Rewind Find; or Why Grace Slick will Kick Your Ass Twice on Tuesdays

It's hard to remember, but there was a time when Jefferson Airplane was one of the bands -- legend stuff; as big as the Stones, almost as big as the Beatles (of course, no one ever was quite  that big), bigger than the Dead and as big as the Who, Cream or Hendrix.  The Airplane was right in the middle of the largest Summer(s) of Love festivals -- no one else played at Monterey, Woodstock and Altamont -- and they sold a serious amount of records.  In a way, the band survived for a long time -- it showed up in the '70s and '80s as Jefferson Starship, then just Starship, and Hot Tuna was a kind of version of the band.  But it was really four or five years we had Jefferson Airplane as Jefferson Airplane.  There was some serious rockin' in those four or five years.

It's the albums with Grace Slick that matter; they first had a different singer (Signe Toly Andersen).  What Slick did for the Band was like what Ann Wilson did (and does) for Heart; it was a low alto voice that could match the power of heavy electronics at the same time as it could serve as a contrast to some lighter, well-done acoustic stuff.  And the Airplane could play both.  The guitar solo "Embryonic Journey" from Surrealistic Pillow (one of the great rock album names ever) is one of the defining sounds of '67 in its absolutely organic, bright, we-will-liberate-ourselves-with-love feel.  The Airplane was sensitive to what it was doing, and its musicians, before it was fashionable, had the chops to pull it off.

What's most surprising -- shocking, almost -- is in going back and revisiting the four key albums, Surrealistic Pillow (1967), After Bathing at Baxter's (also 1967 [remember when groups might release more than one album in a year?]), Crown of Creation (1968) and Volunteers (1969) was how heavy the band could be.  "Somebody to Love," from Surrealistic Pillow -- a tune with a pretty heavy sound -- is one of the band's best known numbers; the über-psychedelic "White Rabbit" is probably the band's best known tune, though.  It some ways, it's atypical.  Behind the Dead -- and part of the San Francisco scene sound at the time -- was a jug band.  A small touch of that comes into the Airplane.  A much smaller touch than with the Dead, though.  The Airplane had a pretty direct and pretty heavy guitar sound -- so heavy, at times, that while you'd never attribute the roots of metal anywhere than but to Black Sabbath, some surprisingly hard hitting came through the fretwork of Jorma Kaukonen and Paul Kantner, the bass playing of Jack Kasady and the drumming of Spencer Dryden.  They made that jangly '60s sound.  But they also hit you with a surprisingly thick bottom; "Volunteers," from the album by that name, hits you hard all the way through.  There was gunshot behind their flower power.

Take some time with the Jefferson Airplane back catalogue and you'll rediscover the power of songs you might know, and the surprising, thorough excellence of lesser remembered cuts like "Eskimo Blue Day" from Volunteers (where the Airplane comes close to discovering heavy metal flute).  For four or five years, they were a hell of group -- a solid cut above some others, like the Doors who, for some reason, seem to have been better remembered, and undoubtedly on par with anything of the Stones', who now enjoy preeminence with the Beatles and Zeppelin as a kind of rock holy trinity.  Grace Slick might have arm wrestled Robert Plant.  She might just have won.