Jefferson Airplane - Volunteers (1969)

Dan: 

Volunteers was the last Jefferson Airplane album put out by RCA and it received a lavish treatment complete with gatefold cover, inner sleeve artwork, and astonishing sonics. Discogs lists a whopping 123 different releases worldwide, including a quadraphonic version on both vinyl and reel-to-reel tape in 1973. I bought the Mobile Fidelity CD in the early 90s and also owned a later pressing of the LP. One might conclude that that this was the band's best seller, but it wasn't. Surrealistic Pillow holds that honor with over a million copies sold. 

It's my favorite Airplane album. Songwriting is distributed across the band members, although Marty Balin's sole contribution is the 2-minute closing title song. Volunteers also was Balin's last album as a member of Jefferson Airplane. By this time, it was easy to guess who wrote which song. I am especially captivated by Grace Slick's songwriting. On Volunteers she contributes "Eskimo Blue Day" and "Hey Frederick," two of the darkest songs on the album. "Eskimo" is a lengthy exercise in free association over a somber instrumental backing. It's about the natural world (eels, trees, snow, sulfur springs, the sun and the sea) and human names, crowds and dreams - all of which "don't mean shit to a tree." "Frederick" is about machines but's not easy to decipher. Again, the music establishes the mood as well as the lyrics. Songs like this can be disturbing, but they're honest expressions of despair in a modern world where nature is threatened by human progress. 

"Wooden Ships" also makes its debut on Volunteers. Paul Kantner and Stephen Stills wrote most of the lyrics to accompany David Crosby's music. Kantner even named a future band after the song, and of course it was a major hit for Crosby, Stills & Nash. It's a beautiful anti-war song in which survivors from opposite camps meet and set off together wondering who might have won the war. In contrast to Slick's angry vitriol, "Wooden Ships" responds to the horrors of the world with idyllic serenity. It's remarkable that her songs cohere along with lighter material on the same album.

Steve:

Jefferson Airplane's prior album, Crown of Creation, had been their bleakest album yet, concluding with nothing less than the end of the world itself ("The House at Pooneil Corners"), so Volunteers seems more optimistic in comparison, but only slightly. Their anger has been channeled away from impotent rage and into positive action - even if such action involves forcing the bad guys "up against the wall, mother f**ker!" ("We Can Be Together", which opens the album on an anthemic note). Only Grace's tunes retain the dark pessimism of before, as Dan points out above. Elsewhere, the band seems to find solutions in returning to the Earth ("The Farm", "A Song for All Seasons") and finding strength in a higher power ("Good Shepherd"). Volunteers is a return to simplicity that capitalizes on the band's individual and collective creative strengths.

I'll add words of praise for "Wooden Ships". This version of the song puts me in a dreamlike state, though it was never clear to me what it was about. I imagine a post-apocalyptic world in which a few survivors remain, and they roam the wasteland wondering about the future of themselves and the world. Kind of like the plot of The Last of Us on HBO, which I've been watching lately, come to think of it. No wonder I like that show. 

Jefferson Airplane - After Bathing at Baxter's (1967)

Steve:

The Jefferson Airplane, at the time of the release of After Bathing at Baxter's in December 1967, had already made it big both in the underground and on the pop charts. Their newest recruit, vocalist/songwriter Grace Slick, was a force of nature whose commanding voice, beauty and charisma brought them two huge hits that year that still cast a large shadow today ("Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit"). The remainder of their breakthrough second album Surrealistic Pillow (released February 1967) easily matched those two hits in quality, making it one of the definitive rock albums of its era.  

Thus emboldened, the band began to expand its ambitions, both as individuals and as a group, creating an abundance of new ideas contributed by each player. Most notably, guitarist Paul Kantner became the dominant songwriter on this album, effectively becoming the band leader from this point forward. Lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen also came into his own as a singer/songwriter at this time, bringing the band's singer/songwriter total to four. The charismatic Slick continued to write songs of a serious nature, and Marty Balin, whose sweet tenor voice and strong pop songwriting had dominated the first two albums (notwithstanding Slick's seismic influence on the second), became just one of many contributors on After Bathing at Baxter's. How would all this surplus of talent find space on the album?

This being the end of 1967, the band took the strategy to let the ideas flow freely and see what happens; musical freedom and pushing boundaries were at the forefront of many rock bands' minds in these post-Sgt Pepper days. Hit singles were probably the furthest thing from their minds. I get the sense that they felt they were in a good position to influence the future of music, and restraint was for the timid. All the band members were given free rein to experiment as they pleased.  

Highlights include Kantner's anthemic opener, "The Ballad of You Me and Pooneil" and folksy ballad "Martha", Slick's "Two Heads", Balin's "Young Girl Sunday Blues", and drummer Spencer Dryden's funny sound-collage interlude, "A Small Package of Value Will Come to You, Shortly." A whole nine minutes on side two is devoted to a free form acid jam called "Spare Chaynge" by the rhythm section (Kaukonen, Dryden, and bassist Jack Casady) that mainly serves to show that Jack Casady is an absolute monster on the bass.  

Tempting as it is to individually praise every song, this really is an album that works best as a unit - a band portfolio that features each band member fairly equally without highlighting any particular member or song (no obvious singles here). To add to the democratic vibe, most of the vocals are sung in two- or three-part harmony, with Balin and Slick both soaring above the mix with their formidable pipes. In some live recordings I've heard from this period and after, they almost sound like they're trying to out-sing each other, which makes for an intense if somewhat unnerving listening experience. The instrumentalists also crank up the intensity here, playing their hearts out, sounding more like a live band than they did on the concise, restrained Surrealistic Pillow. The band benefited immensely from this kind of collective/competitive spirit, for a couple of years anyway.

My personal experience with After Bathing at Baxter's does not go back very far. Beginning in my college years, the first Jefferson Airplane I heard was the CD anthology 2400 Fulton Street, which featured several tracks from Baxter's, and it was years before I heard the songs in the context of the album proper. Now that I have the album, I much prefer hearing these songs in this sequence.

Dan:

I loved the singles-oriented version of the Airplane back when they were recorded. I wasn't too sure what to make of After Bathing at Baxter's when I bought it sometime in the early 70s. But I stayed with it, and it became a favorite. It felt improvised in places, which appealed to my jazz inclinations. 

It also contains one of the most shocking songs to come out of the 1960s: Grace Slick's "Rejoyce." It's not easy to hear all the lyrics, much less digest them, and the sleeve notes did not include the text of songs played. "Rejoyce" is a bitter condemnation of an older generation of Americans and appears as the second song of the suite: "Hymn to an Older Generation." Keep in mind that the U.S. was embroiled in war in Vietnam and soldiers were drafted, against their wills, to fight and die. Thus, the lyric: "War's good business so give your son, but I'd rather have my country die for me" was an understandably radical response. 

Although the Airplane returned to more conventional albums with Crown of Creation (1968) and Volunteers (1969), much of their outrage continued. These were artists reflecting the evil realities they saw - voices in a cultural revolution that would not be silenced or contained.