We’re all different aren’t we? Records that are super familiar to us are unknown to others. Sometimes we just miss a record or band that is high profile for reasons unknown. Believe it or not I was like that about Led Zeppelin until I saw them at Knebworth. I wasn’t unfamiliar with them entirely but afterwards I was obsessed with the whole catalogue, especially Song Remains The Same and Achilles Last Stand off Presence, which was a near religious experience for me in my first term at college.
Anyway, I still meet people who just missed what to me was an important record. For example Crown Of Creation by Jefferson Airplane was the pillar of our experiences of altered states and became a sort of trippy manifesto. It seemed to inhabit that counterculture intolerance with The Man and all his works, which we embraced so fully at 19 or 20. It is at times defiant and at times indignant and there was a time where I thought it quite moving. Songs like Greasy Heart were the perfect antidote to the cosmetic industry and the values it sells. Very ahead of its time, it is still relevant today and certainly was in 1980 when I first heard it.
Lather was so far out and seemed to have arrived from a different dimension, as did Triad, a song about unconventional relationships. ‘You cannot do that, it breaks all the rules’ This was all far out stuff to us northern kids. And the final track The House at Pooneil Corners is little short of sonic nuclear explosive annihilation, all wrapped up in acid hallucinations and insights.
Everything someday will be gone except silence
The earth will be quiet again
Seas from clouds will wash off the ashes of violence
Left as the memory of men
There will be no survivors, my friend
It all seemed very prescient to us and still does, now more than ever, as did this verse
From here to heaven is a scar
Dead center, deep as death
All the idiots have left
The idiots have left
I saw this as radical stuff of great profundity. And I still really do. It offers a different path to walk, away from convention and embraces being different. Of course, it was a big hit for the corporation RCA, making #6 and the Airplane transmuted into Starship who were far less visionary. And the hippie dream and all its attendant hopes and dreams didn’t make it and was soon subsumed by big business which crushed it, though it birthed some ideas and notions that did survive.
That’s why I always recommend the album to fellow seekers of a different path through life. It should be everyone’s friend and inspiration. It might be a bit weird and even scary but it’s worth the ride.
