(I LOVE) JEFFERSON AIRPLANE



Or rather, I figured I would have to love them with a name like that. I didn't know a thing about them, didn't know a thing about anything regarding music, but I catalogued the name in the back of my head for a long time in case I ever did decide to listen to anything other than The Beatles.

Eventually, as is inevitable for anyone digging through crates of vinyl in the 90's, I came across a copy of Surrealistic Pillow. I knew the two songs everyone knows. But it was specifically White Rabbit I had honed in on. A song which I found frightening, even though I could never locate what was scaring me. The lyrics which just recount parts of a well worn children's story? How the song opens with the crawl of a forboding guitar solo? Or maybe it was the image of a woman singing who I knew could tear my head off and turn my skull into a bowl to drink her tequila out of? I don't know. But there was something about that song that when coupled with that band name, evoked a promise of music I wouldn't quite know what to do with. That would confuse me in all the best ways. I of course bought the record.

And it was okay.

And then I bought a bunch more by them and some of those I didn't think were even that okay. I could barely pay any attention to them.

What a disappointment. I had expected something directly confrontational. Something that would set me on edge the way White Rabbit did. But instead what I got was a band who seemed to play so loose their songs seemed constantly in a state of drifting away mid verse. That they would become completely lost before they even reached the chorus. There was none of that muscle I found in White Rabbit, that surging bass line, the milatarisitc drumming. A hit song so confident in its mood that it couldn't even really be bothered with a chorus. Just a constant building and building and building. Tension forever mounting. Of course Hunter Thompson's lawyer wanted to be electrocuted at just the right moment of that song.

So I was kind of lukewarm on them, after all and I only passively listened to them for the next 15 to 20 years. They continued to be okay. My appreciation always grew steadily. But they certainly didn't matter much to me.

Until one day when everything changed. Even though nothing had really changed. It was exactly that familiar looseness of playing and looseness of song structure that began to speak to me. I now could find something ominous in the slow long weird sprawl all of their songs seemed to occupy. A true kind of psychedelic music, that wasn't dumb Utopian nonsense. That wasn't a bunch of fart ass jamming. But a stoned kind of music which, with every new track, seemed to be freshly born out of some deep black hole, then slowly struggled into existence, and as it climaxed, died and would disappear back into the nothingness it came from. 

Volunteers, Surrealistic Pillow, Crown of Creation, After Bathing At Baxters. All incredible documents of a band which somehow became commercially viable on the sound of six musicians wandering off towards the horizon over the course of every song. Each time by themselves, but yet always somehow still communicating with the noises they were each making. Always able to hear and respond to eachother, even as they drifted further and further away into the abyss.

A great band, all along.
 

Last edited by crumbsroom (7/05/2022 6:38 pm)

And they kept getting better, peaking with their 1985 hit, "We Built This City".












Okay, that was a joke. But given how insufferable I find dirty hippie types, I find myself delving back into their work with some regularity. I don't have any great insights, but I think Slick's full bodied voice helps elevate their music beyond the cloying earnestness and drug addled wankery it could have been in lesser hands. It's better than the sum of its parts.

Jinnistan wrote:

Out of all of the Haight Asbury bands, I'd say that maybe Quicksilver Messenger Service is my favorite, because they had a drummer who knew how to keep a Bo Diddley beat.  Frankly, I just didn't care for a lot of those hippie drummers.  Even the Dead needed two just to keep a riff upright.  The original JA drummer left the band to form Moby Grape, where he didn't even play the drums.  Shows you what a drummer he was.

The greatest San Fran rock drummer was Stu Cook.  Lean and mean, understood the pocket.  But of course the very best San Fran drummers weren't exclusively rock - Greg Errico and Mike Shrieve.  Too hip for the hippies.

I think part of what kept me apart from Airplane so long, without realizing it at the time, is that there really isn't a pocket to be in for most of their songs. But now I don't know how much I'd want a Stu Cook sort in this sort  of band. I don't think I want that steady rock there. As Rock mentioned about Grace Slick, I think she above anything else is the anchor that keeps the music tethered to the earth.

That said, Spencer Dryden is probably the last person I think of as essential when it comes to their particular sound. It's all Kaukonen and Cassidy for me.

As for the Dead, I still can't quite get there with them, even though I think a lot of the appeal of JA is very much present in their work. Maybe I should give them a fiftieth chance at some point.

I've been listening to Happy Trails recently, and it's also a really good album. I've never heard anything else by Quicksilver. As for Shrieve, that guy is obviously a monster. How old was that juvenile by the time he performed at Woodstock? Like 18? Just a monster. As was Carlos Santana's whole band during those early years (a great artist who seems to be constantly slagged off as irrelevant because people clearly are unwilling to look before that Matchbox 20 shit he did, or simply put their noses up at any sort of ethnicity in rock music that is rooted in Latin music..either way a bunch of dumdums)

Last edited by crumbsroom (7/05/2022 9:32 pm)

Let us not forget the album he did with John McLaughlin.

He also did one with Buddy Miles.

It was quite a bit weaker than those two.

SHOVELS 

I found ancient Indian artifacts. Jumped a chain link fence and found them under the ground. Old and covered with dirt and not the sort of things Garrett’s mother would let in her car.  

She didn’t care that they were invaluable. Told me to put them back where I found them. Waited for me as I jumped back over the fence and buried them even deeper than before. Even deeper than those long dead Indians had.

I would be coming back for them later and you couldn’t be too sure. I had seen the kids around here. Hands like shovels. Didn’t trust them. 

When I got back to where Garrett’s mother stood, tennis racket under her arm, she looked at my hands. Told me not to touch anything when I got into her car.

Sitting between two girls with missing teeth in baseball outfits, I kept my hands on my lap, worried about those kids out there who’d come out that night to dig. Certain my treasure would be found. I was anxious. But also bored by talk about how their baseball team would have to do better next time if they ever expected to win a game that season. 

“Our pitching is bad and so is our hitting”, they kept agreeing, leaning over me. 

The next morning I got on my bike and listened for roosters as I pedaled from my home. Rode fast to the place I was last night and hopped the fence and found my hole dug up. Stood there for awhile, not sure what else to do. Looked up into the trees. Assumed I was being watched. Waited for the sound of a whistling arrowhead. The funny thump as it struck me in the back.  

When it didn’t come, I began to worry about tomahawks. How that would be worse than an arrow. And I suddenly got angry at Garrett's mother and looked down into the hole and closed my eyes, waiting for the sound of footsteps behind me.  

Last edited by crumbsroom (7/05/2022 11:57 pm)

2

I knew what death preferred. Not fat kids who were younger than me. Instead, it wanted Johnny McMaster, living under the sidewalk with all the bugs. Death liked shriveled things in bathrobes that ate spumoni ice cream and had never married. It’s why it let so many cockroaches die in his vases and toaster. It was always in the room with him.

It called my grandmother in the middle of the night and let her know Johnnie McMaster had died. That he’d been alone when it happened. And I listened from the hallways, growing frightened of how boring dying seemed it was going to be. 

He was the first. Died even before Fat Peter. And when I think of him everything becomes a yellowy-orange. The same color of the cloud that always filled his small apartment when me and my grandmother would visit him. Smoking cigarette after cigarette. Until everything became that color.  

The walls.  

The bedsheet.  

His skin.  

Even the cockroaches. 

My grandmother and grandfather went to the funeral. So did my father and my aunts and uncles. But no one would tell me he was dead, even though I already knew, and they snuck out when I wasn’t looking. Left me with someone I didn’t know. Went to pay their respects without me. Stand by his body, which I imagined in a bathrobe. Laying there for everyone to see. Shriveled up. The casket open. Everyone crying and coughing as his corpse turned everything around it a yellowy-orange.  
 

GROOMSMEN 

1 

I was only four and so knew it wasn’t me she wasn’t coming to marry. Standing in my bedroom doorway, she must have rolled straight out of my dreams like that. Wearing that dress. Somebody’s bride, but not mine, as she would hardly look at me. As if it were her room and not mine and I was being ridiculous finding myself frightened of her standing in the door like that. Making it hard to leave the room if I wanted to.  

In the morning my grandmother said she was just a bunch of shadows on the wall. Nothing to worry over. I just needed to look a little closer. So, one night, I got from my bed and walked up to her. Close enough where I could see the rouge on her cheeks. The shine of moonlight in her black and curly hair. How it spilled over the shoulders of her wedding dress. I got as close as I could. Close enough I could see she couldn’t be shadows. I could have grabbed her arm and pushed her out of the room if I had dared. Which I didn’t, and instead quickly hurried past her, towards my grandmother's bed. 

In her room, there were definitely the kind of shadows she had been talking about. Standing erect in her doorway. Forming into the shape of a groomsman. Top hat and tails. Nothing to be frightened of. A figment of my imagination, which repeated many times down the hallway that led from her room. All of them blank faced and standing in doorways. Many men for her to choose from, if only she thought to stare anywhere but into my room, where now there was nothing for her. An empty bed. A pile of shadows beneath my covers. Me shivering next to my grandmother. And all of them on the verge of vanishing as soon as the sun came up. 

2 

Before I was ever born, my Aunt Joanne dropped her son down the stairs. His  crown of orange curls shook upon every step his head struck. Smudged his freckles. Pulled his teeth apart and made them fangs. Yellow and without any enamel. No shine. Turned him into the boy I met when I was born. Who I tried to be friends with and who threw my crayons out the window.  

She had blamed a ghost when people wondered why Troy’s face was bruised. Said the ghost was wearing a wedding dress. Stood in a doorway. Levitated down from the attic. She had only run to bring her child to safety, but he had slipped from her fingers. It wasn’t her fault. There were always too many ghosts in their house. Gramma Theresa’s lifeforce couldn’t help but attract them. 

My mother told me this story when I was much older and she was crying about how Joanne had died and how much she loved her. How the woman in the wedding dress was an omen. And when I said I had seen the same ghost, she stopped crying and seemed happy. As if it meant I really was a part of their family, after all. 

Then I told her about the groomsmen, and she shook her head and lost interest. Went to the kitchen to fill her glass. Came back and told me a story about the time she pissed her pants at the movies. Said there were so many things I missed when I went to live with my grandmother. And I believed her and let her keep talking. 

Rampop II wrote:

Crumbs, this is exceptional writing; you know that, don't you? 

I certainly do not, but thank you.

I'm still hoping once I write another nine hundred of these things, I might figure out why I'm doing it.

 

Jinnistan wrote:

But, still, it's a frustrating process to have all of these fragments that I can't made heads of tails of.

Let it flow.  I like random heads and tails.  Tales of headless tails.

Last edited by Jinnistan (8/14/2022 12:00 pm)