I was just reading about
Blows Against The Empire. quote:This earliest edition of Jefferson Starship included members of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (David Crosby and Graham Nash) and members of the Grateful Dead (Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann, and Mickey Hart), as well as some of the other members of Jefferson Airplane (Grace Slick, Joey Covington, and Jack Casady)
Wow. I listened to it approximately a million times and never knew who I was actually hearing. Maybe because I had cassettes and the cheap plastic cases self-destructed so you wound up with a pile of cassettes with no liner notes. Anyway, I had no idea. It's so great now, because all I knew was that it was terrific music, with a real message.
I also just discovered that he was the only member who appeared on every Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship album (during the lawsuit era of the band, the deal he worked out was that no grouping could call itself Jefferson Airplane unless it included him, nor Jefferson Starship unless it included Grace Slick. That's pretty creative, I think.)
People talk about musicians being an influence, but I discovered Bless Its Pointed Little Head and Blows in '72, when I was 13 or 14 and absolutely obsessed with Jack Casady (in particular, Bear Melt for some reason, though over the decades I think I figured out who Bear was and what melting was about ).
I remember sitting by the record player, dropping the needle into the groove over and over, trying to capture genius note for note. It's weird how that stuff distills itself into your playing over time, because I play nothing like Casady.
Same with Tom Fowler from Zappa's Overnight Sensation and Greg Lake: it's in there somewhere and pops out in odd places, but overall it's like comparing a Formula One driver and a geezer on a tractor.
The main impression I have of Paul Kantner is that he stuck to his principles throughout his career and his life.
quote:It's a lot of random situations that combine in a certain volatile form and create a bigger-than-the-whole situation that nobody could have predicted. ... You couldn't have fed the '50s into a computer and come out with the '60s.
Paul Kantner
