Jefferson Airplane No. 1

Jefferson Airplane No. 1 is actually all but undocumented. This is the very first lineup of the Airplane, in 1965, the group that Marty Balin put together to play his new nightclub, the Matrix: Balin and Signe Toly Anderson on vocals, Paul Kantner and Jorma Kaukonen on guitars, Bob Harvey on bass, and Jerry Peloquin on drums. Biographers insist that this lineup recorded a demo for Columbia Records, consisting of "The Other Side Of This Life." I've searched the web over and thought I found true love, but I've never found this demo. I'd love to hear it: this Fred Neil cover was the Airplane's true anthem, not "White Rabbit." It best summed up what they were all about, and it was in their repertoire from the very beginning, but they never released a record of it until 1968.

Since JA1 is effectively a matter of legend, we'll just call it JA0, or maybe JA0.5, and let JA1 be the first Airplane for which we have any aural evidence. This is the lineup that consisted of Balin, Anderson, Kantner, and Kaukonen, plus (well wouldja lookit that) Skip Spence on drums and (fanfare, please) Jack Casady on bass.

The original, and just possibly my favorite, Airplane. I know they wouldn't really take off, as it were, until Grace Slick joined the band. But as essential as their next few records would be, they don't sound as much like the organic product of a band as did their first record, the one recorded with Anderson. The factionalization and musical schizophrenia that would eventually destroy the Airplane was there from the moment Slick joined the band (not that she caused it); but it's not apparent on that first album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off.

That first album, released in September of 1966, is a masterpiece of something. Not quite of psychedelic San Francisco rock. Of folk-rock, if anything. Truth be told, it's the work of a band much infatuated with the Byrds.

This infatuation is even more apparent on the few fragments we have that predate that album. Let's run them down.

Wolfgang's Vault has a three-song set dating from November 6, 1965: a benefit for the San Francisco Mime Troupe at the Calliope Warehouse. It's the earliest circulating Airplane, and the first show in SF promoted by Bill Graham - for some intents and purposes, the SF scene starts here. Sound quality is a bit iffy, but historical value is unmatched, and musically it's eminently decent. It shows a rough-and-ready band of folk rockers, ethereal harmonies backed by muscular musicianship. Some pitch problems, but that's more than made up for by a sureness of vision. Signe in particular is shown off to good effect in these three songs; in the studio she tended to be buried in the mix, at least compared to the way she was miked live. I might as well 'fess up here and now: I'm unbounded in my admiration for Grace Slick, but I loooove Signe Anderson. All contemporary photos show this cute Oregon girl in pigtails, but then she opens her mouth and she's just a belter. When she and Balin harmonized it was yin and yang, but she was the yang - that was the dynamic, and it's only intermittently in evidence on their album. This live rendition of "Runnin' 'Round This World," for example, is rougher but ballsier than the studio version, and the song benefits from it.

The next thing we have is the session for their first RCA single: December 16 & 18, 1965. The session produced the studio version of "Runnin' 'Round This World," the classic "It's No Secret," "High Flying Bird," and "It's Alright." The first two were released as a single; the second was also released on the first album; the last two were released on the 1974 odds'n'sods collection Early Flight. They're all available on the 2003 reissue of Takes Off, which does what a reissue should, and brings together the album and all the related studio tracks. There was room for more - it could have been better - but it could have been worse, too. ...This is a very auspicious debut. "It's No Secret" is a great first single, tremendously accomplished: a dicey love song in what would become the Airplane tradition, delivered by Balin in his trademark shudderingly beautiful style, and backed by the well-oiled Airplane machinery. It soars. They would soar higher before very long, but it's still a good start. The other side of the single (dropped from the album for pushing the limits of what you could sing about in 1965) is just as good. Less moody, more poppy, more of an accent on folk-rock harmonies, but again with a solidity that sets them apart. This is not just electrified folk, which is what the Byrds were for most of their career; this is rock.

That Byrds comparison. What do I mean by it? Well, the harmonies, sure: Balin, Kantner, Kaukonen, Anderson had all come out of the Bay Area folk scene, and their band from the very start was all about harmonies. And the Byrds had been the first to figure out how to bring complex, shifting folk harmonies into rock. The Airplane have learned from them. But that's not all they learned. Paul Kantner, like Jim McGuinn, is playing electric 12-string throughout the Airplane's early sides, lending an unmistakably Byrdsy vibe to the proceedings. And Casady, while very much his own man from the start, does sound a bit like Chris Hillman at times in these early days - when he plays way up on the neck, four beats to the measure, he adds the kind of march-like power that Hillman displayed on "Lay Down Your Weary Tune," for example.

But they're not Byrds clones. As I say, they're rock. Take Paul's guitar work. As much as it puts you in mind of the Byrds, he's not going for the kind of chiming effect that was McGuinn's stock in trade; instead he plays in a more impressionistic style, pinching the chords and slashing at the rhythms. And again I have to come back to the harmonies: Byrds harmonies were always all about innocence and joy, about bringing Dylan's lyrical image of "starry-eyed and laughing" to musical fruition. There was something churchy in them, no surprise given McGuinn's love of Bach. The Airplane were always darker, more sinister, more jaundiced: the tragic or Satanic side of romantic, and it was right there in their harmonies. In Signe's belting, and Marty's crooning, with its frank admission that he was after more than a peck on the cheek.

The folk-rock roots of the Airplane can best be glimpsed on the only other stretch of live Airplane that seems to be circulating, a tape from January 14-16, 1966, at the Kitsilano Theatre in Vancouver, BC. It's not a great performance, really, but it has a lot of things they either would never record, or wouldn't record with this lineup. They actually cover the Byrds: "Feel A Whole Lot Better." They cover Dylan (a song the Byrds also did): "Lay Down Your Weary Tune." Neither song comes off very well, and you can see why they dropped them, but still they're perfectly illustrative of where the band was coming from. Illustrative of where it was going are covers of "The Other Side Of This Life," already an anthem, "Let's Get Together," and "High Flying Bird." I really wish this last had made the album - it's one of Signe's best moments. ...The tape also includes a couple of r&b covers: "Baby What You Want Me To Do" and "In The Midnight Hour." I'm generally unconverted to Hot Tuna - when they played pop songs they were great, but as a blues interlude in Airplane shows, they were a drag. Jorma has to have been the least convincing blues singer in the entire SF scene.

Shortly afterward, in February and March of 1966, came the sessions for the debut album. What's there for me to say about it? I just love it. From the first, ominous rattle of bass and 12-string to the last sigh of Marty's angst, it's something different, despite all the obvious antecedents.

My take on the Airplane is that they were the inventors, in this country at least, of the idea of rock as art. They weren't the band-for-all-seasons that the Dead were, the life of the party, the band of the people; they were the most determinedly serious band on the scene. The downside of that is the raging ego-trips that ripped the band apart far too soon. The upside is that from the very beginning they had an ambition that most of their peers simply didn't have. For a while, through to the end of the '60s, that was enough.

Favorite moments: the descending bass runs (stolen from Bill Wyman and brilliantly repurposed) in "Let Me In." The impossibly taut upwards modulation in the refrain of "Don't Slip Away." The haunted, forbidden-fruit ecstasy of "Come Up The Years." Signe asserting (not screaming) bloody murder on "Chauffeur Blues."

Signe.

Dead white males

I read a lot of them, sure, but I try to read some other things too. Anyway, Sullivan today has a post responding to somebody else's essay saying maybe we should shore up the canon. The idea, basically, is that black literature focuses on the experience of oppression, and thus its perspective is narrow. Sullivan writes:

Naturally, if someone has me in shackles, is holding a gun to my head and denying me my basic human rights because of the colour of my skin, I would choose to firstly devote my intellectual energies to addressing that injustice. But it is undeniable that man’s inhumanity to man is only one part of the human condition.

The dead white men never had to face the evils of slavery or the physical and emotional oppression of racism. Thus their minds were freer to range over the great philosophical questions, metaphysical quandaries and cosmological dilemmas. In short, they have been allowed to address man in relation to the macrocosm, as opposed to just the microcosm.

To which I say: isn't bondage a metaphysical quandary as much as a physical? Isn't oppression an inextricable part of the macrocosm of human experience? Is a mind that can't see this free in any way that matters? Why doesn't Andrew Sullivan, a gay Catholic who insists that his temperamental home is with the conservatives, see this?

Crow Quill Night Owls at the Oregon Country Fair

So the second time we saw Opal Creek was at the Oregon Country Fair, exactly a week after the first time we saw them. This time their bass player was a girl, in a cowboy hat. Nice. We saw them playing at the Shady Grove stage at the OCF, which was a much more intimate venue: a small natural amphitheater, with trees on one side and a dusty path on the other, with the creek on the other side of that. They put on another excellent show.

But the big serendipity of it all was that we showed up early to get a patch of ground for Opal Creek and ended up catching the second half of the Crow Quill Night Owls' set, and that was just as confoundingly awesome as you could possibly imagine.

Now, I'm on record on this here blog as having an abiding tolerance for hokum; the CQNOs are loving curators of hokum, wild-eyed bodiers-forth of it. Picture R. Crumb's Cheap Suit Serenaders if they were fronted by Captain Beefheart, imagine if Roxie Hart (in Renee Z's knobby-kneed version) had a jug band, conjure up the mental image if you will of Gentleman Jim dressed like a gas station attendant and thumping on a tub to accompany a troop of liberated Sasquatches who learned everything they know about music from reading the names of '20s orchestras from the labels of shattered 78s: the New Orleans Feetwarmers, the Red Onion Jazz Babies, the Mississippi Sheiks, the Washboard Ragamuffins, the Golden Pheasant Hoodlums.

All of which is to say that they were as visual as they were musical, a conceptual art schtick as much as a performing unit, and while that sort of thing should rub me the wrong way, they were absolutely perfect. I loved them.

Opal Creek

I think I've established that I don't go out for many concerts, and also that this prohibition mostly only applies to rock concerts. It's not that I don't like live music: it's just that it has to be under the right circumstances, and that includes sound quality.

The right circumstances came along a number of times this summer, and always with quasi-amateur local bands. Viz. Opal Creek, who we happened to see twice back in July.

The first time was on a 4th of July party in a park on the Willamette, called Art in the Vineyard. Basically a convocation of arts-n-crafts booths (one step up, in terms of highfalutinness, from the Saturday Market here in 'Gene, if that means anything to you) and wine-tasting tents (Oregon vineyards). But even more basically it was just an excuse to get a crowd together to sit in the sun by the river and listen to music all day, and then see fireworks over the river in the evening. An infinitely smaller version of the Esplanade thing we attended a number of times in Boston (but, curiously, a better fireworks-viewing experience, since most places you can stand on the Esplanade have badly obstructed views of the fireworks, and if you can see the fireworks you can't see the musicians and vice-versa: go figure).

There were a number of different bands playing at the festival, ranging from Scottish fiddle to Russian balalaika (only in Eugene would the finale group at a 4th of July festival be Russian - awesome) to rhythm'n'blooz. The best was Opal Creek.

They're an all-girl (except that the first time we saw them their bass player was a boy) bluegrass band. And they're good. Guitar, mandolin, banjo, fiddle, bass, the standard bluegrass instrumentation, and four out of the five of them can sing, lead and harmony. Hell, one of them can even yodel.*

And what harmonies. The plaintive deadpan of the Carter Family, with just a touch, here and there, of the sweetness of Alison Krauss, and a good helping of the Stanley Brothers high lonesome sound. I mean, they're not world-class - a little wobbly on the rhythms now and then, a little warbly on the pitch occasionally - but they had that wrung-out heart that the best bluegrass has. They had the feeling.

A nice repertoire, too, including some familiar traditional numbers (they did a respectable "Orange Blossom Special," and a kick-ass "Going To Get My Baby Out Of Jail") and some originals that held their own. And I have to admit that the particular gender alignment of the band was part of their appeal. I don't just mean because they looked amazing standing up there in their Minnie Pearl dresses and Wayfarers; they had a definite female perspective that came through in their songs, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, that I found quite bracing.

I don't have a huge bluegrass collection - just a smattering of Bill Monroe, Stanley Brothers, Flatt & Scruggs, Alison Krauss, and a few other people among my old-timey CDs. But sometimes I get an itch deep down in my soul that only bluegrass can scratch. Opal Creek found it.

A perfect thing to listen to on a 4th of July afternoon, against the blue sky over the Willamette. That was the first time we saw them. The second time was the Oregon Country Fair...and that deserves a post of its own.

*The guitar player and yodeler left the band at the end of the summer, according to their Facebook page. Bonnie's going to nursing school. They're looking for a replacement. Any takers?

David Letterman on The View, 9/7/10

Occasionally we watch The View, and this morning their guest was David Letterman. From the second he walked out, he owned the stage. And for the next forty-five minutes he put on a display of impeccable comic timing, improvisation, and craft. The guy has the best delivery in the business, and some of the quickest reactions. This was a master at work.

It reminded me of how much Letterman has meant to me through the years. From the '80s through the '90s I was aware of him, and watched him when I could - I'm 40, and it's fair to say I was part of the generation that grew up on Letterman's brand of humor. Between periods out of the country and periods when I just didn't own a TV, I never got to watch him regularly until 1999, when I came back from an extended stint in Japan. For the next six or seven years I watched almost every night...until finally it became apparent that he was just going through the motions.

I know a lot of people gave up on him long before that, but I thought he was incredibly strong in the early '00s. His running Campaign 2000 bit in that year was the best commentary (completely dada) on that crazy season in our national life, and of course he was the guy who got us through 9/11. But eventually I had to admit that his show was stale. I stopped watching him regularly a couple of years ago, and I haven't watched him at all in about a year.

Maybe I'll tune in tonight. Because this morning he reminded me of why during many of my years outside the US, Letterman was the piece of American pop culture I missed most: that dry, wiseass wit. I'm on the record as not liking snark, and he basically invented it, but Letterman's different; you can always sense an angry, passionate intelligence just beneath the surface. And even when he's not particularly engaged, he's still probably the best remaining practitioner of a particular, ancient and honorable, brand of professional comedy.

That's a lot of qualifiers, I guess. But anyway, maybe we still need Letterman.

Very early Santana

Santana is a band, not a man, or so goes the theory: in practice, most of Carlos Santana's solo work is pretty indistinguishable from his eponymous band's output, but it is true that his music is always more than just him and some sidemen. And if only because he doesn't sing, Carlos doesn't tend to dominate his bands the way, say, Clapton does his. Santana, when billed as such, is a band.

Of course for most of us there's only one Santana band, the first one. The one that gave us the only three Santana albums that matter*: Santana, Abraxas, and Santana III. The Santana that slew everybody at Woodstock.

But it turns out that this wasn't the first Santana band. It was the second. The first one consisted of Carlos on guitar, Gregg Rolie on keyboards and vocals, David Brown on bass, Marcus Malone on congas, and Bob "Doc" Livingston on drums. The first three, of course, were the instrumental core of the Woodstock-era band, but the two percussions were replaced for the first album.

Is this ur-Santana worth checking out? Surprisingly enough, it is. Where can you check it out? Three places.

First you'll want to track down the 1988 compilation Viva Santana! Hokey name, but worth getting if you're a Santana collector, because it has a ton of rarities. The one that concerns us here is "Ballin'," a demo recorded in late 1967 by this original lineup. A demo, it's called, but it was clearly professionally recorded, and it shows, in six and half minutes of instrumental fire, the musical conception of the classic Santana band already fully-formed. Hot crying guitar, cool caressing Hammond organ, seductive multi-percussionist rhythms. If this is the earliest Santana available, it's a magnificent overture for the man's career.

You'll also want to get the 2004 reissue of the eponymous debut album, the two-disc "Legacy Edition." This is a problematic release; it claimed to include, among its goodies, the complete Woodstock set, but in fact it's missing one song - which later came out on a two-disc set that includes the first album, the complete Woodstock set (for reals this time), but not the other bonus tracks from the Legacy Edition. Typical Sony/Columbia chain-jerking. Anyway, among those bonus tracks are six studio recordings from early 1969 that constitute the band's first attempt at recording their debut album. And although the liner notes to this edition very ungraciously fail to name-check Malone and Livingston, they are in fact the percussionists on these sessions.

Now, these tracks - early drafts of "Soul Sacrifice," "Persuasion," "Treat," "Shades Of Time," and "Jingo," plus a studio take of "Fried Neckbones And Some Home Fries" - are mostly disappointing, just like you'll read in any number of discussions of the classic album. They really are unfocused, slightly dead-sounding jams; particularly disappointing after the excitement of "Ballin'." I'm not sure I can even recommend checking them out, although "Shades Of Time" is interesting because it's not on the live album, so this is the only way to (legitly) check out the early stage in this song's evolution. ...It's worth noting that the liner notes to the live album (see below) mention that the first album was originally going to be called Freeway Jam, after a song by that name recorded during the sessions. But it's not here (although it shows up on the live disc). The notes to the Legacy Edition say this is the complete unreleased album, but is it? Or are we going to get yet another reissue someday with "Freeway" on it? This is Columbia/Sony: of course we are.

The live album. In 1997 Sony, who can do some things almost right, released a two-disc live document called Live At The Fillmore 1968, which features the original lineup. Drawn from shows at the Fillmore West on December 19, 20, 21, and 22, 1968, it was an odd move, coming at a time when the classic Woodstock lineup still hadn't been featured on a full-length live album. But never mind: we're glad we have it. And while we're never minding, let's try to forget about the fact that each disc in the set is under an hour long, while bootlegs from the era suggest that the band had more songs in their repertoire than are represented on this release. We're still glad we have it.

Because it's fantastic music. Carlos, Rolie, and the underappreciated Brown are just tearing it up on these nights, while Malone and Livingston hold their own: they're not Shrieve, Carabello, and Areas, but they hold their own.

The set includes four of the tunes that would eventually make up the first album. "Jingo" and "Soul Sacrifice" are pleasant, but definitely pale in comparison with what they'd become. "Persuasion" has yet to be tightened up into a by-gum-that's-a-pop-song; here it starts out with a shaggy fusion vamp before settling into the song portion. You can see why they stripped it down for the final version, but you can also tell that the earlier arrangement was more fun to play live, and maybe even to hear live. Lots of nuance and drama to this arrangement. But the prize of the familiar numbers is "Treat," stretched out to twice its album length here. Still follows the same basic pattern, but Rolie's piano work benefits from the room to stretch out. This is the Santana band as classic jazzers, a role they pull off with astonishing conviction. They had the goods.

The balance of the album consists of numbers that would never show up on an official album. The Willie Bobo number "Fried Neckbones," Chico Hamilton's "Conquistadore Rides Again," and Albert King's "As The Years Go Passing By," plus the originals "Chunk A Funk" and "Freeway."

Quite simply, these should have been the band's first album, and Santana the second. "Fried Neckbones" and "Conquistadore" are as funky and catchy as anything the classic band ever did, with that confident, at-home looseness that only the Fillmore could breed. "As The Years Go Passing By" is maybe the most assured blues performance to come out of San Francisco that year, and is a welcome representation of the straight-blues side of the band, a side that was fully assimilated into the Latin melange by the time the first album was recorded, but which in the beginning was raw enough that they called themselves the Santana Blues Band.

"Freeway," meanwhile, is...I'd love to hear a studio version of this someday. Live, it's a half hour long, and it almost justifies its length: it's their "Who Do You Love," their "Dark Star," their "Bear Melt": lots of solos all around. I don't mind this kind of thing, obviously; there are some who think this kind of thing was self-indulgent, but (a) what's the point of rock if you're not going to indulge, and (b) you have to understand that these jams were meant for dancing, and as a dancer as well as a musician, when you're in the groove, you don't want it to end, and the whole point of the SF scene was to ask, well, why should it have to end? "Freeway" has a great riffy first seven or eight minutes, before all the solos start, and that's why I'd love to hear a proper studio version: what did they consider the essential part of the song? Live, a lot of it is taken up by a percussion duet, and it's here that the inferiority of the Malone/Livingston battery to the Shrieve/Carabello/Areas team becomes glaringly apparent. But in the last six or so minutes the rest of the band comes back in, and all is forgiven.

An essential listen, made all the more so by the fact that it documents a band that is otherwise all but lost to history.

*For the record, I don't buy this line. I think Caravanserai is interesting, and Welcome and Borboletta are damn near essential albums. I haven't gone beyond them yet.

Roman Polanski's Death and the Maiden (1994)

This was one of Polanski's great ones. I think I like him best when he's at his most political - that is, when he allows his normal psychosexual concerns take on sociopolitical overtones. Here it's sort of the reverse: he's taken a play that seems to have been mostly sociopolitical in its concerns and brought out its psychosexual overtones. This old review by Owen Gleiberman runs them down well: "Death and the Maiden is a true Polanski movie now, a sadomasochistic love story that locks torturer and victim together in a chillingly intimate spiritual embrace."

Where I differ from Gleiberman's take is in seeing the political dimensions of the story being given equal importance. Maybe this is easier for an American to see in 2010 than in 1995, at least an American who's had the scales fall from his eyes with regard to his fellow-citizens' willingness to torture and condone torture. The subject of the movie is torture, and how societies deal with it: that comes through loud and clear.

That's why for me, the husband is the most interesting character. Sigourney Weaver's Paulina is a marvel, "stalk(ing) through the rubble like a battered Amazon queen exacting her revenge," in Charles Taylor's phrase (the other review I linked to above). And Ben Kingsley as the suspect Dr. Miranda is amazing, his final confession being one of the most five minutes of speaking you'll ever see, sketching for us how an ordinary man, with the ordinary load of ingrained lusts and anger, can, in the right circumstances, act like a monster, and how he can explain it himself afterward, and to what degree he can forgive himself.

But the figure of Paulina's husband is the real fulcrum of the drama, as we see him struggle to understand the situation. He's supposed to be a dedicated democrat, a crusader for truth and justice for the victims of the old regime, not to mention that he's Paulina's loving husband. But when her actions, her accusation of the doctor, put him on the spot, we suddenly see how as a man, with a normal load of reflexive misogyny; as a husband, with a normal load of grievance; as a lawyer, with a normal distrust of uncorroborated testimony; as a political figure, with a normal sympathy for authority; as a citizen, with a normal unwillingness to see his kind neighbor as a villain; as a peaceful man, with a normal hesitation to use violence; as all these things and more, he's utterly unequipped to give Paulina's story the credence it deserves, and respond with the action it demands. He hesitates at every key moment. And if he hesitates now, how can we expect the truth and reconciliation commission to work?