R.I.P. Marty Balin, January 30, 1942 – September 27, 2018

Paul Kantner and Marty Balin both gone now. I can't imagine how Grace Slick feels tonight.



I remember in Grace's autobiography that she wrote about sleeping with every member of the band except for Marty, but she made love to him every night on stage. That's so obvious in some of these duets. The Slick/Kantner mix has one kind of magic, but the Slick/Balin blend of voices was the early Airplane sound.

Happy 73rd Birthday to Jack Cassady

"Some will come and some will go | We shall surely pass" Signe Anderson 1941-2016

Earlier today we heard the news that Signe Anderson, the singer on the first Jefferson Airplane album of 1966, had died at 74 on January 28, the same day the Jefferson Airplane's Paul Kantner had died at 74. On the cover of Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, Paul and Signe are standing on either side of the propellor in the center of the band. I have to admit that it's not the Airplane album I'm most familiar with, so I put the CD in the car and went for a drive on back roads in the hills and listened to it from beginning to end. I was especially struck when the first solo appearance of Signe's voice came with the words "Some will come and some will go | We shall surely pass" in Dino Valenti's "Let's Get Together" (the hit version of this song was recorded a year later than the Airplane version by The Youngbloods).



"Love is but a song we sing
Fear the way we die"

Paul Kantner 3/17/1941-1/28/2016

If there was one album that was my interior soundtrack as I finished high school and moved into college, it was Paul Kantner's Blows Against the Empire. I knew (I know) every note and every word up to and including this final song:

Hearing the unexpected news of Paul Kantner's death tonight is hitting me hard.

"...morning maniac music..."

Happy 76th Birthday to Grace Slick!



I visited the Museum at Bethel Woods for the first time last summer and there was one thing that shocked me. In one of the Woodstock Festival displays, the Jefferson Airplane's early Sunday morning set was described with the word 'uninspired'; it almost (almost) ruined the whole Museum experience.

Happy Birthday Grace.

The Eyes of Grace Slick

...and the song I can't get out of my head today on Rachel Carson's birthday:

'Eskimo Blue Day' from the Jefferson Airplane (featuring Grace and Jorma) live at the Family Dog in 1970.

Water my roots the natural thing
Natural spring to the sea
Sulphur springs make my body float
Like a ship made of logs from a tree
Redwoods talk to me
Say it plain
The human name
Doesn't mean shit to a tree

Happy Sunday. Imagine your world without Republicans.

It's a beautiful Sunday morning in November in Woodstock, New York, and I'm about to go outside again.

Even though the song in this Jefferson Airplane segment from Woodstock (the movie, not the town) is "Won't You Try / Saturday Afternoon," I always think of it as a Sunday morning song, hanging out in the park on a beautiful Sunday morning (even without your fellow hippies, and with or without acid, incense, and balloons), because the Airplane opened the Sunday portion of the Woodstock concert very early with this "morning maniac music".

Please go outside today and imagine your world without Republicans for a few hours.

Saturday afternoon
Yellow clouds rising in the noon
Acid, incense, and balloons
Saturday afternoon
People dancing everywhere, loudly shouting I don't care
It's a time for growing and a time for knowing love
Saturday afternoon

I sense some of this joy in the Occupy movement that I haven't seen in politics for a long time. And I also can't watch this video without falling in love with Grace Slick all over again.

#OWS Occupy Wall Street Circa 1968

I needed to do something to partially purify my mind after watching a bunch of stuffed suit Republicans (and Michele Bachmann dressed like an admiral) clawing their way to the intellectual and moral depths at a CNN debate in Las Vegas tonight.
What better antidote to their ugly visions of the world than the Jefferson Aiplane on a rooftop in midtown in 1968 playing "House at Pooneil Corners" courtesy of Jean-Luc Godard?

You and me we keep walking around and we see
All the bullshit around us
You try and keep your mind on what's going down
Can't help but see the rhinoceros around us
and you wonder what you can be
and you do what you can to get balled & high...

That's better.

". . . commanding his very own tank . . ."

Here are the Jefferson Airplane performing "Lather" on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on CBS in 1968.

I guess I can blame network television in the nineteen sixties for turning me into the liberal that I am today.

Happy New Year. Feed Your Head.

Spencer Dryden - Official Press Release from spencerdryden.com

Spencer Dryden - Official Press Release
Sad to see these icons of my youth passing from natural causes.
Listen to this and relive 1968: After Bathing at Baxter's

-- true blue liberal