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Greg_L
Banned
Lol. For real. They ran The Clash and DK right out of town.
Lol. For real. They ran The Clash and DK right out of town.
fat_fleet
Swollen Member
i smell a Gerg cover 
D
DrCobweb
New member
A few years ago I took on the task of loading all my music into a server. Ripped about 1000 CDs to FLAC, and began digitizing old vinyl LPs (mostly old jazz and classical albums that were never released on CD) into the system, also as FLAC. I still haven't done all the vinyl, but it's getting there. I make sure everything is properly tagged when it goes into the server so I can organize and find things easily. With a wireless network and a few Squeezebox receivers, I now have over 1100 albums available at the touch of finger anywhere I want to listen to music -- even out on the deck or patio. No more having to go looking for an album; no more being tied to just one room where the music system is -- there is music in the living room, family room, kitchen, each bedroom, the reading room, and out in the backyard. Wherever I am in the house I have my entire music collection with me. I can be listening to Muddy Waters in the family room while my wife has Alan Parsons on in the kitchen, or we can put the same music on all over the house while we're doing weekend chores. It took some time to set up and organize, but it was worth it. And as a bonus I can put on XM Radio or Pandora or any other Internet station, too.
Until I can get a similar system set up in my car (with a duplicate server), I burn CDs I want to take along and keep 'em in a CD wallet. It isn't ideal, but I don't have to worry about them; if one gets scratched, I burn a new copy. Blank CDs cost about a nickel, so it's no loss. My originals are all in their cases, safely stored in bookcases in the music room; they never come out of their cases after they've been ripped into the system. I also back up the server weekly and keep the backup at another location, so if there's a fire or something at the house, my whole music collection (along with photos, home video, financial records and whatnot) won't be lost.
Next big step is to do the same thing for all the DVDs (and old video tapes). But it'll probably be a year or two before I tackle that.
Until I can get a similar system set up in my car (with a duplicate server), I burn CDs I want to take along and keep 'em in a CD wallet. It isn't ideal, but I don't have to worry about them; if one gets scratched, I burn a new copy. Blank CDs cost about a nickel, so it's no loss. My originals are all in their cases, safely stored in bookcases in the music room; they never come out of their cases after they've been ripped into the system. I also back up the server weekly and keep the backup at another location, so if there's a fire or something at the house, my whole music collection (along with photos, home video, financial records and whatnot) won't be lost.
Next big step is to do the same thing for all the DVDs (and old video tapes). But it'll probably be a year or two before I tackle that.
Lt. Bob
Spread the Daf!
yeah, , that's something I'd love to do but we're talking about 5-10 thousand hours for me to do it ...... I'm guessing it'll never happen.
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gu1tarplaya
New member
Many, but some that are far more obsure. Humble Pie is one that I dug out of my collection and really listened closely. What a great band. I always assumed peter frampton had the guitar and vocals. Not so. Steve Marriott provided vocals and much of the guitar duties. Anyway, I love analysing old bands and playing their licks.
Bruce
Bruce
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gu1tarplaya
New member
But there are some notable things that Jefferson Airplane did for rock music. Jorma Kaukonen came out of jefferson airplane and has mellowed out and plays some good singer songwriter stuff. Grace Slick, who I don't have an opinion of, also came out of the band.
Bruce
Bruce
Lt. Bob
Spread the Daf!
absolutely ..... if you reread my post, I didn't say that jefferson Airplane sucks or that they weren't important or that they didn't have good songs and I specifically mentioned two songs in particular.
What I said was that sometimes some of that old stuff doesn't sound so good when you revisit it after a lot of years.
J.A. absolutely were an important band and absolutely had important songs and absolutely had some great tunage.
But on that particular album, other than those two songs .... everything else was a great surprise to me as to how poor and amateurish it was.
fat_fleet
Swollen Member
gotta say Lt., that those two songs (White Rabbit and Somebody to Love) are the two i always skip over when i listen to Surrealistic Pillow. repetitive airplay killed those songs for me a looooong time ago.
you could be right about the rest of the songs on Worst Of... but i don't even know what else is on that. i always kinda thought Greatest Hits albums more often than not misrepresent the band and i usually avoid them. there are exceptions tho.
also if pitchy vox are a total dealbreaker for you, i'm pretty sure you'd hate more than half the records i listen to!
you could be right about the rest of the songs on Worst Of... but i don't even know what else is on that. i always kinda thought Greatest Hits albums more often than not misrepresent the band and i usually avoid them. there are exceptions tho.
also if pitchy vox are a total dealbreaker for you, i'm pretty sure you'd hate more than half the records i listen to!
arcadeko
Illuminatius Overlordious
Iggy and The Stooges Raw Power - thats some bad ass shit right there.
And Bad Religion - Awesome band that I just started listening to again.
And Bad Religion - Awesome band that I just started listening to again.
fat_fleet
Swollen Member
yeah i may be in the minority that's cool with the original Bowie mix. the Rubber Legs boot is great too cuz it contains the ever-elusive Open Up and Bleed.
fat_fleet
Swollen Member
i am determined to kill this thread and i will go down with it like the last guy on the titanic
R
Richard Monroe
Well-known member
OK- a couple of things- I may be too damn old to have recently discovered these old bands, so I'll assume it counts if I just remember them in a rare lucid moment in between the episodes of my normal senile dementia-
Spirit
It's a Beautiful Day (first album only)
The United States of America (no kidding- rich kid's vanity album- no guitars)
The Mahavishnu Orchestra
Salloom, Sinclair, and the Mother Bear
That aside, I'm as familiar with Jefferson Airplane and it's progressively deteriorating spinoffs as anyone.
JA were a collection of poets and truly excellent musicians who were often crippled by alcoholism, drugs, a lack of work ethic, interpersonal and political issues and agendas, and, amazingly enough, enemies in the Federal Government. They sounded *great* on some recordings, especially on "Surrealistic Pillow", "After Bathing at Baxter's", and "Crown of Creation". They then released the Paul Kanter inspired political rant album "Volunteers" and the live album "Bless it's Pointed Little Head", recorded at the Fillmore East and West. Their mental, political and musical meltdown proceeded from there. In an attempt to make enough money to pay for their assorted drug habits, and without a hit in several years, they called up all their buddies in San Francisco, and essentially made 3 personal charity benefit albums- "Blows Against the Empire", "Sunfighter", and the benefit for David Crosby, "If Only I could Remember my Name". This was dubbed "Jefferson Starship". The personnel changed a little, but the basic core was- all of Jefferson Airplane, all of The Grateful Dead, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Most of Quicksilver Messenger Service, Joni Mitchell, and the percussion section of Santana. It's good to have friends.
Once again Gracie and Paul Kantner ran out of money, hooked up with Marty Balin, who had left the band years before (an optomistic love baladeer- I can see why he left). They hooked up with David Frieberg from Quicksilver Messenger Service and formed the touring band "Jefferson Starship" , which bore no resemblance to the storied cast of characters listed above, but diid manage one hit- "Miracles", an obvious Marty Balin piece of saccharin, which paid for the coke for a while. After fighting over the name in court for a while, The studio crew that toured w/ Gracie and Paul became just "Starship", a very easy to forget bunch of guys. Meanwhile, Jack Cassidy the bassist and Jorma Kaukonen, the lead guitarist formed Hot Tuna to play the traditional blues Jorma always loved. For a while, they became a really, really, baaad punk band called White Gland, and Jorma went on to become one of the top acoustic country session guys and guitar instructors in the country. I've left out some really unmentionable albums in the late period, such as "Bark", and "Baron Von Tollbooth and the Chrone Nun", as well as Gracie's awful solo album (or was it two?), and Jorma's recent acoustic solo album, which is pretty good.
All of that said, there were two things that made JA sound good in the studio. Al Schmitt, the producer, and Maurice, their tracking engineer. They spent beaucoup time in the studio at RCA, while Al extracted the best he could from them on those rare occasions when the drug balance was right. In the session that took place the night after Baxter's wrapped up (1967), they recorded a single with Jerry Garcia called "Mexico", which was about the US government's spraying marijuana crops in Mexico with paraquat, which was basically a watered down version of agent orange. The song was not released on a real record until years later. After Grace Slick (who was high on the social register) was stopped by the secret service while planning to slip LSD into a cup or two at Patricia Nixon's white house tea (that register thing- she was actually invited, but even the secret service recognized *her*), president Nixon sic'd J.Edgar Hoover and the FBI on them. Quietly, and unofficially, current Jefferson Airplane releases were banned from all three major networks and their affiliates for about 2 years. Much to their credit, NET, the forerunner of PBS public television, refused to bow to pressure, and featured JA in several videotaped performances. Of course, they rarely were able to play well live, and Al Schmitt wasn't able to hide that fact. If they had been dried out and really worked hard, they might have been a super group, but what they became was a walking corpse of their potential. The political pressure just accelerated their implosion. About that time, Al Schmitt decided he'd had enough of their B.S., and bugged. Gracie lost her beautiful, sultry, truly special voice from too much tobacco, weed, alcohol, and hard living and became a shrill harpy. Marty Balin wisely bugged, as did Spencer Dryden, the drummer, who went on to work with Jerry Garcia in "The New Riders of the Purple Sage" a vehicle for Jerry's amazing steel pedal playing.
My bottom line- In the beginning, Gracie, Paul, and Marty were among the best lyricists in rock music, and Jorma, Jack, and Spencer were among the most innovative musicians in rock. Jorma is the guy who figured out what a Fox wah-wah was good for- just like Jimi Hendrix simultaneously figured out what the Vox wah-wah was good for. Jorma's early use of feedback was truly innovative. They combined folk, blues, and rock into the fusion that defined San Francisco psychedelic acid rock. Gracie and Paul's lyrics, though, are marked occasionally by outright plaigiarism, particularly the title song of "Crown of Creation", which was lifted verbatim from a page of prose in John Wyndam's novel "Rebirth", without credit. I think Paul got sued for that later. In my opinion, their best work is "After Bathing at Baxter's" (RCA-1967) and "Crown of Creation" (RCA-1968), both produced by Al Schmitt. Today Gracie is a happy, sober, pleasant artist in California who looks like my mother. Maybe I'll have lunch with her some time. I used to hang at that old house in San Francisco, and she might even remember me.-Richie
Spirit
It's a Beautiful Day (first album only)
The United States of America (no kidding- rich kid's vanity album- no guitars)
The Mahavishnu Orchestra
Salloom, Sinclair, and the Mother Bear
That aside, I'm as familiar with Jefferson Airplane and it's progressively deteriorating spinoffs as anyone.
JA were a collection of poets and truly excellent musicians who were often crippled by alcoholism, drugs, a lack of work ethic, interpersonal and political issues and agendas, and, amazingly enough, enemies in the Federal Government. They sounded *great* on some recordings, especially on "Surrealistic Pillow", "After Bathing at Baxter's", and "Crown of Creation". They then released the Paul Kanter inspired political rant album "Volunteers" and the live album "Bless it's Pointed Little Head", recorded at the Fillmore East and West. Their mental, political and musical meltdown proceeded from there. In an attempt to make enough money to pay for their assorted drug habits, and without a hit in several years, they called up all their buddies in San Francisco, and essentially made 3 personal charity benefit albums- "Blows Against the Empire", "Sunfighter", and the benefit for David Crosby, "If Only I could Remember my Name". This was dubbed "Jefferson Starship". The personnel changed a little, but the basic core was- all of Jefferson Airplane, all of The Grateful Dead, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Most of Quicksilver Messenger Service, Joni Mitchell, and the percussion section of Santana. It's good to have friends.
Once again Gracie and Paul Kantner ran out of money, hooked up with Marty Balin, who had left the band years before (an optomistic love baladeer- I can see why he left). They hooked up with David Frieberg from Quicksilver Messenger Service and formed the touring band "Jefferson Starship" , which bore no resemblance to the storied cast of characters listed above, but diid manage one hit- "Miracles", an obvious Marty Balin piece of saccharin, which paid for the coke for a while. After fighting over the name in court for a while, The studio crew that toured w/ Gracie and Paul became just "Starship", a very easy to forget bunch of guys. Meanwhile, Jack Cassidy the bassist and Jorma Kaukonen, the lead guitarist formed Hot Tuna to play the traditional blues Jorma always loved. For a while, they became a really, really, baaad punk band called White Gland, and Jorma went on to become one of the top acoustic country session guys and guitar instructors in the country. I've left out some really unmentionable albums in the late period, such as "Bark", and "Baron Von Tollbooth and the Chrone Nun", as well as Gracie's awful solo album (or was it two?), and Jorma's recent acoustic solo album, which is pretty good.
All of that said, there were two things that made JA sound good in the studio. Al Schmitt, the producer, and Maurice, their tracking engineer. They spent beaucoup time in the studio at RCA, while Al extracted the best he could from them on those rare occasions when the drug balance was right. In the session that took place the night after Baxter's wrapped up (1967), they recorded a single with Jerry Garcia called "Mexico", which was about the US government's spraying marijuana crops in Mexico with paraquat, which was basically a watered down version of agent orange. The song was not released on a real record until years later. After Grace Slick (who was high on the social register) was stopped by the secret service while planning to slip LSD into a cup or two at Patricia Nixon's white house tea (that register thing- she was actually invited, but even the secret service recognized *her*), president Nixon sic'd J.Edgar Hoover and the FBI on them. Quietly, and unofficially, current Jefferson Airplane releases were banned from all three major networks and their affiliates for about 2 years. Much to their credit, NET, the forerunner of PBS public television, refused to bow to pressure, and featured JA in several videotaped performances. Of course, they rarely were able to play well live, and Al Schmitt wasn't able to hide that fact. If they had been dried out and really worked hard, they might have been a super group, but what they became was a walking corpse of their potential. The political pressure just accelerated their implosion. About that time, Al Schmitt decided he'd had enough of their B.S., and bugged. Gracie lost her beautiful, sultry, truly special voice from too much tobacco, weed, alcohol, and hard living and became a shrill harpy. Marty Balin wisely bugged, as did Spencer Dryden, the drummer, who went on to work with Jerry Garcia in "The New Riders of the Purple Sage" a vehicle for Jerry's amazing steel pedal playing.
My bottom line- In the beginning, Gracie, Paul, and Marty were among the best lyricists in rock music, and Jorma, Jack, and Spencer were among the most innovative musicians in rock. Jorma is the guy who figured out what a Fox wah-wah was good for- just like Jimi Hendrix simultaneously figured out what the Vox wah-wah was good for. Jorma's early use of feedback was truly innovative. They combined folk, blues, and rock into the fusion that defined San Francisco psychedelic acid rock. Gracie and Paul's lyrics, though, are marked occasionally by outright plaigiarism, particularly the title song of "Crown of Creation", which was lifted verbatim from a page of prose in John Wyndam's novel "Rebirth", without credit. I think Paul got sued for that later. In my opinion, their best work is "After Bathing at Baxter's" (RCA-1967) and "Crown of Creation" (RCA-1968), both produced by Al Schmitt. Today Gracie is a happy, sober, pleasant artist in California who looks like my mother. Maybe I'll have lunch with her some time. I used to hang at that old house in San Francisco, and she might even remember me.-Richie
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Richard King
New member
I have always liked the Jefferson Airplane "Takes Off" album, recorded before Grace joined up. I think it still sounds pretty good for it's time period and the fact that it was "probably" recorded on a 1/2" four track machine. I think is was some of their best work (or as they would say "worst").
Scotti
New member
Scorpions -Longing for fire, has some fantastic bass work and killer lead guitar spots. Blows my mind.
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Greg_L
Banned
Amen. All three original Stooges albums are fucking awesome, and even The Weirdness is pretty good.
fat_fleet
Swollen Member
what were you 12 richie?
anyways, great post. you summed up their peak and decline nicely. one thing you didn't really go into, probably cuz your fingers were bleeding and it was a little off topic, was the departure of Skip Spence to co-found Moby Grape and his subsequent decline. that first Grape album and Spence's solo album Oar are really high up there on my list. after Oar, Spence would battle mental illness, drug addiction and homelessness until cancer eventually did him in.
without a doubt those 1st three are the shit but i gotta say i heard Trollin and a couple others around when The Weirdness first came out and i was all like "meh..." and never ended up picking it up... in fact it blew my mind that those guys and Albini and Mike Watt could be together in the same room and the end result was so meh...
maybe i didn't give it enough of a chance. often when a band that was great 30+ years ago gets together as old farts and puts out a comeback album, i expect it to suck royally and go into it with a bias. maybe i should just give it another shot.
and you probably know this but for anyone who doesn't, Pop's The Idiot is another one of those records everyone should hear at least once. just don't go into it expecting that Stooges skronk n stomp on account of it bein all Bowified n shit.
fat_fleet
Swollen Member
ok and...
the first four X albums with Billy Zoom (up to & including More Fun In The New World)
required listening
the first four X albums with Billy Zoom (up to & including More Fun In The New World)
required listening
R
Richard Monroe
Well-known member
Yo Fat_fleet- actually- 13 and a runaway. I was in my first band at 14, which was a JA and Country Joe cover band called Afterbirth. And thanks for the update on Skip Spence. He was before my time, I never met him or Signe Anderson. -Richie
T
thunderstation
New member
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grimtraveller
If only for a moment.....
It's been a long time since I heard someone referred to as a 'shrill harpy' !
That phrase kills me ! 
Great post Richie, that was minefield of great info. If you ever get the time, Grace's autobiography, "Somebody to love ?" makes fascinating reading. I used to use the phrase "Why, bless your pointed little head" with major sarcastic leaning, back in the day. It came from that album. I must admit, I've never really liked JA but they did great album names and some incredible LP covers.
A superlative band. I saw them live in 1984 and it was one of the worst gigs I've seen and heard. I was murderous after it. I want my money back !
If I had seen John McLaughlin, Danny Gottlieb or Jonas Hellborg that thursday night going back to their hotel, I may not have been responsible for what would've taken place....... Damn, they were awful. 
I was particularly galled because that summer I'd just discovered the band through that incredible "Birds of fire" album. It's still sensational. Of course, I didn't realize that that line up had broken up some 11 years previously ! Along with Kansas, they were responsible for really turning me on to the possibilities of rock violin.Years later, John McLaughlin admitted that reforming the band for the set of gigs I saw was a big mistake. So I forgive him.
I think the bands first three LPs are 'in the stratosphere out of this world' fantastic while the two with Jean Luc Ponty on violin are good with some unbelievable stuff. What I liked about them was that they played with heavy rock volume including guitar fuzz crackle, energy, speed, dynamism and intensity, jazz improvisation, Indianesque time signature weirdness and classical cleverness and never sacrificed melody, yet they were rough.