The Big Green House

Wednesday, June 04, 2003

 

She has funny cars

It�s funny how some types of music seem perfectly suited to certain seasons, and occasionally even specific days of the week. Jefferson Airplane, for example, has always felt like a lazy summer Sunday afternoon. Actually, I think we could expand that to include most rock & roll released between, say, 1966 � 71 or so, probably due to my being a kid during that period. I just about always had my little transistor radio with me during summer vacation � I seem to remember strapping it to the handlebars of my bike at one point.

Anyway, while we were out and about this weekend, Science Girl and I stopped into Easy Streets records; one of the things I picked up was this new Jefferson Airplane compilation. (Not, I hasten to add, Jefferson Starship - or, as we so cruelly referred to them in the record shop I used to manage, Jefferson Wheelchair). Always a soft spot in my heart for the Airplane, although honestly I don�t know that much of their music. Maybe they balance my intense dislike of the Grateful Dead. At any rate, it�s a nice comp, and shows how they evolved from nice little folk-rockers (�Come Up the Years�, �My Best Friend�) to acid heads (�Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil�, �Greasy Heart�) to
upper-class �revolutionaries� (Volunteers�). Plus there�s �White Rabbit� and �Somebody to Love�, so no one gets disoriented. As I recall 2400 Fulton St. is a better, more complete anthology, but it�s also a two-disc set. If you�re just looking for a starter set, I�d go with the Platinum and Gold Collection.

(Somewhere out there on the intarweb-thing is a story about how Bill �Sputnik� Spooner of The Tubes was at a party where he�d heard that either Gram Parsons or Keith Richards, I forget which now, had referred to the Airplane as being, yes, �white punks on dope�, thereby prompting him to find the other writing members of the band and slap together the song of the same name. I spent the last hour or so trying to find it, but to no avail. I am a failure.)

bmarkey 6/04/2003 10:56:00 PM