Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 108

Record label: RCA Victor

Produced: Al Schmitt

Recorded: RCA Studios, Hollywood; June–October 1967

Released: November 30, 1967

Chart peaks: None (UK) 17 (US)

Personnel: Grace Slick (v, k, recorder); Paul Kantner (g, v); Marty Balin (v, tambourine); Jorma Kaukonen (g); Jack Casady (s); Spencer Dryden (d, v); Richie Schmitt (e)

Track listing: Streetmasse: i. The Ballad Of You and Me and Pooneil; ii. A Small Package Of Value Will Come To You, Shortly; iii. Young Girl Sunday Blues. The War Is Over: i. Martha; ii. Wild Tyme. Hymn To An Older Generation: i. The Last Wall Of The Castle; ii. Rejoyce. How Suite It Is: i. Watch Her Ride; ii. Spare Chaynge. Schizoforest Love Suite: i. Two Heads; ii. Won’t You Try/Saturday Afternoon

Running time: 43.55

Current CD: 0786366798-2

Further listening: Surrealistic Pillow (1967); Crown Of Creation (1968) replaces ’67’s heady vibe with more apocalyptic visions

Further reading: Jefferson Airplane And The San Francisco Sound (Ralph J Gleason, 1969); Got A Revolution: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane (Paul Kantner, 2003); www.jeffersonairplane.com

Download: iTunes

The surprise success of Surrealistic Pillow and its two singles had transformed Jefferson Airplane into a Top 10 act. After Bathing At Baxter’s, its title a euphemism for psychedelic drug-taking, hastily reaffirmed their underground credentials. Uprooted from their communal home in Haight-Ashbury, the band rented a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, complete with pool and underground bowling alley, where they held ‘parties, strange parties, and then weird parties’. With rookie producer Al Schmitt manning the mixing desk, the highjinks continued in the studio.

‘We took over the soundboard,’ remembered Kantner. ‘We had motorcycles in the studio, nitrous oxide tanks, marijuana everywhere. Smoke rose out of the boards with Jack’s bass parts overloading. (We) experimented with every button.’

‘The material was being written as we were in the studio,’ remembered Grace Slick. Few bands had hitherto enjoyed such freedom. At the time, Marty Balin, the band’s erstwhile leader and frontman, described Baxter’s as ‘a whole new and different thing for the group’. With Slick and Kantner emerging as the group’s leading writers, and instrumentalists Kaukonen and Casady hellbent on undermining pop song convention, it also marked the end of his influence, Balin by now reduced to one writer’s co-credit and a single lead vocal.

Baxter’s was single-mindedly dedicated to the pursuit of high art via hallucinogenics. Songs were grouped together as ‘suites’, the mix was unprecedentedly ‘open’, with the instrumental balance often throwing strange sounds to the fore, and the range of the material was huge. At its extremes were a silly stoned sound collage (A Small Package Of Value Will Come To You, Shortly) and an inspired power-trio jam (Spare Chaynge). Central to the album were Kantner’s robust, harmony-drenched anthems (The Ballad Of You And Me And Pooneil; Wild Tyme; Watch Her Ride; Won’t You Try). Meanwhile, Slick’s Rejoyce (a sharp-witted anti-war lament inspired by Joyce’s Ulysses) and Two Heads were the album’s brilliant, baffling, idiosyncratic wild cards. ‘It was sort of a progress report on how things were going,’ concluded Kantner.