Rolling Stone : Jefferson Airplane: Volunteers : Music Reviews

Album Reviews

It took just two years for the folk-rock shimmer and Camelot optimism of Surrealistic Pillow -- Jefferson Airplane's exquisite 1967 score for America's Summer of Love -- to harden into the black temper of Volunteers, the band's requiem for an America under Nixon. It is hard, in an Eminem era, to appreciate the original shock of hearing the Airplane sing "Up against the wall, motherfucker" in "We Can Be Together." Thanks to the blow-dried legacy of the 1980s' Starship, the sound of the Airplane's golden vocal triad -- Marty Balin, Grace Slick and Paul Kantner -- belting neo-Yippie rhetoric ("We are forces of chaos and anarchy") now seems not trite or laughable but sad, the cruel echo of a broken promise.

But Volunteers was the Airplane's last great blast of psychedelic magic -- a sizzling hybrid of Pillow's sharp song-craft and the freak-rock extremes of After Bathing at Baxter's -- and an honest document of its time, sometimes painfully so. "Come on all you people standing around/Our life's too fine to let it die," Kantner, Slick and Balin sang in "We Can Be Together," engulfing the song in war-cry harmonies. Elegantly scarred by Jorma Kaukonen's shrill distorted guitar, the traditional carol "Good Shepherd" became a cautionary prayer against the evil mothers ("the long tongue liar," "the gun shot devil") who, by '69, had fatally corrupted the Haight-Ashbury experiment. Her voice shivering with apocalyptic dread, Slick rammed home the dire consequences of screwing Mother Nature in the prophetic eco-drama "Eskimo Blue Day." And in the opening double-entendre of her long dark march "Hey Frederick," Slick brilliantly combined sexual politics and social responsibility, literally daring you to put up or piss off: "Either go away or go all the way in." This was not an age for half measures.

Volunteers has its simpler joys: the lysergic sway of the Airplane's take on "Wooden Ships," co-written by Kantner with David Crosby and Stephen Stills and released earlier that year by CSN; the acid-saloon flair of Nicky Hopkins' piano work; the folk-pop gleam of Kaukonen's "Turn My Life Down," sung by Balin with melancholy conviction. Indeed, for all of its revolution-rock trappings -- the punk-rock stomp of the title song, the heavy-artillery snort of Kaukonen's lead guitar -- Volunteers was really a last-stand hymn for the sunshine daydream of '67, a call for nonviolent unity and peaceful common sense packed into a rich grenade of sadness, irony and righteousness. The daydream didn't last; neither did Nixon. This record has outlived them both -- a thrilling testament to the power and beauty of despair. (RS 855)

Further Listening: Surrealistic Pillow (RCA, 1967) FOUR AND A HALF STARS
After Bathing at Baxter's (RCA, 1967) FOUR AND A HALF STARS
Blows Against the Empire (RCA, 1970) THREE AND A HALF STARS

DAVID FRICKE

(Posted: Dec 7, 2000)