of a 'taste of wine' in the high life and the
mood-swings that find her 'crawling like a baby' back to where she knows is
familiar. This story is inevitably going to end in tears and this is the one
song on the album with the tension that Grace uses so well so often, with a
turbulent backing track that keeps trying to stop to take a rest, only to be
urgently pushed along when Grace has another change of heart. Future writing
partner Craig Chaquico** is excellent here on his third extra-curricular
Jefferson performance before joining Starship and is already a great foil for
Grace's soaring vocals. All in all, one of the two songs you need to own this
album for.
'It's Only
Music' is a David Frieberg
tribute to the healing power of music, with vocal 'assistance' from Paul
Kantner. The second of the only three vocals he'll have during his time as a
'Jefferson', it must have surprised him greatly to learn that it wouldn't be
appearing on a 'trio' album this time but Grace's first solo record. In fact,
you wonder where Grace is - this song badly needs her higher harmonies (both
David and Paul are basses who try to out-lower each other) and she's suit it
well. Musically this is non-descript stuff which only really gets going on the
fiery guitar solo, but lyrically this is a nice nod towards the best art form
there is, with the lovely self-deprecating thought 'Even though we know we'll
never get the song quite right, still we sing it just to hear it'.
'Better
Lying Down'
is another oddball song, although at least Grace bothers to show for this one.
A Billie Holiday spoof of the sort Janis Joplin revelled in doing, Grace's
vocal isn't quite right for it: she barks out the song where Janis would purr
(and for the record that's not a put down: I adore both voices equally, in all
their multi-shaded glory and find Janis similar 'Turtle Blues' another song
hard to love, but she does suit the genre better). It's also hard to follow,
what with the pianist always one step behind her and a lyric about sex healing
all ills that keeps stepping outside its main drift to offer the listener an
'aside'. Give this one a miss.
The record then ends with the grand finale 'Epic #38'. This Kantner-led
track starts well enough, with a crowd-rousing anthem about how the hippie
dream is still on track despite the small returns ('Remember where we were just
ten years ago!' he pleads). The song reaches a natural conclusion on the
triumphant lines 'the world will be ready for love!' And then an odd thing
happens. A swirling organ keeps the song going after a natural pause and Paul
and Grace chime back in for a lovely imaginative folky passage about what the
future could look like: unpressurised children 'lazing on a hazy afternoon'
that sports one of Paul's better utopia lyrics. 'Do you feel they sometimes run
you crazy?' he sighs for the umpteenth time, building to another peak of hope
and joy. The song really ought to end here at the five minute mark, but they're
still not done. A sudden flurry of strings cuts in through the silence and a
quick guitar battle takes us through another 90 seconds before the song,
clumsily, fades out rather than take up one of its many natural 'endings'.
Strange, but the main part of the song is sound, being almost the last time we
hear Kantner so sure in the hippie ethos (the next time we hear sing about it
directly, he's angrily sighing that the moment has passed on 'I Want To See
Another World' from 'Red Octopus').
Overall, then, 'Manhole' is a real oddity. Many
fans seem to have fallen for it for its sheer quirkiness and the fact that no
other album has ever been released that sounds anything like it. I'm not always
convinced that this is a good thing: the Jeffersons always skirted with being
self-indulgent but this is one of the few cases where one of them (or a few of
them in this case, whatever the credits say) falls into so many traps at once.
However, 'Manhole' isn't a worthless record either: its frequently beautiful,
usually inventive and in 'Come Again Toucan' contains one of Grace's better
loosely autobiographical songs. Come to this album expecting a laugh and a bit
of fun, rather than the long lost missing piece of your Jefferson jigsaw, and
you might find you like it; however 'Manhole' is an aperitif to the main
course. A very interesting aperitif it has to be said, but an aperitif
nonetheless, marking a step backwards from even 'Baron Von Tollbooth'.
(Grunt/RCA, 1973)
I See The Light/Letter To The North
Star/Easy Now/Corners Without Exits/Day To Day Out The Window Blues//In The
Kingdom/Seaweed Strut/Living Just For You/Soliloquy For Two/Sally Where'd You
Get Your Liquor From?
"Paradise I'm living for each and
every day, about the crossroads of the past nothing more to say, there's good
times now but we can't see our way"
Like the luminous rodent of the title, Hot Tuna
were never stable for very long and their lab-rat organisation was dealt a
severe blow when Papa John Creach decided to bed in with the Jefferson Starship
full-time. Rather than replace him, Hot Tuna decided to carry on as a power
trio of Jorma, Jack and Sammy. Like many bands reduced to power trios (Johnny
Kidd and the Pirates, The Who) Hot Tuna decided to plug the gap in their sound
by sounding louder and heavier. 'Phosphorescent Rat' is the most
straightforwardly rock of the Hot Tunas albums and is probably the most
accessible for curious Airplane fans looking to see what Jorma and Jack got up
to, with just the one token blues cover added right at the end. There are two
re-actions to this approach: on the plus side 'Phosphorescent Rat' has a nice consistency
of sound, Sammy sounds a more natural fit as a rock drummer than a blues one
and Jack of course was always one of the rock scene's greatest bass players.
Jorma, able to fit many styles, comes up with several of his better songs which
alternate between gentle jaunts and killer songs that yet again return to the
dissolution of the Airplane. The negative side is that Hot Tuna have lost their
identity a bit - the things that made them both weird and weirdly special.
While the band perform their own brand of rock and roll very well they're no
longer the quirky band they once were and their brand of Tuna-rock is now one
that's competing with the big boys rather than the only fish swimming in a very
selective pond. Both approaches have their merits by the way - 'Phosphorescent
Rat' isn't necessary the best Hot Tuna album because it doesn't break down so
many barriers but it's easy the Tuna album I keep returning to the most, full
of some excellent accessible songwriting and a palatable mix of the raw and produced,
with the funky backing tracks often embedded into an orchestral accompaniment.
The best thing to say about this album is that
Jorma's on a creative roll. Having proved that he can fill up two-thirds of an
album on his own for the first time he comes close to getting the complete set
here with just 90 seconds of this album not his. Taking his cue from his best
songs of the decade so far for different bands ('Third Week In The Chelsea' and
'Sea Child'), Jorma pours out even more of his soul here instead of returning
to his usual style of writing about 'other' people (he may have been influenced
by Paul and Grace's recent batch of songs which they too are having their
biggest successes for a long time with). Throighout the record the theme of
uncertainty crops up again and again. The opening song 'I See The Light' is a
turbulent powerful number about this period being a 'good time' but Jorma is so
hit by worry about his band and his past that 'I can't see the light'. 'In The
Kingdom' has Jorma 'living blind in one-eyed land, amongst those kings I
thought were grand' - possibly about his doubts over his own material before
finding that, yes, he does indeed have what it takes to write songs of the
equal of Paul, Grace and Marty. 'Corners From Exits' is the sound of a man
hemmed into a corner, 'when the time you doubt to wonder is slipping by your
side'. 'Day To Day By The Window Blues' tries to spoof this bad mood ('Your
favourite horse has turned to glue!') but is only partly successful. Not until
the near-closing pretty ballad 'Soliloquy For Two' does the album find some
sort of peace and serenity. The other key theme of the record - taken straight
from 'Sea Child' - is water, apt for a band named after a fish and perhaps here
to differentiate them with all that 'high flying' malarkey of the Airplane (the
'old' band tried to reach new druggy heights but this one is literally an
'underground' band - underground in the sense that it's set in the sea).
'Almost drowned at sea without a trace of living that's to be' Jorma wails on
'Soliloquy', while the album's token guitar instrumental is named after
seaweed, the opening song has a life journey as not a long and winding road but
'an endless sea' and another song looks for direction from the North Star (the
traditional navigation point for sailors that are lost). Once again the record
seems to be deliberately programmed into an 'unhappy' side (the first) and a
'happy' side (the second), with the differences between the two even more
extreme than on 'Burgers'. There is, by the way, no mention of rats - just as
the last record had no mention of fast food!
'I See The
Light' features two Jorma's
wailing thanks to the wonders of double tracking and they make for a most
delightful noise, while Piazza plays some of his finest drumming here. Jorma's
bitter lyric is a 'Where Have All The Good Times Gone?' for another age,
Jorma's narrator turning his back on the past now that he's made his decision
to split from the Airplane, so caught up in his quest for paradise that he's overlooked
how great things are in the present. The result is one of the finest Hot Tuna
songs, heavy and loud but with a deftness of touch about the lyrics and
featuring one of the band's all-time jammathons.
'Letter To
The North Star' is prettier, Jorma's narrator content that a right decision has
been made and that 'summertime is here'. A folkier, lighter song than normal,
'North Star' lacks a catchy chorus to make it truly memorable and unlike the
narrator whose finally found his way rather drifts past aimlessly. Still it
comes as welcome reprieve between two of Hot Tuna's heaviest songs and proves
that the band can do more than just play loud.
'Easy Now' is the most Airplaney
song on the album, based around a heavy relentless riff played en masse by Jack
and Jorma. The guitarist is back writing about his life in terms of the ocean
again, moved by each and every current: 'This time tomorrow who knows where
I'll be - writing by the sea?' he asks, before the song turns into something of
an American travelogue. Kaukonen's guitar solo really flies on this one, loud
even by Airplane standards, and there's a catchy riff but somehow this song
doesn't stand out quite as much as 'I See The Light'.
'Corners
Without Exits'
is another album highlight, with an orchestra added to embellish the band's sound. Jorma's narrator
is trying to offer words of advice to those, like him recently, in trouble:
'When the way is busy and the way is hard to see will you remember?' he asks,
reminding his listeners that they've been in impossible situations many times
in their lives and have always found a way through - and so you will again
eventually, by the last verse in fact (where 'The broad horizon's ready and
your world has opened wide'). There's even a dreamy middle eight that sits at a
counterpart to the rest of the song, just the way we at the AAA like them. The
result is another charming song about uncertainty written and performed by a
man at the peak of his powers, with a confidence like never before. Superb.
'Day To Day
Out Of The Window Blues' isn't so much a blues song as a novelty rock song with
blues-spoofing lyrics. When hemmed in with nowhere left to go, try jumping out
the window is Jorma's rather odd solution to the world's problems (not recommended
unless you live on the ground floor!) The chorus comes after a comic list of
errors: Santa comes and leaves nothing except a 'stocking that covers your
head', with Jorma's, umm, not AAA-endorsed solution to poverty being to rob a
bank! The result is an oddball song that isn't meant for repeated listening but
is very funny.
'In The
Kingdom' is another of Jorma's
prettiest songs. After so many years wrapped up inside his own worries someone
new has come into his world and opened his eyes to the way human life should be
lived: 'it's made for having fun!' He's also discovered that he really can be a
success even though he's left the 'valley of the kings', no longer a 'blind man
in one-eyed land' and vows that 'with you by my wide the tears that dried have all
died away'. Sweet!
'Seaweed
Strut' is one of Jorma's better
solo instrumentals. Dare I say it, it's rather more interesting than his better
known and widely loved 'Embryonic Journey', whilst sharing a similar flowing
chord structure and showing off Jorma's talents as an acoustic guitar player.
This song really does cry out to be an instrumental too: it's not just that the
band are too lazy to put words to it.
'Living Just
For You' is a unique experiment:
Hot Tuna's now typical full throttle sound accompanied by some steel drums!
This rock-calypso hybrid is something of an acquired taste although the lyrics
are rather good once again, another song about how life is so much better when
it's shared.
Soliloquy
For Two' is a final blast of
optimism. The fog that had once buried the beach has now lifted and the
narrator, once nearly drowned at sea on life's treacherous waves, has been
rescued. This song isn't quite as pretty or memorable as 'Corners Without
Exits' or 'In The Kingdom' and the second dose of orchestra is less successful
than the first, but it's still lovely to hear the often-troubled blues singer
so happy, pleased to assume that 'we'll be together all our lives'.
Just to remind us that Hot Tuna are a blues
band first and foremost, the albums end with the final of five covers of songs
by the Reverend Gary Davies. 'Sally
Where's You Hide Your Liquor?' is a brief folk dance accompanied by
Sammy playing the spoons!
It's an odd end to what's actually the most
accessible and immediately likeable of all the Hot Tuna albums. While others
have strong moments and might even be better from a pure
you-can't-get-thus-anywhere-else point of view, 'Phosphorescent Rat' is a
pretty neat compromise between a record that needs to be commercial (this was a
comparatively strong seller too) and a record that still has heart and
character. Had this record come out in any other year we'd be busy recommending
you buy this instead of whatever varied mess the Starship had come up with -
but as it happens their debut 'Dragonfly' is about the only record of theirs
that's arguably better. What a fab year for the Jeffersons - and what a shame
that inevitably, it couldn't last, with the next album heavily delayed and
featuring yet another line-up change...
"Seemed
like it might be the right thing to say at
the time, and I'd probably say it again if you
Marty
Balin in Bodacious DF "Bodacious
DF"
(RCA Victor, October 1973)
Drifting/Good Folks/The
Witcher*//Roberta*/Second Hand Information/Drivin' Me Crazy/Twixt Two Worlds*
* = Marty Balin writing credit
"It's
a nightmare story on a late night show"
Given
that Marty was such a star in his day, it surprised many that it took a full
three years from 'Volunteers' in 1970 for the singer to bounce back with
another record. It surprised many more that with Marty usually more comfortable
working on his own he made a group record, forming a new band out of the ashes
of Grootna, a promising San Franciscan band who never quite got round to making
a record before splitting up despite being heralded as the next new thing.
Alongside Marty singing were bassist Mark Ryan (once a member of Quicksilver
Messenger Service alongside the Starship's David Freiberg), Guitarist Vic Smith
and Keyboard player Charlie Hickox (who'll stay in touc with Marty long enough
to get a co-writing credit on 'St Charles' from 'Spitfire'), who co-write most
of the rest of the songs between them. Marty clearly enjoyed being the most
famous member of the band and the focal point of all the attention again, but
considering that he was by far the most famous member he seems to have little
to do with the nuts and bolts of the band. Bodacious DF only ever made one
album, which while promising and undeniably pleasant is more than a little
short - on songs, on running time, some might say ideas. Marty only co-writes
three of the album's seven songs despite being by far the biggest name in the
band and doesn't sing on every song either - which seems an odd thing to do on
a debut album launched to much fuss and after such a long gap. Marty really
needed to get this album right to regain his career following; alas this is one
of those albums that only get things half right.
Nothing
here is bad. All the songs are pleasant and easy on the ear and Marty is on
great voice throughout. Fans of Jefferson Starship's most mainstream album 'Red
Octopus' will find much to admire (this is very like that album in fact, heavy
on some excellent ballads and some rather rockers, but with the Grace and Paul
cameos and the instrumentals removed). That automatically puts this much
overlooked album ahead of certain better known Jefferson LPs like 'Earth' and
'Winds Of Change' and this album is arguably on a par with 'Octopus' and 'Long
John Silver' in the great Jefferson pantheon of collected works. Easy listening
it may be, but there's nothing as horrendously misguided or as dated as most of
Starship's recordings. Then again, this isn't exactly a record that lives long
in the memory with few songs standing out (the non-Marty 'You're Drivin' Me
Crazy', later played on stage with Jefferson Starship, is the closest to a
great song here but it's still a poor man's 'Miracles' with a funkier beat).
Marty's always had the talent to deliver a great LP and in this period - with
three years of finding his head and gathering material - this could have been
the one. Certainly Marty's vocals are great, way above most other pop singers
of his era. Unfortunately this is only a 'good' one - but, hey, at least it
isn't a ghastly one either. The most groundbreaking thing about this record, in
fact, is the cover, which features a shot of the band and friends surrounded by
a fully-dressed frog on a surfboard (no, I don't know why either...)
Jesse
Osbourne's 'Drifting'
has been played, briefly, by Jefferson Airplane during 1970 but Marty left
before the band could put it on record. It's a fair rock-pop song with a cherry
tune and some nice lyrics about being lost but finding your way again which
suits Marty's life story in this period well. I defy anyone to remember how
this song goes after it finished playing, though.
Lonnie
Talbot's 'Good Folks'
is probably the weakest song on the album. It's very early 70s soft-rock,
complete with gospel choir and reggae overtones and nobody here sounds as if
they have anything terribly urgent to say.
Marty
and Vic collaborated on 'The
Witcher', a noisy soul song that Marty obviously liked because he'll
return to it many times over the years (it's the title track of one of his
website-only download albums). Marty's full of magic and wants to lay it on his
missus - but by the time he's used all that energy up shouting he won't have
any left for lovin'.
'Roberta', a
collaboration between the whole band and Jesse Robbins, is a clever blues
pastiche of the sort Hot Tuna were recording in this period. 'Roberta' is a
name used on many a blues songs although the lyrics themselves seem nicked from
Sonny Boy Williamson's 'Eyesight To The
Blind', as used by The Who in their work 'Tommy' ('Got something here can make
a dead man see!')
Hickox's
'Second Hand Information'
is one of the better songs, with Marty's humble narrator trying to work out how
the world works but learning that all the people he used to trust to know
what's happening don't know what's going on either. The most Airplane of the
Bodacious DF songs, this could have slotted in nicely on 'Volunteers'.
The
lovely 'Drivin' Me Crazy'
is a lovely pop ballad by Vic Smith, perfect for Marty's voice. 'How can I love
you if I can't love myself?' asks Marty as he's rescued from depression by
falling in love. This version of the song is much slower than the live version
Jefferson Starship will play in concert and much more suited to Marty's voice.
The
album ends with Marty and Vic's 'Twixt Two Worlds', which sounds like the heavier Hot Tuna of the
end of the decade. A powerful throbbing cod-heavy metal track with a very
Starship style philosophical lyric, it's an odd mix but is played with gusto
and a lot more power than the rest of the album.
Overall,
then, 'Bodacious DF' isn't quite the acclaimed comeback Marty was hoping for,
but the band have promise and in many ways this is the 'Takes Off' of the
Jefferson solo oeuvre, important not solely for what's there but for the
promise you can hear of what's to come. Unfortunately this time this was all
there was: the band split the following year when Marty got the invite to
record 'Caroline' with Jefferson Starship and was enthusiastic enough to rejoin
the band full-time. Given the strong songs Marty would go on to make over the
next four years that was probabloy a good move, but Bodacious DF could have
been up there too. In many ways it's the confidence Marty regains on this
record, after six years of not being in charge of his destiny, that enabled to
make that move in the first place. Not exactly an essential purchase, but
Marty's fans will find much to enjoy.
Joey
Covington "Fat Fandango"
(**, '1973')
Your Heart Is My Heart/Country
Girl/Moonbeam/Mama Neptune//Miss Unaverse/Hideout (A Crook's Best Friend)/Vapor
Lady
"I
didn't know angels had wings until I was twenty-one and I didn't know they
could read until I asked them where I could find a book, she told me via an
invisible pass to the Vatican Library and I said to her 'darling, show me your
scripture!"
Who'd
have guessed that third Airplane drummer Joey Covington would have gone on to
make a solo album, after just one record and two songs with the band? Who'd
have guessed, too, that the memorably named 'Fat Fandango' would go on to
out-sell efforts by Marty the same year and very nearly Grace? As quirky as the
songs on 'Bark' would suggest, whilst being surprisingly listenable, this album
is perfect for the times being caught perfectly on the edge between pop and
prog. The productions are elaborate and lush, not something you could say about
any other Jefferson-related release, but throughout it al Joey seems to be
treating the whole thing as a joke with tongue firmly in cheek, which makes the
mammoth choirs and massive orchestras seem like a bit of a laugh rather than
the just-plain-wrongness they should be. Joey's eccentric singing, which never
sticks to the same key two verses running (what is it with Airplane drummers
and singing? Skip does the same) is tough to take at first, but then this is a
record that doesn't conform to any of the usual rules about making records -
and if that doesn't make this the single most Jeffersony solo album then I
don't know what does! Murder to play (every song is really a 'suite' of several
sections, which suddenly change tempo or key mid-song) and difficult to listen
to, 'Fat Fandango' wins mainly by charm alone but charm it does, sounding like
fellow AAA band 10cc at times, but even more eccentric than that! 'Mama
Neptune' is an appalling blues song and 'Vapor Lady' is an odd overdone prog
rock moment with a synthesiser near- instrumental blasting off into space
(still more interesting than 'Sandalphon' mind...) - unfortunately these two
songs are by far the longest on the album and take up a full quarter of an hour
between them. The other five are rather good though I have to say, with the
opening song 'Your Heart Is My Heart' (though not quite as heartfelt as the
title makes it sound) the very best of a really good bunch. They don't make
record like this anymore, which is just as well because my brain probably
couldn't keep up with much more of this anyhow.
(Grunt/RCA Victor, February 1974)
High Flyin' Bird/Runnin' Round This
World/It's Alright/In The Morning/JPP McStep B Blues//Go To Her/Up Or
Down/Mexico/Have You Seen The Saucers?
"I
understand what I understood before, but loving you has made me understand much
more...The times I've spent with you have been fantastic trips!"
'Early
Flight' is an above-average collection of songs jettisoned during the band's
first five years released as a contract-filler for Grunt while Jefferson
Starship prepared for lift-off. Appearing during the year when such sets were
in vogue (The Who's 'Odds and Ends' was out the same year), 'Early Flight'
features several tracks that the Airplane's contemporaries would have killed
for - it seems amazing to think that such fan favourites as 'High Flyin' Bird'
(a permanent fixture in the band's setlists until their split in 1973), 'Go To
Her' (a Kantner song that sounds like a Balin one, fast-paced and aggressive)
and 'JPP McStep B Blues' (easily the best song of Skip's the band recorded - it
was probably only left in the vaults as he'd already left the band at the time
they made it!) never came out in the Airplane's lifetime. These two songs plus
the Jefferson's only ever non-album single (combining 'Saucers' and 'Mexico')
are all must-haves for Jefferson collectors even though you can find them
easier and more cheaply on various other sets nowadays (most of the songs here
are on the 'Loves You' box set and almost all are on the relevant era CD
re-issues; only the lengthy-jam-with-lyrics 'Up Or Down' is exclusive to this
set and you don't really need it). In fact you really don't need to hear quite
a lot from this album: Jorma, the quiet star of many a Jefferson LP, was
probably right to drop both of his lengthy six-minute songs from this set from
official releases- the afore-mentioned 'Up Or Down' from the band's dying days
was co-written with his brother Peter but isn't much of a song and 'Come Back
Baby' is the only less than brilliant song the Airplane recorded in the magical
year of 1967. Even Hot Tuna would have struggled to make this cod-blues songs
work - the Airplane have no hope, even with Marty doing his best on the former
song. Paul and Marty, though, come out of this album particularly well with
several key early songs that deserved their place on 'Takes Off' and 'Pillow'.
The packaging is excellent too, adding to the self-deflating vibe of 'The Worst
Of Jefferson Airplane' by using pictures of 'dinosaurs' - the band's joke that
they were 'past it' now that they were old enough to have a history to look
back on! Part fan pleasing, part contract fulfilling, it's a shame that some of
the better then-still-unreleased tracks (like 'Things Are Better In The East' and 'Drifting') weren't used instead of the
filler to make a very good album greater - but then outtakes sets don't usually
come with as much quality as this as it is, more proof of what a great little
band the Airplane were that enhances rather than damages their reputation.
(JA) Early Flight (1974)...............................................................................
Jorma Kaukonen: Quah
(1974)...........................................................
Jorma
Kaukonen "Quah"
(Grunt/RCA Victor, 'Mid' 1974)
Genesis/I'll Be Alright/Song For The
North Star/I'll Let You Know Before I Leave/Flying Clouds/Another Man Done
Gone//I Am The Light If This World/Police Dog Blues/Blue Prelude/Sweet Hawaiian
Sunshine/Hamar Promenade
CD Re-Issue Bonus Tracks: Lord Have
Mercy/No Mail Today/Midnight In Milpatas/Barrier
"If
trouble come I don't mind no pain"
The
online urban dictionary lists 'quah' as being 'a mass quantity of all things
amazing concentrated in one place, person or thing'. I can't really argue with
that then - 'Quah' is Jorma at his best, freed at last from the
responsibilities of being an Airplaner and even, for the moment, of Hot Tuna.
Instead Kaukonen is free to indulge in whatever takes his fancy - which for the
most part is sweet acoustic guitar ballads, plus the inevitable Rev Gary Davis
covers. However, whilst mainly solo, there's a sense of 'family' about this
sweet album: Jack Casady is along to produce the record (the only production
credit the bassist ever gets as far as I know), Jorma's then-wife Margarita
drew the distinctive Hot Tuna-esque bright-yellow-background-with-a-primitive-face
staring at you from the front and Jorma's close friend Tom Hobson guests on
vocals. Actually the original intention was for Tom to do more than just guest:
when first planned in 1973 Jorma didn't have enough material for a full LP and
wanted to promote his friend so he made plans with RCA to make this a 'joint'
album with half a side each. They refused late in the day, delaying the album
for another year and a hurried extra batch of Jorma recordings in April 1974,
with some of the Hobson vocals included on the CD as bonus tracks.
'Quah'
is a pretty album without the intensity of Jorma's past records with his
various bands and shows off a new side to the guitarist who has fun returning
to his folk roots. On an impressively consistent album nearly every track is
excellent (with only the odd blues covers sounding out of place), but
particular highlights include fan favourite 'Song For The North Star', blues
cover 'Another Good Man Done Gone' and 'Blue Prelude' - one of the surviving
Hobson vocals - all amongst Jorma's best work. The record sold well, with Jorma
no doubt benefitting from the extra publicity fuss over the launch of Jefferson
Starship, but while this record is probably just as good as 'Dragonfly' it's a
very different beast: understated, rootsy, tethered to the Earth. 'Quah' also
has a footnote of sorts in musical history: it was chosen for re-release by the
Grateful Dead label Relix early on in the CD age and came out to great acclaim
at the very beginning of 1987 as near-enough-as-makes-no-difference the first
ever CD released on an independent label as opposed to one of the major
companies who could afford to waste money on what was then a brand new
technology (to put this in context you couldn't buy any Beatles product until
that year's Christmas, which was the moment when lots of fans gave in and
splashed out on expensive players and no Airplane CDs were out as yet). This
gave 'Quah' a whole new lease of life amongst hip young things and was a
particularly good move as the un-produced low-fi 'Quah' is the sort of timeless
album that could have been recorded in any era without any real connections to
1974. The record would no doubt do as well again but sadly copyright issues
mean that nobody is quite sure who owns what of this album anymore and it's
incredibly hard to find (although it was back out on CD briefly in 2003 and
even more briefly in 2013 - good as the CD bonus tracks are, by the way, none
quite match the original album so I'd stick with the vinyl if you're lucky
enough to own it). 'Quah' badly needs releasing again so that more fans can
enjoy it.
'Genesis'
is a natural place to start with Jorma's folk accompaniment sounding millennia
old and suitably biblical. However it sounds like an early song about
difficulties in Jorma's first marriage and like many a Hot Tuna song has the
narrator paused at a crossroads wondering which way to turn - this time though
he rather humbly asks 'I'd like to go with you'.
The
traditional folk song 'I'll Be
Alright' might not have any lyrics but then it doesn't need them - you
know instantly that the narrator protesting he's fine might be now but hasn't
been for a long time, while Jorma turns in one of his greatest multi-layered
performances here.
'Song For The North Star' is a song Jorma will return to often and for good reason - it's
a pretty semi-autobiographical song about suddenly having it all at a young age
unexpectedly and not being quite sure what to make of it all. Jorma clearly has
the Airplane in mind for his sort-of-sequel to 'Third Week In The Chelsea' and
speaks about how odd it is for him to take the 'lead role' in a band after 'so
long in the shadow' , before adding at his excitement now 'the beckon of the
highway has seen through all our useless games'. This is one of my favourite
Jorma songs, later followed by an equally worthy Hot Tuna sequel 'Letter From
The North Star' which too started life at this album's sessions (it's the
instrumental 'Lord Have Mercy' featured on the CD bonus tracks).
'I'll Let You Know Before You Leave' is a bluesy folk instrumental that might not match 'Embryonic
Journey' but features some fine guitar-picking from two multi-tracked Jormas.
'Flying Clouds' is the first of the songs to feature Tom Hobson and is the most
ambitious song on the album. While the backing sounds much like usual, there's
a lush orchestra and some gorgeous French Horn parts overdubbed on top which
adds a real other-worldly epic feel to the song. The lyrics concern a giant
'wave' coming that will rock the world to its foundations, but the narrator is
ready for it and secretly can't wait for the wild ride, 'heading for sunshine
country as life comes rolling in'.
Vera
Hall's powerful blues song 'Another
Man Done Gone' is one of Jorma's best blues covers, performed more
seriously than some with an excellent couple of guitar parts fighting each
other throughout the song (one played with what sounds like nylon strings). The
lyrics sound as if they're referring to a slave on the run, someone the
narrator secretly admires but is unable to help: 'He had a long chain on, they
set the dogs on him, they killed another one' is the long-wrought out story,
again referring back to the album theme of freedom (perhaps Jorma's referring
to the Starship selling their soul all over again for RCA?)
'I Am The Light Of This World' is one of the album's lesser moments, a surprisingly boastful
Rev Gary Davis cover, although the song is more in keeping with gospel songs
about how everybody is a 'light' for someone. This is about as religious as
Jorma ever gets: 'I know I got religion I know I ain't ashamed, for the holy
ghost is my witness and the angels done signed my name!'
Blind
Arthur Blake's 'Police Dog
Blues' is another traditional cover that doesn't really fit this album's
style of uplift and hope. Instead it's a rather odd tale of the narrator being
shooed away from an ex-lover so he gets a police dog instead - no I don't quite
follow that logic either. Some of these lyrics are very odd ('His name is
Rambler and when he gets the chance he's gonna leave his mark on everyone's
pants!')
'Blue Prelude' appears to split fans. It's a Gordon Jenkins blues cover that
sounds as if it ought to fit Jorma to a tee, but that isn't him singing but Tom
Hobson. Personally I rather like Tom's strident vocals, so different to Jorma's,
who recall Gene Parsons' in the Byrds with the same rich, lazy tone. It's a
good song whoever's singing, most famous from Nina Simone's cover and sits in
contrast to most of this album, sobbing over the end of a good thing and
declaring that the narrator has the blues real bad.
Hobson's
own 'Sweet Hawaiian Sunshine'
is the only one of the singer's songs RCA allowed onto this record and if the
others are like this they probably had a point: 'See that wicky wacky ooh!' is
the less than intelligent chorus, whilst Jorma's blues playing simply sounds
like he's on auto-pilot. Still given the outrageous comments I used to read
about how terrible the song is and how it's the one blot on an otherwise
perfect album, it's not actually that bad - just less inspired than the rest.
The
album finished with one last great Kaukonen original in 'Hamar Promenade'. Another tale about how
exciting this new unexplored world is for the guitarist, the song's chorus 'we
keep spinning and we can't wait...pushing on faster till we can't push no more'
says it all. This is the folk world's equivalent of 'Wild Tyme' with Jorma busy
';doing things that haven't got a name yet' which he never thought he'd get the
opportunity to do.
Overall,
then, 'Quah' isn't perfect. The record must have been a shock at the time when
fans had only really hear Jorma play electric or at the very most play blues
covers on acoustic and the fact that this record is so sparse and empty in
direct contrast to everything the chaotic Airplane held dear takes some getting
used to even if you got to know these records out of order. However, 'Quah' is
easily the best of Jorma's work outside the Airplane, full of the same
exquisite playing and daring rulebreaking but on a smaller, prettier more
intimate scale. Jorma's lyrics are rarely better than here as he demonstrates a
new knack for philosophical, wordy songs quite unlike his earthier Airplane entries and he's in great voice
throughout to boot. All things amazing indeed: 'Quah' is one of the better
Jefferson spin-offs around and one of the few essential LPs in this book not to
come with the word 'Jefferson attached.
(Grunt/RCA, 1975)
Sleep Song/Funky #7/Walkin'
Blues/Invitation/Hit Single #1/Serpent Of Dreams/I Don't Wanna Go/Great Divide
- Revisited
"With
such a promising future ain't no way to go wrong - but the line we were taking
was just taking too long, there'll be a rainbow on a morning one day, but how
we're going to find it I just can't say at all"
After a quiet 1974, during which Hot Tuna lost
drummer Sammy Piazza and replaced him with Bob Steeler and still hadn't
received the sales or plaudits they'd hoped for, Hot Tuna clearly had something
of a 'stained' character within the record business. Their response was to
re-model their 'brand' as a laundry detergent titled 'America's Choice', with
cover designer Frank Mulvey poking fun at the band's hopes of becoming
mainstream. The side of the box reveals everything you need to know about Hot
Tuna's uncompromisingly heavy sound during their latest LP: 'Pure unadulterated
sounds with amplified additives and the necessary polytonal ingredients to
handle heavy loads!' Not seen Henry Purcell had music had the opportunity for
so many jokes about music and dirty laundry. The band may be poking fun at
their predicament, but they're clearly feeling the strain too as their record
contract with RCA (well, technically Tuna were with the Airplane's own label
Grunt, but RCA were paying) comes to a close without any real signs of
headway. One of Jorma's songs for this
album - an archetypal heavy Hot Tuna rocker with twinges of blues - is
sarcastically titled 'Hit Single #1' and it's far from the only non-commercial
recording here. The fact that Jorma and Jack's old buddies in Jefferson
Starship had just released the all-singing all-dancing 'Red Octopus' (a record
that outsold anything the Airplane had ever done) only made the situation seem
ever more desperate.
Once again Jorma writes practically everything,
with one jam session credited to him and Jack and one lone blues cover. This
time there are no great half-album concepts divided between the two sides, no
great theme about underwater exploration, no anything really. Of the eight
songs here only the moody and oddly Starship like 'Serpent Of Dreams' (a dead
ringer for the songs from their 1976 LP 'Spitfire') is up to Jorma's best. The
mood, though, is practically all-down (as opposed to 'half down' on 'Rat'),
with only 'Invitation' offering any poptimism. Throughout Jorma's guitar solos
no longer full of beauty or even melancholy but at times burning with righteous
indignation and anger, while Jack's cut his usual exploratory heavy bass
playing down to the point where he rarely moves off the same bone-crunching
riff. Had grunge been around in 1975 'America's Choice' would have been
classified as a grunge album: it's a moody set about lowered expectations
delivered by a power trio headed by a singer-songwriter-guitarist going through
something of a bad spell in his life. However I'd take Jorma's work over Kurt
Cobain any day: rather than recycled teenage angst these are yet again grown-up
and pleasingly lyrical songs from a songwriter continuing to grow. It's just a
shame that, for once, Tuna aren't the best band to deliver these songs for him
- they're too heavy and rock solid as he is Bob Steeler doesn't have the
variety of percussion shots in his locker that Sammy Piazza had. In other words
'America's Choice' is a very soggy kind of album all round, one of those cheap
detergents where the powder gets so stuck together you end up with one block of
mess rather than separate powders. After a year away 1975 was a double year for
Hot Tuna - a 'buy one get one free' so to speak - and if you combine the best
of this record with the next ('Yellow Record') you have one half of a good
double record set.
'Sleep Song' is - believe it or not -
the quietest moment on the album. A reflective song about the changing of the seasons, it skirts
dangerously close to travelogue ('Branches piled up past the Winter snow') but
sports a pretty tune. There's also one last reference to the sea: Jorma having
been 'blown across the water like a ship without a sail - and that ain't the
way to be'. Whether the 'plan behind this album offers any better alternative
is, of course, another matter altogether.
'Funky #7' is a rare Jack/Jorma
collaboration that promises solidarity, that the band will 'be there in the
chosen few' for a few years to come. In truth, though, the fact that this song
is based around popular blues chords suggests a darker story. The lyrics add
that to last something has to change - that there are rainbows to find but for
the life of him the narrator isn't quite sure what destination will take him
there. Considering the confusion, though, this song is oddly confident, almost
brutal in its attack, stretching out into a two-and-a-half minute instrumental
finale that depending on your tastes is either one hell of a lot of noise or
the best thing on the album.
'Walkin'
Blues' is a Robert Johnson cover
- the band seem to have dispensed with their Rev Davies ones by now - which
reverts back to the idea of the first album, dressing old standards up to the
nines so that they sound contemporary. A lot of bands have covered this song
down the years (though oddly no other AAA ones), which is one of the legendary
guitarist's (who famously died young after allegedly signing a pact with the
devil and taking up the guitar quickly after showing no aptitude whatsoever)
most famous compositions. Jorma's take on it is reverential but noisy, keeping
the original's swagger but losing much of its atmosphere. Jorma's slide playing
is excellent, though.
'Invitation' ends the first side on
the closest thing in the Hot Tuna arsenal to 'pop'. 'Come along with me my
baby, we'll ride this road together' sigs Jorma on this song that sounds at one
with the happier second side of 'Phosphorescent Rat'). However a tenser,
tougher middle eight - that's virtually punk - suggests an extra edge and
although the invitation for spending some happy times is given out we still
don't know if it's received by the end of the song.
The wryly titled 'Hit Single #1' is a slow churning blues chug with a
heavy backbeat, a hookline not far removed from 'Feel So Good' and nonsensical
lyrics about not wanting a career to end just yet and 'needing time enough to
play'. The narrator is on to a good thing, he can 'feel it in my shoes' but
can't express it in words except that - in sea terminology again - he 'feels
the ocean roll'. What should be a short song is extended way beyond breaking
point by several fiery guitar solos that stretch the song out to five minutes.
The nearly seven minute 'Serpent Of Dreams' on the otherhand doesn't
last a second too long. More atmospheric and dramatic than most Hot Tuna songs,
with several criss-crossing Jorma guitar parts overlapping each other, this
song features a classy Jorma sideways hypnotic riff and some excellent lyrics.
The world has been 'living in the shadows, trying to be the master of
tomorrow's slave' in a world where 'nobody is what they seem'. One character
leaves the herd and discovers a diamond, creating a whole new structure built
round commerce and money. 'We cannot stay by the crystal mountain' Jorma
implores, urging mankind onto the 'next 'adventure, with the serpents ready to
take off to the next destination.
'I Don't
Wanna Go'
is less poetic, a swampy curious sounding song which shows Hot Tuna have been
having a fair bit of fun with studio sound effects. Another song about not
wanting a career to end, this is a parody blues song about encroaching death
(Jorma's feats with a guitar are ridiculous - given the presence of Robert
Johnson on this album is he loosely comparing himself here, afraid the devil
will get him too? If so the good news is Jorma is still with us today, in his
70s now). Jorma all but shouts 'Lots of things I've got to do - living's much
too slow', telling us that 'when the demon arrives I'll be looking the other
way'.
The album ends with 'The Great Divide Revisited'. Jorma's latest
metaphor: 'It seems to me that living is like being on the run'. Weary and
longing for a rest, all Jorma sees are more mountains to climb, summed up by
another relentless ever-restless riff that gnaws and gnaws away at this song
until it finally peals off in a scream of noise.
Overall, then, 'America's Choice' wouldn't be
my choice of Hot Tuna LP. Despite the running theme of needing to do better and
change, there isn't as much invention here as on the past four LPs and there's
very little that approaches the best that Jorma can offer. However while this
album doesn't yet have the cure it is searching for one - which is more than
you can say for the next album...
Papa
John Creach "Playing My Fiddle For You"
(Grunt/RCA, 1974)
Friendly Possibilities/Milk Train/I
Miss You So/String Jet Continues//Playing My Music/Git It Up!/Gretchen/One
Sweet Song/Golden Dreams
"Been
playing my fiddle for 47 years, it's brought a lot of happiness it's brought a
lot of tears, I've got to admit there were times a little rough, but I didn't
let that stop me from playing my stuff"
Despite
the traditional 1920s-style portrait on the front cover, Papa John's third is
his most forward looking yet and arguably the solo album that will appeal best
to curious Jefferson Airplane fans. Released right in the middle of Papa John's
years with the Jeffersons, more or less parallel with 'Dragonfly', 'Fiddle'
features a much more straight-forward rock attack than the slight bluesy feel
of its two predecessors. Papa John also has a lot more input into the music,
with co-credits on four of the album tracks, usually with co-credits to his new
six-piece backing band Zulu (later re-named Midnight Sun) who are on
particularly good form throughout. There are far more actual 'songs' here as
opposed to jolly instrumentals, although that's not actually as automatically
good a thing as that would have been on the two previous LPs. Creach's music is
still an acquired taste, with a couple of songs (most notably 'I Miss You So'
and 'Gretchen' ) that give away Papa John's age, leaving him sounding like a
breathless crooner. However the rest of the album is impressively youthful -
you wouldn't guess from most of this record that Creach was 57 when he made it
with some serious funky recordings with the instrumentals particularly strong
on this record, particularly the Santana-style 'String Jet Continues' and the
fierce electric hoe-down 'Git It Up', with the purred sexual innuendo of the
title supplied by some un-credited singer clearly pretending to be Grace.
Talking of Grace, this record also sees an instrumental re-recording of the
pair's collaboration 'Milk Train' a couple of years on from 'Long John Silver'
and this glossier, longer, even more uncontrolled train wreck of a version
isn't quite first class but does give way to some excellent extended jamming.
In terms of songs the title track is easily the best, a semi-autobiographical
piece actually written by Zulu as a whole but very much sounding like a
personal confession, where John tell us how badly he's always wanted to play
music and how lucky he is to be doing what he loves. The result is perhaps the
best Papa John album of them all, still eccentric but a lot more accessible
than usual and with a sound much more naturally like the Airplane's, although
it's still an excellent accessory to the Jefferson catalogue rather than a
must-have.
(Grunt/RCA, **1975)
Baby What You Want Me To Do?/Hot Jelly
Roll Blues/Free Rein/Sunrise Dance With The Devil/Song For The Fire Maiden/Bar
Room Crystal Ball/Half-Time Saturation/Surphase Tension
"You
got me doing what you want - but baby what do you want me to do?"
Unusually for me, I both bought and got to know
these Hot Tuna albums in order. That usually never happens - Pink Floyd for
instance I got to know back to front while for years before the CD re-issues my
Kinks kollection was restricted to whatever I could get hold of without having
to melt down gold records to cover up for it. 'Yellow Fever', the second Hot
Tuna record of 1975, isn't what I was expecting. While 'America's Choice' is
far from perfect there are several moments that are promising, the new line-up
of the band - while ragged - is bedding in nicely and all of Jorma's lyrics
about looking for a purpose and a drive I thought must surely result in at
least some of that sense of hunger coming through on the album. Not a bit of
it. 'Yellow Fever' is the laziest Hot Tuna album since the first one, starting
with two rather obvious blues covers each stretched beyond breaking point and
then following it with six Jorma writes or co-writes which all sound like
variants of the same song. While you can't fault Jorma's searing guitar work
(generally heard twice over thanks to the wonders of double-tracking, which
must have been a pain for Jack and Bob to play to on the backing track), Jack's
bass is again mixed to inaudible levels and Bob's drumming is getting simpler
and simpler as the tracks wear on (perhaps the band's jamming session have worn
him out?) Once again a fine bit of packaging comes to the rescue of a leaden
LP, making the outside more interesting than what's inside: titled 'Yellow
Fever' for reasons that are never fully explained (that phrase never crops up
on album titles or lyrics) it features everything that could possibly be
coloured yellow crammed into one room (paint, bananas, cheese, corn, an eight
ball, even teeth - a shame about the casual racism on the album sleeve but it
was 1975, unfortunately) while a man is on the verge of a breakdown, his eyes
out on stalks. Had a little of this 'madness' and fire ended up in the music
then this album might have fared ok.
The problem is, as with all these Hot Tuna LPs,
Jorma is a fine songwriter. While Hot Tuna seem to have made a pact to keep
things simple across this LP, he's always going that extra mile - dropping in
poetic lyrics that show how much deep thinking is going on. 'Song For The Fire
Maiden' is this album's epic rock poem set to music, debating on time running
backwards, love and, well, everything really that's working well until the
(gulp) two minute guitar solo comes in to spoil the fun. He deserves a better
background for his music than a band that often sounds tired and uninspired,
happy just to play through the same old grooves over and over. The band seem to
think that playing loud and repetitively is what their fans want - but did they
really want a whole album of this without a break? It seems more likley that,
unwilling to go back to the blues for any length of time, the band no longer
quite know what they want. The trend of working with outside writers is
worrying though: neither Paul Ziegler nor Gary Douglas seem to offer anything Jorma
couldn't have written on his own and none of the tracks here move out of
Jorma's comfy spot halfway between heavy metal with a hint of blues backing
songs that deal with metaphysics and love. Reaching the end of the LP, which
doesn't drop the decibel levels till track six and then only slightly, feels
like you've made it to the end of a siege. A little of the Airplane's
playfulness, eclecticism, heck even their songs about flying saucers and
Pooneil corners wouldn't have gone amiss. Thankfully the band seem to realise
this too and next and last studio album 'Hoppkorv' will put most of these
problems right, finally making good on the promise shown by Hot Tuna across six
albums now but only really fulfilled on one. That's in the future though; for
now it's ear protectors on and back to
'Yellow Fever'...
One of these days, when I'm feeling strong
enough, I'm going to back through every single AAA book and work out once and
for all what the most covered songs across the 30 bandsa are. I'm willing to
bet that Jimmy Reed's 'Baby
What Do You Want Me To Do' will end up somewhere near the top; Hot
Tuna's take is heavier than The Byrds and clearer than Crazy Horse's, neither
of which are necessarily good things. Hot Tuna settle on a nice groove but at
nearly seven minutes, with several segues into guitar jams, what worked so
charmingly over three minutes is driving you up the wall by the end.
Bo Carter's 'Hot Jellyroll Blues' is more suitable Hot Tuna
material and for a change one of the many guitars on this track is an acoustic
one. The double entendres that work so charmingly in a blues song, though,
don't really work when heard loud and clear on a rock song and Jorma sings this
song like a shopping list, rather than the twinkle in his voice he needs. At
least this song is restricted to a more sensible four minutes, but at times
even that seems like a slog.
'Free Reign' by Jorma and Paul Ziegler
is a powerful driving rocker that at least features some very Airplane-like
lyrics. The song's narrator longs to be free and vows to very soon, just let go
and 'jump and shout', egged on by an 'angel' whose a reminder of brighter days
that lie ahead. However there's so much aggression on this bass-heavy track
that it doesn't sound so much like carefree excitement as a boxing match made
with guitars.
'Sunrise
Dance With The Devil' is one of the better songs on the album, with a fun cod-blues
riff and lines about the devil luring another over to his realm ('...and the
devil's got a new pair of shoes!') that would sounded great in the hands of the
Rolling Stones. Jorma doesn't quite have the strut right, although the unusual
and long main hook is rather good and the band have fun navigating it's tricky
structure. The band decide to get loud again in the middle with a capital everything,
which is actually a shame when it makes one of the better album songs sound
like everything else. Jorma might have done better performing this one as an
acoustic blues.
'Song For The Fire Maiden' co-written with Greg Douglas sounds like Kiss - and I'm not
quite sure if that's an insult or compliment just yet. The slightly different
feel of the song - hard to describe but featuring more interaction between the
players rather than each just banging away throughout, a sort of heavier 70s
version of 50s rock and roll - does break up the album sound nicely, although
the song itself is rather a dull one, with barely any lyrics. That's not much
of a problem as you can't hear them too well anyway; Jorma's vocal being
drowned out by guitars.
'Bar Room Crystal
Ball' is my favourite song on
the album. The closest thing here to a ballad, it even includes some delightful
flute work and a delightful lyric which again returns to the album theme (heard
on 'America's Choice' too) about wasting time. The title seems to unite a day
of melancholic boozing with wondering about the future which suits this quietly
reflective song where a worried narrator obsesses about 'how far I've fallen'.
Not one of Hot Tuna's very best but an excellent song all the same.
'Half-Time
Saturation'
is a fiery jamming session credited to all three band members with some lyrics
later overdubbed by Jorma. A rallying call to the band. Jorma yells that 'we've
got it made', but again the general mood of the song is downbeat, bordering on
paranoid. 'I can't let the moment slide' is again the motto of this song, but
by Hot Tuna standards this song isn't even that urgent; if anything it's the
more laidback of the rockers on this album which even a typically fiery Jorma
solo can't disrupt.
The album ends with the unusual 'Surphase Tension', an
electric instrumental credited to Jorma alone who plays with a great deal of
electronic distortion on his guitar, which makes the sound quite psychedelic. A
second Jorma guitar part plays just slightly deeper than the first during the
last half of the song, giving the effect of movement, space and quite probably
a headache as well., like one of those 'magic eye' pictures that always end up
being pictures of cats.
Overall, then, 'Yellow Fever' is an odd record.
You can tell that it was recorded in something of a hurry, but the question was
why: it's not as if this album has anything burning to say or that the last LP
was crying out for another so similar record so soon. Only one song of the
eight really adds anything to the Hot Tuna legacy; the rest will most likely
only appeal to people who like having their ears blown off by loud fiery rock.
Had Hot Tuna been an entirely new band that might have been enough - but
two-thirds of this band came from one of the greatest, most distinctive rock
bands on the planet; how did we wind up at an album that's all about the riffs
and noodling solos so soon? Even compared to the Starship's over-rated record
that year ('Red Octopus') this is an empty mess without anything much to say,
albeit one that sold better than normal thanks to a distinctive cover (also
like 'Octopus'). Thankfully much better will come along very soon - for both
bands...
Papa John Creach "I'm The Fiddle
Man!"
(Buddha Records, '1975')
I'm The Fiddle Man/Stardust/Enjoy/The
Rocker/Jim Dandy//Joyce/I Know Where I'm Going/Solitude/You Left Your
Happiness/Fiddlin' Around
"You
wander down the lane and far away,
leaving me a song that will not die"
Papa
John album number four was the record Creach left Jefferson Starship to record
and hopes were high that this album would re-launch Papa John's career in a
major way. That never quite happened and actually Papa John sounds slightly
more distracted here than on his previous trio - it's not that this record is
bad so much as that it simply sounds like watered down versions of what he's
already done, without the enervation or re-invention of the records to come.
Now working with a whole host of collaborators after splitting with Roger
Spotts (most of them members of his backing band Midnight Sun, basically still
the same band as Zulu), Papa John only gets two co-credits himself - a long way
from the near completely original albums at the start of his career. There
seems to be rather a high quota of instrumentals too, although when Papa John
does sing the album comes alive - he's learnt the act of letting his unusual
but groovy voice tell the story rather than leaving it to the music and it's
full of subtleties and emotion that greater technical vocalists just can't
match. Highlights include the big band-with-sixties-overtones cover of Gary St
Clair's 'Jim Dandy' and the funky strut of 'I Know Where I'm Going', with
lowlights coming from odd additions from the Hoagy Carmichael and Duke
Ellington songbooks (as fiddle instrumentals?!) One of the weaker Papa John
records then, it seems as if Papa John made the wrong move leaving the Starship
at the peak of their fame and success - but this album is not without merits
and if nothing else this set proves that Papa John is indeed the fiddle man;
there wasn't no one like him.
Papa
John Creach "Rock Father"
(Grunt/RCA, 1976)
Travellin' On/High Gear/Ol' Man
River/Slow Groove/J V and Me//Straight Ahead/I Like All Kinds Of Music/Brand
New Day/Jump Up, Gimme Some Dancin'!/Orange Blossom Special
"Jefferson Airplane fans have a little joke - that the
world is so hard a man must have two fathers to look after him and that's why
they have Rockfathers" (Slightly Altered Speech From 'The Godfather')
Papa
John may have made better, deeper albums but 'Rock Father' sure is his
grooviest. The hardest, heaviest rock of the now 59-year-old's career, this
album finds Papa John spending more time looking back over his past than usual
- but with the twist of the most modern setting for his music yet. Many of
these songs are centred around the great depression of the late 1920s and early
1930s and feature struggling young hungry wannabe musicians shrugging their
shoulders at the setbacks life gives them and just getting on with making a
living as best they can. Opener 'Travellin' On' is one of Papa John's most
memorable songs and would have gone down great on a Hot Tuna stage, with its
tale of years of hardship and toil being worth it in the end. Elsewhere Papa John
proves his musical credibilities by competently re-arranging the standard 'Ol'
Man River' for a modern rock audience, which has to be heard to be believed,
whilst 'Brand New Day' is a strangely convincing pop single about leaving the
past behind when a rosy future beckons. Had the rest of the album continued in
the same vein then I'd have no hesitation in marking 'Rock Father' as the best
of Papa John's career. However James Brown-style cover 'Jump Up' is just horrid
(Papa John may have 'got' 70s rock but he patently doesn't understand 70s funk
and this leering sexy song is woefully misread, especially the fiddle solo
which doesn't belong in this sort of a song) and five similar-sounding
instrumentals is way too many even if they are Papa John's stock in trade.
Stuffing all the good songs into the front, this starts by raising our hopes
but just ends up dashing them again on a typically Creach-style uneven LP. At
least the cover artwork is worth a laugh though, Papa John dressed as an
angelic priest, trusty fiddle in his hand.
Hot
Tuna "Hoppkorv"
(Grunt/RCA, 1976)
Santa Claus Retreat/Watch The North
Wind Rise/It's So Easy/Bow Legged Woman, Knock Kneed Man/Drivin' Around//I Wish
You Would/I Can't Be Satisfied/Talkin' Bout You/Extrication Love Song/Song From
The Stainless Cymbal
"Night-time
falls like the crack of doom, but it fills the skies with a shining
moon..."
Hot Tuna's curiously titled final studio LP
('hop' what? Was the car on the front of 'Burgers' a 'Korv'-ette?!) finds the
band cruising towards a natural conclusion. In one way it's a shame the axe
fell just at the point where the band were beginning to reach a happier union
between their own fiery hard rocking originals and the blues covers they formed
to cover (this record features four of the former and six of the latter,
although some of the covers are closer to rock this time around). In another
it's probably a good thing: Hot Tuna were in danger of 'going off'; they had
nothing really much to do except repeat themselves from here until the end and
could conceivably have ended up like the Starship, becoming more and more of a
caricature of their earlier selves (thank goodness that didn't happen!)
'Hoppkorv' is a more fitting end to the band than either of their two records
from 1976 would have been too: while not as interesting as 'Burgers' or as
consistent as 'Phosphorescent Rat' there are some excellent new songs and some
intriguing covers that change the songs around a lot more than before. The
band's been stable for three albums now, too - the longest by far of any
line-up - and Jorma, Jack and Bob know each other really well by now, with the
mixing finally putting them all more or less equal the way they need to be.
Best of all everyone's topped overplaying - while sections of this album are as
tough as either of the last two records the band's foot isn't on the
accelerator button all the time now. This is still very much Jorma's show,
though, featuring some of his finest ballads, fieriest guitar playing and
sweetest vocals. It's a tragedy that from this point on one of the 1960s most
daring, brilliant and inventive guitarists is left effectively to disappear,
with a loyal following live but absent on record until as late in this book as
1989. One last chance to show off Jorma's eclecticism, 'Hoppkorv' is an
entertaining LP and a much better place to say goodbye than the last few
records have been.
One thing 'Hoppkorv' lacks, however, is the
sense of unity of the past. You can't have it both ways I guess - this record's
eclecticism is it's greatest strength so we can't really complain about the
splintering too much. But featuring so many cover songs from different areas is
inevitably going to make this a les 'together' album and none of Jorma's songs
seem to touch on the themes of sea and hope that Hot Tuna have been busy
cooking since 1970. In fact some of his last batch of songs are downright odd -
I've heard 'Santa Claus Retreat' and 'Extrication Love Song' quite a few times
over the years and still can't work them out; it could be that Jorma's work
would have gradually got more and more surreal as the decade progressed had Hot
Tuna continued rather than leaning more towards pop in his resurrected solo
career. However 'Watch The North Wind Rise' is his last great song, a
composition that harks back to the earlier 'Letter To The North Star', signing
Hot Tuna off in style with a song that looks back on the band's earlier
confusion about their direction and effectively says that it all turned out
right in the end. Jack gets slightly more to do on this album too; against all
the odds he'll be almost as active in future years than Jorma, rejoining his
old colleagues in the KBC ('Kantner Balin Casady') Band in the 1980s and - in a
move that took fans by surprise - releases his first solo album in 2003, full
of self-penned songs and guest vocalists (despite having only three co-credits
to his name during his entire previous career!), with his old sparring partner
Jorma popping up on a couple of tracks. Bob Steeler, sadly, seems to have
disappeared**, despite having finally nailed the art of rock drumming with
dynamics across this album. Overall,
then, 'Hoppkorv' might look odd, read odd and at times sound odd but it's one
of Hot Tuna's more accessible LPs, with just enough inventiveness and courage
left over from the old days too.
'Santa Claus
Retreat' is the heaviest and most
'old style' song on the album, a chugging 12 bar blues sped up a bit with twin
guitar attacks. The lyrics are truly peculiar but seem to be, at least loosely,
about wrapping things up and starting anew ('The finger of fate can't seem to
give me a break, the highway is calling - had all I can take this time,
tomorrow I'll be gone'). Compared to Jorma's 'goodbye' songs to the Airplane,
though (who didn't make that many more records than Tuna did remember) this is
happier stuff, with the band not falling apart in a sea of arguments and squabbles
but calling it a day because it seems like a natural end: 'There's no point
digging if there's nothing to mine'. Goodness only knows where Santa Claus
comes in though - if you get any tuna stuffed in your stockings next yuletide
you'll know who to blame!
The gorgeous 'Watch The North Wind Rise' bides us goodbye too,
with some beautiful 'Embryonic Journey' style acoustic playing and a lovely
bouncy melody that sounds like 'Trial By Fire' with all the aggression removed.
Jorma's narrator has been on an adventure - surely the one started during
'Letter To The North Star' when no one was sure of the destination - it's been
a lovely experience but he knows it's time to go home now. He's decided to
'taker the time for just one more', though and I'm awfully glad he did: 'Rise'
is one of Jorma's very greatest compositions, tender and sweet and exquisitely
played by the whole band who've now learnt to let most of the anger and attack
come from Jack's big fat bass lines.
The unusual cover of Buddy Holly's 'It's So Easy' is up next. Of
all of Holly's songs this is one of his frothiest and least likely for adapting
as a full-on rock and roll song (the under-rated 'It's Alright', which
practically invented the Merseybeat 'cowbell' 4/4 style, seems like a much more
obviously Hot Tuna song). However the band cope well, keeping the playfulness
of the original whilst speeding it up and adding a heavier beat to it. Jorma is
joined by an un-credited female singer whose voice goes rather well with
Jorma's and all in all this is one of Hot Tuna's better cover versions.
Bobby Rush's hilariously titled 'Bowlegged Woman, Knock-Kneed Man'
is closer to the bluesy shuffle of the early Hot Tuna releases, albeit played
with all the power of the more recent incarnation of the band. Jorma sings to a
girl that their love must be fate because they go together so well - their bow
legs even fit together neatly! There's a neat circling guitar riff that pounces
around the song in duplicate and with a three minute running time and less
extended jamming than usual this is much more palatable than most Hot Tuna
covers too.
Nick Buck's 'Driving Round' - he's a piano player who'll join
Hot Tuna on stage as heard on 1978's 'Double Dose' concert - is a fierce cover
of a car song that knocks spots off that year's attempt by the Starship
('Cruisin'). Jack gets to play his bass like an old 50s rocker with some great
octave dives, while Bob's thunderous round-the-set drumming is some of his best
work too. Which is just as well because Jorma sounds slightly less in control
here, on an unusually structured song that doesn't give his guitar work much
room for navigation.
Billy Boy Arnold's 'I Wish You Would' takes us straight back to
the blues. A song very similar to Jorma's old standard cover 'Come Back Baby'
(recorded with both the Airplane and Tuna), you can see why this song appeals
to the band with its defiant lyrics, repetitive riff and murky bass-heavy mood.
However, the whole thing seems awfully over-dramatic and loud compared to the
less formulaic tone of the rest of the album and is probably about the weakest
thing here even if Jorma's final wah-wah style solo is fantastic.
McKinley Morgenfield's unusual 'I Can't Be Satisfied' is up
next with what's almost a new wave sound to it (how apt - after all but
inventing punk a few years early Hot Tuna bow out by predicting it's
successor): twinkly synth keyboards, electronic effects and a stomping beat.
This blues song about barely contained aggression isn't one of the best but
does feature an intriguing riff and really suits the new setting it's been
given.
Chuck Berry's 'Talkin' Bout You' has been covered in a variety of
ways by a variety of different bands (including fellow AAA members The Stones
and The Hollies). However I've never heard it done quite like this: a slow
building crunch that 'gets my message through' not by charm or sheer chutzpah
but by wearing the girl down. Jorma plays three times over on this track, two
of him alone just playing one of Berry's all-time great riffs throughout the
entire song while his third self breaks away for a typically busy guitar solo
in the middle. I'm not sure it's my favourite version of this adaptable song,
but it does at least offer something new.
The charmingly titled 'Extrication Love Song' is an unusual Jorma
song this time, based around a typically searing bluesy guitar part and a
series of parables about how things always have a certain set time and people
need to move on. Jorma's narrator has climbed so high he can't touch the ground
and wants to get back to earth, 'with no good intentions left to pave the way'.
It's not one of his best songs but it's certainly one of his noisiest,
seemingly determined to give his fanbase a heavy rocker to get their teeth into
one last time.
The band's studio career then ends with another
curiously titled Jorma piece, 'Song
From The Stainless Cymbal'. Fittingly, it sounds like a combination of
everything from Jorma's past: that soaring lead guitar, a big fat bass line, a
slight blues feel about the melody and some nicely mystical lyrics. Jorma once
again looks to the future, warning himself to stop hanging around musical
alleyways and looking forward to tomorrow 'so I can shape what I had in mind today'.
It's a powerful conclusion and another of the better songs on the album,
although it strikes rather a sombre note, with a gloomy riff and three Jorma's
all going off in completely different directions over the fade.
Overall, then, 'Hoppkorv' has successfully
reversed the downward trend of the last couple of albums and returned Hot Tuna
to what they did best: a smattering of excellent Kaukonen originals with
deep-thinking originals combined with a handful of cover songs both rock and
blues revisited in a much harder style than they'd ever been heard before. Hot
Tuna could have quite happily gone on doing this for their small but loyal
following for many years, but there's a feeling across the album that the time
is right to say goodbye and that there's nothing else really left to say. Hot
Tuna will be back in this book one last time, though, for a live album that
features several recent favourites and many songs from this album.
Jefferson
Airplane (Except Where Credited) "Flight Log"
(Grunt/RCA Victor, January 1977)
Come Up The Years/White Rabbit/Comin'
Back To Me/Won't You Try?-Saturday Afternoon/Greasy Heart/If You Feel//Somebody
To Love/Wooden Ships/Volunteers/Hesitation Blues (Hot Tuna)/Have You Seen The
Stars Tonite? (Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra)//Silver Spoon
(Slick/Kantner)/Feel So Good/Pretty As You Feel/Milk Train/Ja Da (Keep On
Truckin') (Hot Tuna)//Come Again Toucan? (Slick)/Sketches Of China (Slick/Kantner/Frieberg)/Genesis
(Kaukonen)/Ride The Tiger (Jefferson Starship)/Please Come Back (Jefferson
Starship)
"Sharpen
your teeth for the 'family feast'"
'Flight
Log' is an excellent manual for the Jefferson fans who already know the basics
and want to dig a bit deeper - especially into the Jefferson spin-off albums by
Grace, Paul, Jorma and Hot Tuna. With the tracks generally included in
chronological order, it's a welcome chance to hear just how much the band's
signature sound changed over the years and to see just how much fine-tuning
went on underneath the bonnet with lots of excellent band songs that don't
always make compilations ('Won't You Try' 'Greasy Heart' 'Feel So Good') as
well as the usual quartet of 'It's No Secret' 'Somebody To Love' 'White Rabbit'
and 'Volunteers'. While the 'other' selections aren't always as good as they
should be ('Stars Tonite' is the 'safe' choice from 'Blows Against The Empire',
while 'Come Again Toucan' is one of the worst songs from 'Manhole' while most
Hot Tuna fans would take 'Sea Child' 'I Think I See The Light' and 'Letter To
The North Star' over anything featured here (though 'Sketches Of China' and
'Silver Spoon' are both good choices). Jefferson Starship are also badly
unrepresented, even notwithstanding the fact that they've only released three
albums by this point - although on the plus side the two songs here are the
terrific 'Ride The Tiger' and an exclusive live song, the Marty rocker 'Please
Come Back'. However, flawed as it is, 'Flight Log' gives you a much better
overview of the history of a band across a much longer time period than any
other compilation and as such can be judged a success. Long missing on CD, the
set was finally re-issued on compact disc in 2011, although sadly RCA chose not
to extend the track listing; had, say, 'Today' 'Wild Tyme' 'ReJoyce' 'Hi*Jack'
'Across The Board' 'When I Was A Boy I Watched The Wolves' 'I Think I See The
Light' 'Devil's Den' and 'St Charles' all been added to this set it would be
the single best purchase in this book. Maybe next time...
Papa
John Creach "The Cat and the Fiddle"
(DJM Records, August 1977)
Country Boy City Man/Keep On
Rockin'/Livin' For Myself/Keep On Movin'/Right Down//Let's Get Dancin'/Foxy
Lady/Rock and Roll Music/Give Me Another Chance/Pop Stop
"Hey
diddle diddle!"
Papa
John's sixth album is for a new label and he's smartened himself up slightly -
both from the more polished production on this album (which must be one of the
very last prog rock sounding albums released in an era of punk) and the look of
the jacket where Papa John is in a white tuxedo and top hat! Against all odds
the actual 'songs' still tend to be the best things here, with John's unusual
but distinctive growly vocals well suited to this collection of blues covers.
Once again Papa John doesn't get a single writing credit on the album but the
songs are all suited to his distinctive style, albeit with slightly fewer
violin 'squeals' this time around. Highlights include the pretty 'Keep On
Movin' that could have been a hit single, the funky almost reggae 'Right Down',
the country 'Pop Stop' and the pretty 'Foxy Lady' (no not the Hendrix tune but
a track by John's keyboardist Steve Haberman; bassist Brian Tilford is the
other main album contributor). You're really not missing much if you don't have
this album but as oxogenerian fiddle players' solo albums go this is, erm, one
of the best!
Hot
Tuna "Double Dose
(Grunt/RCA, 1978)
Disc One: Winnin' Boy Blues/Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and
Burning/Embryonic Journey/Killing Time In The Crystal City//I Wish You
Would/Genesis/Extrication Love Song/Talkin' Bout You
Disc Two: Funky #7/Serpent Of
Dreams/Bowlegged Woman Knock Kneed Man/I See The Light/Watch The North Wind
Rise/Sunrise Dance With The Devil/I Can't Be Satisfied
"We're
gonna do a few old timey numbers, acoustic stuff and then we're gonna get the
band on!"
Like the Airplane, Hot Tuna's true final
goodbye -for a whole at least - came in the form of a live album and like '30
Seconds Over Winterland' was basically a taster from the last studio record with
a few highlights from other records that hadn't appeared on a live album yet.
Also like 'Winterland' the songs aren't all that different, with just a bit of
jamming here and there extending the songs even further past their natural
length. As the inner sleeve wittily remarks, this record is an 'affliction' -
and after a 'double dose' of no-holds-barred Hot Tuna, with most songs doubled
in length, you may well need a double dose of something else to get you through
it. Like many a concert recording, it's not that essential unless you
passionately want to own everything and unlike the Airplane, Hot Tuna aren't
necessarily a band where every release is so different that you kinda need to
own it all. However this is a superior live album: the improvement in sound
confidence and ability compared to the first two Tuna records is striking and
the band are on top form for most of the night. The main reason for buying this
album is to hear how cleverly Jorma re-arranges each track to get away without
being able to overdub solos (even so there's a fair bit of overdubbing in the
studio afterwards I suspect, as even Jorma isn't clever enough to play two
guitar lines at the same time as on 'Funky #7'). New keyboard player Nick Buck
also adds a nice new dimension to the second set, filling out the sound and
clearly there to cover the fact that Jorma can't always be in two places at
once, even with overdubbing.
As the title implies, 'Double Dose' is made up
of two very different halves (well quarter and three quarters really), a clever
way of getting round the band's perennial problem of whether they're a
hard-rock outfit playing straightforward songs or a blues cover act. Jorma
plays what was in the days of vinyl the first side of the first record himself,
with nothing more to accompany him than his acoustic guitar. Effectively Jorma
is planning his next move away from the band as a solo star - and taking the
opportunity of getting some practice by effectively making his 'new' self the
opening act for his 'current' self - exactly what Hot Tuna did opening for the
Airplane. Most of this first set is made up of blues standards, sung more
subtly and quietly than on the album, with the highlight a note-perfect 'cover'
of his Airplane favourite 'Embryonic Journey' (now over a decade old but still
getting the biggest screams of the night) and an epic seven minute time of
'Killing Time In Crystal City' which sounds quite different without all those
guitars flying all over the place.
Hot Tuna arrive for the remaining eleven songs
and a more mixed bag. A lot of these songs, especially the blues covers, sound
much like before only not recorded as sharply and whole it's impressive how
close the band can get live to their studio feel songs like 'I Wish You Would'
and 'I Can't Be Satisfied' weren't that interesting the first time round, never
mind the near repeats here (although the latter now has a keyboard solo instead
of a guitar one!) As ever with Hot Tuna it isn't all thrash and noise, however
and there are three standout moments, all of them quieter than everything else
here. 'Watch The North Wind Rise' is a lovely version of one of Jorma's most
under-rated songs and even though there's a muddy aural hiss throughout (which
I don't think is just on my copy by the way because I've owned it twice and
they both do that) shines through the murk nicely. 'Serpent of Dreams' is
another excellent song played well, with the wailing epic feel of the original
pared back to the bare-bones, with more emphasis on Jorma's metaphysical lyrics
and some intriguing sound effects that sound like a dragon puffing on a
cigarette. The other album highlight is the album's only exclusive song, a
sweet new ballad entitled 'Genesis' which would have made a fine addition to
'Hoppkorv'. A tender love song that once again could be about either girlfriend
or band, it's not really about beginnings but endings and opens with the line
'the time has come for us to part' and asks both the lady and the listener for
permission 'to go with you'. It may well
be the single best thing on the first disc, simpler than most Hot Tuna songs
and more heartfelt than average too, with a nice rounded melody that's one of
Jorma's best.
Overall, then, 'Double Dose' is certainly
atmospheric and well-played, but it's one of those live albums that makes the
good material shine like never before and makes the weaker material seem worse.
Unfortunately the band' setlist is way too heavy on songs taken from 'Hoppkorv'
(six out of ten of that album's songs) and one of these songs ('Winnin' Boy
Blues') had already been heard in a near-identical version on the eponymous
first live record. Had Hot Tuna been as bit braver in their setlist and
recorded some of their better earlier songs then this record might have been
quite something; as it is, like most Hot Tuna release, the promise is there in
spades but something never quite gels, with twice the space of usual filled up
with twice as many mistakes. As the last song on the last Hot Tuna album for
twelve years, 'I Can't Be Satisfied' is perhaps their epitaph, a complaint
about not quite getting things perfect that brings the band's career to a noisy
end. Well, it wasn't going to end any other way really was it?!
Papa
John Creach "Inphasion"
(DJM Records, November 1978)
Inphasion/Night Fire/To Fill The
Need/Hezakiah/Montuno Grande//All The World Loves A Winner/Somehow She
Knows/Silver Bird/Flow With The Feeling/Southern Strut
"Hanging
out walking home from school, playing my radio and being cool, watching the
girls as they walked by, I'd turn it up just to catch their eye, rock and roll
made it fun!"
Papa
John's seventh album is much like his other six, although with a slight rockier
feel than some of his earlier LPs. Sadly the formula that's been serving him so
well up till now is beginning to sound a little bit stale - but this time
around whenever Papa John reaches outside his comfort zone it all falls a bit
flat. There are you see far less fiddle-led instrumentals this time around,
which should really be a good thing, but replacing them with synth-led
instrumentals that merely sound like bad Santana is not really much of an
alternative. Similarly while there are more actual 'songs' here, which should
be a good thing, you kind of know where each of them is going from the opening
line. A couple of the selections here are particularly weird: 'To Fill The
Need' is surely where the Grange Hill production team got both the melody and
the weird noises on their theme tune from, whilst 'All The World Loves A
Winner' is a curious big band funk disco hybrid complete where everybody is
mixed lower than the irritating guiro percussion and 'Hezekiah' is reggae - but
the streamlined clean-cut Boney M idea of reggae rather than the true funk Papa
John could have given the album. After so much recording and touring Papa John
also sounds as if his voice is giving way badly - though to be fair my copy of
this LP has clearly lived through at least two wars and a revolution judging by
the state of it and nobody sounds very good, so perhaps it's just that (for love
or money I can't find a better copy anywhere - this is easily Papa John's
rarest LP from what I can tell). There are, thank goodness, a few highlights
here: 'Montuno Grande' is perhaps the funkiest of all of Papa John's attempts
at being funky, coming on like the theme song from 'Shaft', 'Somebody She Knows' is a rare Papa John
ballad, his most romantic song by some margin. The record also contains one of
my all-time favourite Papa John songs in 'Silverbird' , a superior prog rock
song about Papa John's childhood memories
which would have sounded right at home on 'Spitfire' all about how rock
and roll 'made it fun'. An up and down LP then, with some real highlights in
there somewhere but you can't shake off the feeling that Papa John might have
done better hanging on until he had a full album's worth of material to record.
Papa John's last record for some fourteen years, you can tell that the
61-year-old fiddle player's sound is becoming ever more anachronistic in the
age of punk and that his solo career is rapidly running out of steam. However
considering that this about as bad as it gets, it's still pretty good.
'Spitfire' (1976) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/jefferson-starship-spitfire-1976-album.html
‘Freedom At Point Zero’ (1979) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/jefferson-starship-freedom-at-point.html
'Dreams' (Slick) (1980) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/news-views-and-music-issue-39-grace.html
A NOW
COMPLETE LIST OF JEFFERSON ARTICLES TO READ AT ALAN’S ALBUM ARCHIVES:
'Takes Off!' (1966) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/news-views-and-music-issue-116.html
'Takes Off!' (1966) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/news-views-and-music-issue-116.html
'Surrealistic Pillow' (1967) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2014/03/jefferson-airplane-surrealistic-pillow.html
'After Bathing At Baxters' (1967) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-15-jefferson-airplane-after.html
'Crown Of Creation' (1968) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/jefferson-airplane-crown-of-creation.html
'After Bathing At Baxters' (1967) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-15-jefferson-airplane-after.html
'Crown Of Creation' (1968) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/jefferson-airplane-crown-of-creation.html
'Volunteers' (1969) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/jefferson-airplane-volunteers-1969.html
'Bark' (1971) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/news-views-and-music-issue-91-jefferson.html
'Blows Against The Empire' (Kantner) (1971) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-44-paul-kantner-and-jefferson.html
'Bark' (1971) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/news-views-and-music-issue-91-jefferson.html
'Blows Against The Empire' (Kantner) (1971) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-44-paul-kantner-and-jefferson.html
‘Sunfighter’ (Kantner/Slick) (1972) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/paul-knatnewrgrace-slick-jefferson.html?utm_source=BP_recent
'Long John Silver' (1972) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2017/02/jefferson-airplane-long-john-silver-1972.html
'Baron Von Tollbooth and the Chrome Nun'
(Kantner/Slick/Freiberg) (1973) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/paul-kantner-grace-slick-and-david.html
'Dragonfly' (1974) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/news-views-and-music-issue-51-jefferson.html
'Dragonfly' (1974) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/news-views-and-music-issue-51-jefferson.html
'Red Octopus' (1975) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/jefferson-starship-red-octopus-1975.html
'Spitfire' (1976) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/jefferson-starship-spitfire-1976-album.html
‘Earth’ (1978) https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/jefferson-starship-earth-1978.html
‘Freedom At Point Zero’ (1979) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/jefferson-starship-freedom-at-point.html
'Dreams' (Slick) (1980) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/news-views-and-music-issue-39-grace.html
'Modern Times' (1981) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/jefferson-starship-modern-times-1981.html
'Winds Of Change' (1982) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/07/jefferson-starship-winds-of-change-1982.html
'The Empire Blows Back'# aka 'The Planet Earth Rock
and Roll Orchestra (Paul Kantner/Jefferson Starship) (1983) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/10/paul-kantnerjefferson-starship-planet.html
'Nuclear Furniture' (1983) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-87-jefferson-starship-nuclear.html
'Nuclear Furniture' (1983) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-87-jefferson-starship-nuclear.html
'Jefferson Airplane' (1989) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/jefferson-airplane-1989.html
Non-Album Songs 1966-1984 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/
10/jefferson-airplanestarship-non-album.html
The Best Unreleased Recordings 1966-1974 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/jefferson-airplane-best-unreleased.html
Surviving TV Footage 1966-1989 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/jefferson-airplane-surviving-tv-footage.html
Tribute Special: Paul Kantner and Signe Anderson http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/tribute-special-paul-kantner-and-signe.html
Live/Solo/Compilation/Hot Tuna Albums Part One
1966: 1978 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/jefferson-airplanestarship.html
Live/Solo/Compilation/Hot Tuna Albums Part Two
1979-2013 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/jefferson-airplanestarship_16.html
Essay: Why Flying In Formation Was So Special For
The Jeffersons https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/jefferson-airplane-essay-why-flying-in.html
This is just an amazing dive into the music. Thank you so much! Knowing what you do of Papa John Creach, would you be willing to give a listen to this 2 minute award-winning animation by Jim Simon? I have an educated guess that Papa John Creach is playing but I have not been able to confirm. If you watch the animation as well as listen, would you agree? Not to mention the song title, right: Hey, Diddle Diddle.
ReplyDeleteAww thankyou so much! It's been ages since I wrote those reviews, I must dig out those albums to listen to again - thankyou for reminding me! is this the right link? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6JoY2lWJac It certainly does sound like Papa John to me. He does have such distinctive style! If it's 1972 that would figure too as I think he was doing film work round then, just before he joined the Airplane. Must admit it's a new one on me though so I don't know for sure. Very exciting to hear 'new' music, thanks for letting me know!
Delete