Jefferson Airplane Masters - Crown of Creation and After Bathing in . . . .

JEFFERSON AIRPLANE

 The Rockasteria has posted two Jefferson Airplane Classics - remixed and remastered and extended limited edition no longer available albums yesterday and today so have at it (them? - ED) Remember after bathing at Baxter's place you are the crown of creation . . . . it's true.

I saw the Airplane in the late sixties and early seventies twice at festivals here in the UK and they were a band it was always welcome to wake up to lying in the mud . . . . . . .I was never quite the same after that

Indoors the Doors took away the doors and their was strong smell of incense at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm back then but outside . . . . . . ? well outside there was Canned Heat, Santana and Jefferson Airplane!

Jefferson Airplane- Crown of Creation Deluxe Ltd Edition - Plain & Fancy

of course one of the reason I so enjoy the posts from Plain and Fancy is the texts Marios selects for each album  project. Often contemporary with the release of said album or from historic sources reflecting upon a bands album or place in music history. These two Classic Jefferson Airplane albums are no exception 

“Is it true that I’m no longer young?” Grace Slick sang in “Lather,” the luscious and cinematic opening number of “Crown of Creation.”

Slick was singing about the arrested development of her lover, the Jefferson Airplane drummer Spencer Dryden, but by extension she addressed the fast-forward aging afflicting the San Francisco scene. That sunny Summer of Love had given away to the chill winds of LBJ’s 1968.

“Crown of Creation” finds the Airplane coming of age, wary but not yet transformed into the jaded radical-chic collective that rolled out “Volunteers” a year later. The erratic and playful psychedelia of “After Bathing at Baxter’s” gives way to songwriting for adults:

“Long time since I climbed down this mountain before,” a weary-sounding Paul Kantner sings on “In Time.” “Things I’ve seen here make me want to go running home.”

Slick, a painter, ponders the 1960s’ boho dance — underground art as commerce — on the album’s single, “Greasy Heart”:

    He’s going off the drug thing ’cause his veins are getting big

    He wants to sell his paintings but the market is slow

    They’re only paying him 2 grams now

    For a one-man abstract show

And has anyone ever captured the highs and lows of the hippie era better than Kantner in this lyric from the title track, boiled down to haiku: “You are the crown of creation / and you’ve got no place to go.”

The unease comes packaged beautifully. The band performs with precision and assurance, lead by guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and bassist Jack Casady, team players and not yet a faction. (Their work at times points to the heavy metal of the great live album to follow, “Bless Its Pointed Little Head.”)

Time is a major theme. War and the sickening events of 1968 are the undercurrents. “Crown of Creation” does no duty as a concept album, however. It is a collection of songs, some far better than others, most of them recorded on-the-run while the band met its rock-star obligations.

Despite the album’s prescience and longevity, it remains woefully underrated — here we have Jefferson Airplane at their psychedelic peak. They soon would become a rock band, angry and disenfranchised, but with one great album left in them.

“Crown of Creation” opens with a triple offering of morning maniac music.

Slick’s “Lather” employs studio effects to tell its tale of an aging man child. It was inspired by Dryden’s turning 30, and by the arrest of bassist Casady for nudity. The effects — a child’s fearful query; a blast of firepower from a tank — flirt with kitsch, but hold up well. Slick uses a conversational storyteller’s tone, lovely and knowing. “I’m singing the song quietly and softly, like a little kid,” she recalled years later. All other studio Airplane albums open with rockers; commencing with this quiet number is part of “Crown of Creation’s” confident genius.

Marty Balin and Kantner’s “In Time” celebrates a lover, a hippie chick cast in psychedelic tones, “in the colors of what I feel.” A less obvious companion to “Baxter’s” “Martha.” “In Time” brings to mind the softer side of L.A. band Love.

David Crosby’s “Triad” completes the opening trilogy. Slick finds the humanity in Crosby’s come-on to a pair of competing lovers. It is the closest to an embrace (and reaffirmation) of the hippie ideal to be found on the album, and it remains stunning.

Things get back to Airplane(/Hot Tuna) business as usual with Kaukonen’s “Star Track,” a meditation on fame and the scarcity of time. Kaukonen works out with his wah-wah pedal — the guitar effect is your constant companion on this album — warning the listener: “Running fast you’ll go down slow in the end.”

Balin’s “Share a Little Joke” delivers a seemingly whimsical message, belied by the instrumental chaos just below the surface. “I believe in half of you,” Balin sings to his friend. The song reportedly touches on mental illness.

Drummer Dryden gets credit for the brief bit of electronic music, “Chushingura.” It’s a sort-of sequel to “Baxter’s” “A Small Package of Value Will Come to You, Shortly.” Dryden has said it was inspired by the soundtrack to an old samurai film.

Side 2 opens with more generic Airplane and more wah, as Balin works out on the tambourine-shaking ode to freedom “If You Feel.”

Kantner’s classic title track marches to martial beat. The bandleader foresees the yuppie apocalypse in the pages of a science fiction novel:

    Soon you’ll attain the stability you strive for

    In the only way that it’s granted

    In a place among the fossils of our time

(Kantner borrowed from the post-apocalyptic novel “The Chrysalids.”)

“It’s trying to make the point that science fiction is politics, and politics is science fiction,” Kantner later explained.

“Ice Cream Phoenix” has Kaukonen returning to the scarcity of time, with Slick providing a surreal vocal interlude.

The rocker “Greasy Heart” finds Slick in full badass mode, dispensing advice in a jumble of words straight out of Lewis Carrol. “Don’t ever change, people,” she warns. “Your face will hit the fan.” It’s a slap at cosmetic beauty and plastic people — a la “Plastic Fantastic Lover.” “It sounds like I’m pointing fingers, but (I was) living it,” the former model has said.

“The House on Pooneil Corners” concludes the album with a scalding dose of acid rock. The title and the familiar amp-shaking feedback that begins the song suggest it’s a mirror-image sequel to “The Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil” from “Baxter’s.” Kaukonen, Casady and Dryden slash and burn their way through as Slick’s Middle Eastern-influenced vocals summon the darkness.

Lyricists Balin and Kantner’s vision is distinctly apocalyptic:

    Everything someday will be gone except silence

    Earth will be quiet again

    Seas from clouds will wash off the ashes of violence

    Left as the memory of men

    There will be no survivor my friend

Truth in advertising: The cover of “Crown of Creation” showed the band caught up in a mushroom-shaped cloud. The h-bomb, Kantner said, is our civilization’s technological crown — and the thermonuclear holocaust one very possible outcome seen from the badlands of 1968.

Psychedelic Sight 

Jefferson Airplane - After Bathing In . . . Deluxe Ltd Edition - Plain & Fancy

There’s nowhere to begin with After Bathing At Baxter’s than with the cover art, where for a sixteen year old in 1967, I was completely captivated by a tri-winged San Francisco style flying house, complete with marijuana bushes peaking out of the windows, that in full colour was aimlessly winging its way over piles of black and white trash, a sea of pollution and debris, where balloons and coloured confetti (though I was informed that this was blotter acid at the time) were being dispensed over just about any anonymous city in America during the middle of the psychedelic 60’s. Of course over the years I’ve come to learn that this flying house represented the 2400 Fulton Street pad that The Jefferson Airplane called home, and oddly enough wasn’t painted in day-glow paints, but rather totally in black and white, at least from the outside.

While the Surrealistic Pillow album brought The Airplane to center stage, it was After Bathing At Baxter’s that defined this band and the journey into the hearts and minds of the counterculture generation, flagging these high flying minstrels as a group of revolutionaries out to subvert the youth of America. With that in mind, the album is much more psychedelic than people give it credit for being, with pondering lyrics that ask question that could only be asked from seeing the world through psychedeliczed eyes, such as “Will the moon still hang in the sky / when I’m high / when I die?” or “Does the sky look green today?” not to mention the dadaesque feedback that opens the album and a mixture of words such as “armadillo,” injected for no reason at all, other than for the sake of embracing weirdness … and truth be told, that was enough of a reason, especially with Grace wailing away singing “It’s a wild time / I’m doing things that haven’t got a name yet!”.

After Bathing At Baxter’s isn’t an album to be listened to, it’s an album to be assaulted by, as The Airplane attack everything from middle America, to womanhood and everything in-between, and it’s all done as a celebration of freedom and self liberation. There is nothing commercial about this record, it was designed for the hip, those who got the joke before it was spoken, those willing to be a force to be reckoned with. Of course “Somebody To Love” was the soundtrack of the day, yet Surrealistic Pillow, the album the single rose from, stood in stark contrast to what The Airplane were doing live, which was much darker, and plays out here in all of its psychedelic glory. This is not to say by any means that the album does not have its flaws, these flaws are easily heard and have not aged well, but for the time, these aspects (such as overindulgent jams) were pure experimentation that broke new ground, giving The Airplane a surefooted platform from which to take flight on their more controlled and pointed future releases.

With the album composed of songs strung together into mini-suites of sorts to create a bizarre aural collage of lengthy jams, screaming guitars, some extremely beautiful moments, and a great deal of raucous ones, all was mixed with the alchemy of intellectualism, where The Jefferson Airplane manage to embrace the weird and the disconnected, yet at the same time intertwined it all as a freaky acid trip … though surely one I won’t wish to have taken. While nearly contextually unlistenable with today’s ears by those who weren’t there then, I embrace this gem with my total being.

The Fun Facts: Baxter’s was’t a real place, and it certainly was a bath, though in a sense it was.  “Baxter” was the band’s code for LSD, or bathing in acid, so the coded album title would translated to “After Tripping On Acid”.

by Jenell Kesler

* NB not all the artwork here is available with the downloads, some of it is from my collection down in the vaults. I think I have over 12 JA ROIO items in there

A Small Package Of Value Will Come To You, Shortly