"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.

On the Bus

All the talk about Mitt Romney on his bus tour of the US is making me think about THE bus trip (at least for those of us who came of age in a certain era), so I sought out this video of Jerry Garcia and Ken Kesey on Tom Snyder's Tomorrow Show discussing the Acid Tests (and is it just me, or does Tom seem like he's doing an animated impression of Dan Ackroyd doing an especially clueless Tom Snyder?):

 
 Even with Tom Snyder's strange reference to the antichrist of rock, Ted Nugent, this helped me detox from seeing Republicans on my television and computer.

 
Escapin' through the lily fields
I came across an empty space
It trembled and exploded
Left a bus stop in its place
The bus came by and I got on
That's when it all began
There was cowboy Neal
At the wheel
Of a bus to never-ever land