Jefferson Airplane – Page 2

Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part Six

The United States of America, 1968. Back, left–right: Joseph Byrd, Dorothy Moskowitz, Gordon Marron; front, left–right: Ed Bogas, Craig Woodson, Rand Forbes.

Concluding the psychedelic mega-mix based on Jon Savage’s list of “100 mind-expanding masterpieces” (see this post). The last of the six mixes is the third visit to the USA, and features songs from the years 1968 to 1969 arranged in chronological order. As before, the selections from the Savage 100 are in bold, and I’ve added notes about my additions or amendments.

The most notable deviation from Savage’s list in this final collection is the substitution of Lothar and the Hand People for two other groups combining psychedelic music with electronic sounds, Fifty Foot Hose and The United States Of America. Lothar and the Hand People were so named because of their use of theremins; they’re often described as electronic pioneers but I’ve never liked their music very much or thought it was as inventive as people claim. Fifty Foot Hose and The United States Of America are better on all levels, the self-titled USA album is a masterpiece that proved an inspiration for Portishead (listen to Half Day Closing) and Broadcast.

Savage ended his UK list with Can’t Find My Way Home, a song that captured the come-down feeling after the psych fireworks were over. The US list lacked an equivalent resolution, hence the choice of Wooden Ships; where Blind Faith’s lament is a personal one, Jefferson Airplane offer something more global, a pessimistic vision of the future that you can tie to all the other crashing dreams of 1969. It’s also a great song, and a fitting way to bring everything to a close.

US Psychedelia, Part Three by Feuilleton on Mixcloud

Radio news — Grateful Dead drug bust
The Grateful Dead — That’s It For The Other One
Nazz — Open My Eyes (The first single by a band with Todd Rundgren on guitar, and another song from the original Nuggets collection.)
Iron Butterfly — In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida
Fifty Foot Hose — If Not This Time (One of several songs whose unusual chord progressions—some of them inspired by Schoenberg—set them apart from their contemporaries.)
Steppenwolf — Magic Carpet Ride
The Steve Miller Band — Song For Our Ancestors
The United States Of America — The Garden Of Earthly Delights (A paean to poisonous love with a title borrowed from Bosch.)
Tommy James And The Shondells — Crimson And Clover
White Lightning — William
Spirit — Dream Within A Dream
Skip Spence — War In Peace
The Youngbloods — Darkness, Darkness
Kak — Electric Sailor
Kaleidoscope (US) — Lie To Me (A last nod to the psychedelic sound from an album very aptly entitled Incredible!)
The Grateful Dead — Mountains Of The Moon
Jimi Hendrix — The Star Spangled Banner
Jefferson Airplane — Wooden Ships

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part Five
• Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part Four
• Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part Three
• Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part Two
• Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part One
• What Is A Happening?
• My White Bicycle
• Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake
• Tomorrow Never Knows
• The Dukes declare it’s 25 O’Clock!
• A splendid time is guaranteed for all

Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part Five

Haight Street hippies, San Francisco, Oct. 26, 1967. From the Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection.

Continuing the psychedelic mega-mix based on Jon Savage’s list of “100 mind-expanding masterpieces” (see this post). The fifth of the six mixes is the second visit to the USA, and features songs from the years 1967 to 1968 arranged in chronological order. As before, the selections from the Savage 100 are in bold, and I’ve added notes about my additions or amendments.

Savage’s selections for the USA can be more arguable than those in the UK list. As I noted earlier, UK singles are easily identifiable for being effects-heavy studio creations. The US scene evolved out of the dance halls of San Francisco, the same halls that also fuelled the demand for all the trend-setting psychedelic poster art. Some of the bands could be just as adventurous in the studio but the sound at this point is more a transcription of the live performance. In other songs the “psychedelic” quality is a result of context, as with Otis Redding who played at the Monterey Pop Festival, and is singing here about the San Francisco Bay, but isn’t really a psychedelic artist.

US Psychedelia, Part Two by Feuilleton on Mixcloud

Radio ad — The Trip
The Glass Family — House Of Glass (The first song on the group’s only album.)
Kaleidoscope (US) — Egyptian Candy (The multi-generic multi-instrumentalists recorded a number of Middle Eastern-style pieces. This is one of the more obscure ones.)
Park Avenue Playground — The Trip (The wildest trip song of them all.)
The Red Crayola — Hurricane Fighter Plane (One of the few actual songs in the psychedelic soup of the group’s first album. This version is from a compilation.)
Jefferson Airplane — White Rabbit
Tim Buckley — Hallucinations
The Chocolate Watchband — In The Past (The Savage 100 has Are You Gonna Be There (At The Love-In). This replacement is by the “fake” Watchband assembled by producer Ed Cobb to fill out a side of the group’s second album. Real or fake, I always liked the song.)
Big Brother and the Holding Company — Piece Of My Heart (The Savage 100 has Ball And Chain.)
The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band — Smell of Incense (A great song by a group who never sound as experimental as their name implies.)
The Third Bardo — Five Years Ahead Of My Time
Painted Faces — Anxious Colour
The Beau Brummels — Magic Hollow
Buffalo Springfield — Broken Arrow
The Strawberry Alarm Clock — Incense And Peppermints
Love — The Red Telephone
The Byrds — Change Is Now
Otis Redding — (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay
The Balloon Farm — A Question Of Temperature
Sly & The Family Stone — Dance To The Music
Quicksilver Messenger Service — Pride Of Man
The Monkees — Porpoise Song (The Monkees at their most tripped-out. A song by Goffin & King that plays over shots of Micky Dolenz swimming with solarised mermaids during the opening of their feature film, Head.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part Four
• Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part Three
• Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part Two
• Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part One
• What Is A Happening?
• My White Bicycle
• Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake
• Tomorrow Never Knows
• The Dukes declare it’s 25 O’Clock!
• A splendid time is guaranteed for all

Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part Four

LIFE, September 9th, 1966. Photo by Yale Joel.

Continuing the psychedelic mega-mix based on Jon Savage’s list of “100 mind-expanding masterpieces” (see this post). The fourth of the six mixes is the first visit to the USA, with songs from the years 1965 to 1967 arranged in mostly chronological order. As before, the selections from the Savage 100 are in bold, and I’ve added notes about my additions or amendments.

US psychedelia differs from the UK variety in its origins—there’s often a country or folk influence where British bands tended to be working from a background of R&B—and in the political reality that lurks underneath the spaced-out sentiments. UK psychedelia can be whimsical to a degree that tips into childishness, the stakes are often nothing more serious than the risk of being busted for illicit drug use; America was a nation at war overseas and at home, with riots and assassinations forming a backdrop to many of these songs. Kaleidoscope’s Keep Your Mind Open sounds like it might be a typical plea for freer thinking but the lyrics address the war in Vietnam, and the song fades out to the sounds of gunfire.

US Psychedelia, Part One by Feuilleton on Mixcloud

Radio ad — Psych Out
The Byrds — Eight Miles High (first version)
The Charlatans — Alabama Bound
Jefferson Airplane — Blues From An Airplane
Country Joe & The Fish — Section 43
Great Society — Someone To Love
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band — Electricity
Oxford Circle — Foolish Woman
The Vejtables — Feel The Music
The 13th Floor Elevators — Slip Inside This House (The Savage 100 has Roller Coaster but I got hooked on the momentum of this one—which is actually from 1968—via a compilation.)
The Count Five — Psychotic Reaction
The Magic Mushrooms — It’s-A-Happening (One of the outstanding numbers on the original Nuggets compilation.)
The Sons Of Adam — Feathered Fish
Love — 7 & 7 Is
The Beach Boys — Good Vibrations
Sopwith Camel — Frantic Desolation
The Doors — Crystal Ship
The Seeds — Mr. Farmer
Kaleidoscope (US) — Keep Your Mind Open
Radio ad — Vox Wah-Wah Pedal
The Electric Prunes — I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night (Savage has Get Me To The World On Time but this is one of my favourite psych songs of all.)
Mystery Trend — Johnny Was A Good Boy
The Moving Sidewalks — 99th Floor (The first single by a band featuring ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons.)
Moby Grape — Omaha

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part Three
• Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part Two
• Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams: Part One
• What Is A Happening?
• My White Bicycle
• Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake
• Tomorrow Never Knows
• The Dukes declare it’s 25 O’Clock!
• A splendid time is guaranteed for all

Bomb culture

The Atomic Mr Basie (1957) by the Count Basie Orchestra.

A few more examples and this would have been part of the ongoing Design as virus thread. A recent post at MetaFilter led to this piece about the use and misuse of photos of nuclear tests. The Count Basie album above appears there, a cover I’d not seen before. This isn’t the same cover as in the post since there were several variations of this album entitled either Basie or The Atomic Mr Basie.

Hood, 11:40.00.4 5 July 1957.

The photo on the cover was of “Hood”, one of the detonations from Operation Plumbbob, a series of tests that took place in the Nevada Desert during the summer of 1957.

Crown of Creation (1968) by Jefferson Airplane. Design: John Van Hamersveld.

The Basie cover reminded me immediately of a similar cover for Jefferson Airplane’s Crown of Creation album a decade later. No doubt both albums chose shots of explosions against dark skies since they look a lot more fiery and dramatic than those photographed in the desert daylight. I’ve often wondered if this cover—which runs counter to the peace & love vibes of the late 60s—gave Norman Spinrad the idea for his story The Big Flash published a year later. Spinrad’s story is a twist on the usual scenario of Jesus or Satan appearing in contemporary guise: “The Four Horsemen” are a rock band who are also the actual Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Their popularity leads the world willingly to nuclear destruction.

Fizeau, 16:45 14 September 1957.

The first surprise was that this isn’t a night shot. The second surprise was discovering that “Fizeau” was also a part of Operation Plumbbob. This page has more details of the complete operation in all its cancer-inducing glory.

Dynamite (1974) by Various Artists. Artwork by Phil Richards.

There may be other albums using the Plumbbob photos but the only other example that came to mind was a painted cover which is vaguely reminiscent of the pictures above. I wouldn’t have known this one at all if I hadn’t received it as a Christmas present in December 1974. Of all the cheap compilation albums I used to play on my first record player this was easily the best one, an odd mix of glam, forgettable pop and the heavy rock that in those days made it into the charts on a regular basis. “As advertised on TV.” The Cozy Powell number, Dance With The Devil, was a drum-led instrumental based on Jimi Hendrix’s Third Stone From The Sun. It still sounds good today.

The Age of Quarrel (1986) by Cro-Mags.

An album by a hardcore band that uses a shot of the Romeo test from Operation Castle, 1954. Thanks to @NONPOPOCCULTURE.

Update: Added Cro-Mags.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Lyrical Substance Deliberated

Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds from Yellow Submarine (1968).

The advent of spring invariably gets me listening to favourite psychedelic songs, and this year has been no exception. Earlier this week I was idly wondering how many songs there are that follow the Beatles’ lead in telegraphing their drug metaphors by using the initials L-S-D in their titles. Wikipedia’s page for Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds (1967) relates John Lennon’s oft-repeated claim that the initialism in the title was a coincidence, and the song itself is really a bit of Lewis Carroll-like whimsy. This might be credible if works of art only ever carried one meaning but they don’t, of course, and the song is both a piece of Lewis Carroll-like whimsy as well as being a pretty obvious paean to the drug experience: “Climb in the back with your head in the clouds / And you’re gone”. Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit (1967) was similarly ambivalent with mushrooms/pills replacing acid.

Among the many things birthed by the enormous success of the Sgt Pepper album, a small flurry of songs or instrumentals have imitated Lennon’s initialism for their titles. The ones that came immediately to mind are detailed below, and they make a curious group. If anyone knows of any others—there must be others…—then please leave a comment.

Burning Of The Midnight Lamp/The Stars That Play With Laughing Sam’s Dice (Aug, 1967).

The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s B-side not only alludes to LSD but also to STP. The song itself doesn’t go very far before collapsing into freakout mode.

The Trip (1967).

Not a song but included here for that “Lovely Sort of Death” tag. Written by Jack Nicholson! With Dennis Hopper as the acid dealer! See the trailer here, then watch the whole film here.

Lost Soul In Disillusion (November, 1967).

Hard to imagine anyone in London would have heard this in 1967. The Power of Beckett were a Montreal garage group who only released two singles. Lost Soul In Disillusion turned up years later on compilation albums.

Continue reading “Lyrical Substance Deliberated”