Graded on a Curve: Jefferson Airplane,
The Worst of Jefferson Airplane

You should be ashamed of yourself. Here the most important date on my holy calendar has come and gone, and you didn’t buy me a single gift. I’m talking about the anniversary of Altamont, of course, the benighted free concert held on December 6, 1969 at the Altamont Speedway in northern California. Four people died, one poor fellow at the hands of the Hells Angels, who were hired to provide security. The Angels, anger fueled in part by the $500 in beer they received as payment for their services, also rendered Jefferson Airplane vocalist Marty Balin unconscious with a blow to the head, which is why the anniversary of Altamont is also known to strict religious observers such as myself as “Punch Marty Balin in the Mouth Day.”

Altamont is perhaps rock’s most significant day because it, along with the Manson Family killings, put paid to the Age of Aquarius. It was the end of the innocence, to quote that dick from the Eagles, the high water mark of peace, love, and understanding, and on that dark day the glorious lysergic wave of good vibes and universal brotherhood broke and receded forever, as Hunter S. Thompson so astutely notes in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

I write all of this because the Jefferson Airplane was Thee Official Band of the LSD era. “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love” were as much countercultural signifiers as they were songs, as was “Crown of Creation,” as in “you are the.” But the whole scene went south, first with the numerous drug casualties of Haight-Ashbury, then with Charles Manson’s bloody murder spree and the disaster at Altamont, about which Grace Slick noted, “The vibes were bad. Something was very peculiar, not particularly bad, just real peculiar. It was that kind of hazy, abrasive and unsure day. I had expected the loving vibes of Woodstock but that wasn’t coming at me. This was a whole different thing.”

Peculiar is one way of putting it; ominous would probably be a better word. The combination of bad trips, wasted Hells Angels spoiling for a fight, and the frustrations attendant upon putting together a huge concert on very short notice all exacted their toll, and the vibes at that speedway in the middle of nowhere were so far from loving that the Grateful Dead, whose idea it had been to hire the Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels to provide security in the first place, skedaddled by helicopter (like refugees catching the last chopper out of Saigon!) without ever taking the stage, freaked out by the disintegrating security situation.

Anyway, on to 1970s The Worst of Jefferson Airplane, a greatest hits package with a wonderfully self-deprecatory title. It’s probably rock’s densest and most direct expression of countercultural unity, what with songs like the beautiful “We Should Be Together” and the great “Volunteers,” which I think is the best song they ever recorded. The Worst of Jefferson Airplane’s 15 cuts span the band’s career from its pioneering days with vocalist Signe Toly Anderson (i.e., 1966’s Jefferson Airplane Takes Off) to 1969’s Volunteers, from which the lovely “Good Shepherd” (as well as “Volunteers” and “We Can Be Together”) was taken. The most cuts (four) were taken from 1967’s Surrealistic Pillow, which only makes sense as it remains the band’s best known album; in addition to “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love” the contributions from Surrealist Pillow include “Today,” which is very reminiscent of the Grateful Dead’s folk pastorals a la American Beauty, and the too precious for its own good guitar instrumental “Embryonic Journey.”

As for 1967’s After Bathing at Baxter’s (evidently “Baxter” was the Airplane’s code word for acid), the songs included on the “Worst of” include “Martha” (which includes one of the worst lines in rock history, to wit, “She sifts the hairy air that’s worn and wood-swept”) and the very psychedelic “The Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil,” which features one freaked-out guitar and lots of unison singing by Balin and Slick. “Chushingura” is a short and very trippy instrumental written by drummer Spencer Dryden, and it comes from Crown of Creation, as does “Crown of Creation” (duh) and the sound-effect laden folk-rock number, “Lather.” A weird one, “Lather,” and the perfect ticket for your next voyage into interstellar overdrive, my friendly psychonaut. As for “Plastic Fantastic Lover” it’s a bona fide kick-ass rocker and the band’s token representative from 1969’s live LP Bless Its Pointed Little Head.

I originally intended to review 1973’s live Thirty Seconds Over Winterland, but Marty Balin isn’t even on it, and what good is celebrating “Punch Marty Balin in the Mouth Day” by reviewing an LP on which Balin doesn’t make an appearance? No good, no good at all. The truth is that just as Altamont marked the high water mark of the hippie dream, The Worst of Jefferson Airplane marked the high water mark of the Airplane; albums like 1971’s Bark and 1972’s Long John Silver were relative disappointments (although I have a soft spot for the latter LP), and before long the Jefferson Airplane would morph into the abominable Jefferson Starship and Marty Balin would be uttering those infamously dumb lines, “I had a taste of the real world/When I went down on you girl, oh,” which are proof positive that what Balin really needed was for the Hells Angels to punch him in the kisser again, just to show him what a taste of the real world REALLY feels like.

There are innumerable other Jefferson Airplane compilations out there, but like I say this one highlights the best material from the Airplane’s best albums, and spares you some of the hirsute hippie hoo-hah that would come later. Because the Jefferson Airplane never got over the Age of Aquarius, and continued to purvey New Age/Space Age acid twaddle long after its sell-by date. In short, they were the band that never grew up, and constituted a kind of time capsule of the Peace and Love Generation long after said mythical beast had slipped into a long heroin-induced nod.

So, yeah. Here I am without so much as an Altamont Day gift under my dead Altamont tree, drinking brown acid-spiked eggnog and watching Gimme Shelter, the 1970 documentary about that fateful day. And I can’t help but wonder what’s wrong with people today, cuz them who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it. And if that’s true then the Hells Angels will have punched Marty Balin in the nose in vain, and that’s nothing short of tragic. Hippie idealism was a beautiful thing for about a half hour, but all those acid-soaked, love-bead-wearing boys and girls flashing the Peace symbol had to wake up to the awful reality of life on this planet sooner or later, which is why Altamont, as tragic as it was, was also salutary; sure “we should be together,” to use the Jefferson Airplane’s own words, but we never will be, and if there’s better proof of this than what went down at the Altamont Free Concert on December 6, 1969, I’ll be damned if I know what it is.

GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
(Is for Altamont)

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