There was a rare London performance by San Francisco musicians Paul Kantner and David Freiberg in London in October 2012. Kantner is the founder of Jefferson Airplane and later Jefferson Starship while Freiberg had been in Quicksilver Messenger Service before joining the Airplane/Starship. Jefferson Starship's singer is now Cathy Richardson who had success off-Broadway as Janis Joplin in 'Love Janis' in 2001. She is a powerful vocalist in the tradition of Grace Slick. Jefferson Starship played a set of two hours.
Their version of the 1964 'Let's Get Together' by Dino Valenti encapsulates the LSD-inspired Haight-Ashbury counter-cultural fraternity (“everybody get together, try to love one another right now”). They performed Airplane's 1967 hits 'Somebody to Love' by Darby Slick which proposes free love to abolish human alienation (“When the truth is found to be lies and all the joy within you dies”), and 'White Rabbit' by Grace Slick, which references Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland' and is a paean to psychedelic drugs (“feed your head”). Also from 1967 they performed 'The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil' by Kantner which is influenced by A.A. Milne poems for children. 'Pooneil' is singer Fred Neil, and the song captures the magic of childhood and the psychedelic 60's (“Love like a mountain springtime flashing through the rivers of my mind”). 'Crown of Creation' by Kantner from 1968 is based on the Cold War science fiction novel 'The Chrysalids' by John Wyndham, and lyrics like “life is change, how it differs from the rocks” are reminiscent of Heraclitus, the father of dialectics.
Freiberg performed a powerful version of the 1964 Buffy Sainte-Marie anti-narcotic song 'Codine' (“I feel like I'm dying and I wish I was dead”). 'Wooden Ships' from 1969 by Kantner, David Crosby and Stephen Stills is an evocative song of the quest for human survival in a post-apocalyptic nuclear war world, and highlights the counter cultural desire to leave the bourgeois capitalist world of Nixon's AmeriKa (“we are leaving, you don't need us, sailing ships on the water very free and easy”). Kantner's 1970 'Have You Seen the Saucers?' indicts US government cover up about UFOs (“have you any idea why they're lying to you?”) but there is the idea of exiting planet earth (“open the door, don't you know that's what it's for, come on and join us on the other side of the Sun”). The science fiction theme was continued with 'Have You Seen the Stars Tonite?' by Kantner and Crosby which appears on Kantner's solo album of 1970 'Blows Against the Empire' (inspired by Robert Heinlein's novel 'Methuselah's Children'). The album describes the counter culture escaping the capitalist earth for a galactic world of free love, free music and free drugs.
Jefferson Starship closed the gig with the leftist 1969 anthem 'Volunteers' by Kantner and Marty Balin (“Hey now it's time for you and me Got a revolution Got to revolution”) and reference is made to the potential of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Steve Clayton
Thanks for that! Grew up into all the West Coast stuff, a bit late, in the mid-70's, and ever since. 'Blows against the Empire' - what a title! Add the Grateful Dead, Country Joe & the Fish, Love and the Doors and you've got the greatest explosion of counter-culture we've ever seen. shame it never had the Socialist perspective to help it hold itself together...
ReplyDeleteThey are back in January 2014...
ReplyDelete