JEFFERSON AIRPLANE - Volunteers, Dick Cavett and Hampstead Heath

(MS)

Oh the after-tram-ride quiet, when we heard a mile beyond,

Silver music from the bandstand, barking dogs by Highgate Pond

"Parliament Fields" JOHN BETJEMAN

I had a strange moment on the lavatory recently. I was absent-mindedly surfing the net on my phone when I discovered an old fan review of a gig by the Jefferson Airplane that had taken place in London back in 1968. On a wet Wednesday the Airplane supported by the Sandy Denny line-up of Fairport Convention, played to 200-odd people for Camden Council’s first free festival on the slopes of Parliament Hill. 

Playing dare with the blinds that largely protect my modesty from the dog walkers and joggers traipsing down this very Hill, I considered this as I rose to flush. “Wow what a line-up!”, I enthused to myself. Then peering out through the window towards the mist gathering round the distant bandstand, I realised - like a thunderbolt -that the account of the gig I was reading about… had actually taken place right in front of my field of vision. Trousers hastily gathered around my mid-rift I urgently ventured out into the drizzle and mud, driven by a need to pay immediate homage to this event. As I stood under the bandstand in Grace Slick’s very footsteps, listening to the rain drumming against the roof, I smiled to myself about the band’s reported plea to the crowd to go home because of the shit weather.

A year later The Airplane were the featured guests on the Dick Cavett Show, a day after they had played a much larger free gig to 400,000 people at the Woodstock festival. Everyone’s seen the famous concert movie, Richie Havens strumming away, Joe Cocker, “The Star-Spangled Banner”...the freaks, the bad acid...all that. 

Even Charlton Heston saw it, chilling  in his own personal theatre during mutant-slaughter downtime in “The Omega Man”. Forming part of a future-shock triptych with  "Soylent Green" and "Beneath the Planet of the Apes",  the scene was added to the narrative to illustrate the symbolical yearning for a recent time when the earth was FREE. The film was made in 1971 and if they were fondly looking back to 1969 I guess they were basically saying the apocalypse came down just after Woodstock. This runs through my mind when I watch this TV Show.

Beneath the genial hip-uncle bit, Cavett’s ringmaster seems to be straining to fill this ABC showcase with the freak-show that you just knew middle America was craving for. As a crash course in the counter-culture there’s a bit too much traffic colliding here; there’s anarchy in the air but it’s oddly stage managed with all the participants pursuing their own unacknowledged agenda, The knowing discarded neckerchief schtick in the intro, shorn like a Woolworths “genuine hippy wig”, signifies something REAL is coming but the temperature never really rises beyond the petulant kick Paul Kantner aims at one of the fireside poufs.

Noted critc Robert Cristgau prematurely dismissed the JeffersonAirplane’s first recordings as an “electrified Peter, Paul & Mary”, but the progression through folk-rock into full blown psychedelia established them as the highest grossing West Coast act, with a RCA record contract that guaranteed expansive studio time and a lavish communal mansion in San Francisco. With the recent addition of session man star Nicky Hopkins, their contemporary “Volunteers” album also featured some of the most successful studio work of their entire career with political and sci-fi themes rubbing shoulders with fearsome song-jams like “Eskimo Blue Day” and “Hey Frederick”. The title track is worth comparing to the song “St Stephen” by fellow travellers The Grateful Dead to get a sense of the difference between these two West Coast giants. Both songs appropriate the same old bluegrass reel for the opening guitar riff, but where the Airplane sound is tightly driven with propulsive bursts of guitar, the Dead meander their way across the soundscape with semi-audible lyrics over a largely acoustic backing. The studio version appearing on the Dead’s “Aoxomoxoa” LP, a definitive study in acid-folk and one in sharp contrast to the way Jefferson Airplane sounded in 1969.

Thus the most immediately shocking aspect of this TV show may be the ragged opening song from the Airplane who were then at their musical apex. Days before, their 8am set at Woodstock had been one of their very best with the preceding energy of The Who pushing the band to a wonderfully wild hour and a half blow-out. It is alleged they only missed out appearing in the original movie due to Slick’s misgivings about her stage outfit. But this opening salvo does them no favours. It reminds us that as a live act, beneath the thunderous bass and urgent acid guitar lines there was always a lot of risk-taking in their combined and disparate talent that threatened to crash them. The competitive antagonism between Grace Slick and Marty Balin did not help the “harmony” of their massed vocals, with the latter’s exposed histrionics at times verging on the caterwauling. Here they seem cold in the lights and so self-consciously focused on getting over their message that they forget to “get it together”, which is somewhat ironic as the song performed is “We Can Be Together”. The lyrics of this anthem boast the first expletives ever aired on live US TV no less, which was probably less a random shock tactic and more a pre-determined act of symbolic subversion designed to aid all assembled parties. Cavett in fact underlines this point, helpfully alluding to the song’s impending controversy to his audience who in truth may have missed the “Motherfucker” amidst all the noise.

The band had been pushing for a while. Take a step back to December ’68 and the Airplane’s appearance on CBS rivals The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. It’s unclear exactly why, as she has since claimed she simply took advantage of the extensive backstage make-up, but Grace Slick appears in blackface for the band’s musical segment. At the climax of “Crown of Creation” she throws in a Black Power salute and hey presto! An obscure political statement is preserved. (In case you missed it she followed it up with a magazine cover a little later-LEFT). The incident contributed to the growing concern in the carpeted exec suite at CBS towers that the show’s increasingly subversive direction was heading the corporation into dangerous waters. This culminated in the cancellation of the show in mid-run during April 1969. In light of this it may well be that CBS’s loss became ABC’s gain, with the Woodstock special designed to exploit the times to the widest audience imaginable.

Cavett was a genuinely engaging interrogator too, as easy with a Truman Capote as he was with a Janis Joplin but here he assembles his guests like a School panto with the photogenic girls sat either side of him and the hairy boys sat with their back to the parents. The deeply-tanned and dangerously knowing Slick is counter-balanced by the pale and sweet Joni Mitchell, whose exposure on this show was so important to her management she wasn’t actually allowed to attend Woodstock. She delivers a couple of faultless songs, preaches “Trudeaumania” and basically sits smiling with the hope that no one thinks she’s the one smelling of Acapulco Gold. Then on comes Stephen Stills, like a ponchoed Daniel Craig impersonator looking for a dentist and Mitchell’s old amour David Crosby. “Don’t you think he looks like a Lion?” she tweets. Yeah like the cat in the Wizard of Oz that’s been laying out in the Wicked Witches poppy-field a little too long. It is impolite to speak ill of the recently deceased but on this showing Crosby must have been insufferable to be around for too long. Sensing the fakery of the occasion he rushes in to steal every awkward moment, filling the vacuum with the inane, masquerading as the profound. (Or is it the profound masquerading as the inane?) Even Slick looks baffled at times, perhaps more comfortable with the flirtatious Cavett who teases her about her life at an elite finishing School. 

So elite in fact Patricia Nixon attended her year group and invited her to a White House gathering the following year. Slick took along Abbie Hoffman to ensure she was barred entry and made sure the cameras captured it for posterity. A little later she appeared on stage at the Fillmore East in New York hamming it up as Adolf Hitler next to actor Rip Torn as Richard Nixon. By the end of the 70’s she was sacked from the band for berating a hostile Hamburg audience with a volley of “Hey remember who won the fucking war!”

Slick may have had the biggest balls of them all, but the advert breaks display the truth about where America really saw where it’s female population was at. I think the ads have been retrospectively compiled for effect here but it serves as a delicious counterpoint to the studio proceedings (Watch out for Max Bialystock’s Swedish “toy” in the first one). Thankfully the band finish strongly with the rhythm section dominating versions of “Somebody to Love” and an unnamed signature jaaaaam. The latter prompting much control room confusion and an outbreak of freak dancing from some break-out straights. Look at the moves from the hip stockbroker at 41.48 and 43.33. He’s pushing 60 at 35. The camera settles in on the light show and the final shot is of a cop nervously appearing from behind a curtain, tapping his feet in time with Jack Cassady’s monstrous deep bass.

The band ended the year at the Altamont concert with Marty Balin being punched out by Hell’s Angels ("It doesn't seem right man") and Slick being forced to attempt crowd control in the only way possible with the immortal plea, ”You’ve got to keep your bodies off each other unless you intend LOVE”.

Back in London the Camden Council free festivals continued with the likes of Pink Floyd, Roy Harper, Procol Harum, Soft Machine, Pete Brown and John Fahey all gracing that bandstand. By the end of the decade the gigs had moved indoors to The Roundhouse. The last hurrah came when a bunch of skinheads ran down the Hill and disrupted a Fleetwood Mac concert. Mick Fleetwood was hit by a beer bottle and Peter Green’s dad released the following statement to the music press:

" My son travels all over the country playing to different  audiences practically every night and last Friday was one of his nights off. But instead of taking advantage and resting, he offered his services to play for free at an open-air concert along with other artists. Everything would have gone off fine , when along came a small group of hoodlums - not I may add , long haired freaks , 

as is their usual description -but a gang of crew-cut young thugs who seemed to delight in spoiling a night out for the vast majority of people who were there to enjoy themselves. After many nasty incidents the concert had to be abandoned, much to the disgust of the organizers who went to a great deal of trouble to arrange it. It is time sterner measures were taken by the law and stiffer sentences imposed on these so-called citizens of the future. "

(PS)

Although my knowledge of Dick Cavett is limited, I think I kind of like the cut of his jib. He seemed completely at ease with whichever guest he had on the show and seemed to straddle generations with his wide range of interviewees, from establishment pillars to counter-culture weirdos.  

That he devoted an entire programme to a bunch of smelly hippies who had come straight from Woodstock - I’m guessing there wasn’t much time to shower on the way to the studio - and indulge them for who knows how long (the extended jam that played out the last 5 minutes of the show was heavily edited and may’ve actually gone on for several days), shows how much empathy and affection he held for the youth movement of the time.  Even so, I loved Grace Slick’s wariness of Cavett’s genuine compliment, “You were wonderful”, and the cod eye she subsequently gives him – maybe she was still coming down from a trip, certainly sleep deprived - but I can’t help thinking that her default response to any praise received from a guy in straight clothes should be that of suspicion, such was the fierce divide between youth and establishment at the time. 

I also loved the adverts, brilliantly left in by the uploader, which speak volumes about where social mores were at the time in Amerika: men should essentially be James Bond and women should bend over backwards in their efforts to be attractive to them, if they’re not serving them coffee or cleaning up after them at that precise moment, that is. Subtle, not so much. 

 

From a musical point of view, the driving force of the show for me is the Airplane drummer, Spencer Dryden. Joni Mitchell was a drippy pain in the arse and tolerated far too much for my liking; Stephen Stills’s 4+20 was decent enough; but for sheer power, tightness and visceral energy the Airplane really were streets ahead here. This was a band at the peak of their powers, and Dryden was the behatted heartbeat at the centre of it all, cigarette permanently pinched between his lips, looking like Lee Van Cleef’s harder brother. 

 

Bonus sweary points must go to Slick, who managed to get her “Up against the wall, motherfuckers” line in We Can Be Together in uncut, even if it’s not quite as prominent as, say, the MC5’s Kick Out The Jams (edited on subsequent re-releases of the LP to “Kick out the jams, Brothers and Sisters!”). 

The opening two songs both signpost the rising tensions between
generations and it’s a brave call from Cavett to allow these to open the show. Following on from their doom-laden Crown of Creation the previous year, (complete with cover photo of the band in front of the Hiroshima mushroom cloud and sleeve credits reading “courtesy USAF”, nicely done) the Airplane had just recorded their angriest and most cynical LP Volunteers, which would be released a few months later in the November of 69. I think that ‘tude comes across loud and clear in their commanding performance on this show, they really look like they mean it. 

A month after the LP’s release, the sixties died (both literally and figuratively) along with Meredith Hunter at Altamont and both Dryden and Marty Balin soon quit the band; the seventies would turn out to be no less tumultuous for the US than the previous decade.