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
