Gavin B.

Raust's posting of the Airplane's Wont You Try/Saturday Afternoon reminded me of how much I loved that band as a kid. My father was a producer of a few outdoor, love-in type rock music shows in St. Louis in the late Sixties. He had a few contacts among the rising bands in Haight Ashbury and sponsored free shows at Forest Park featuring bands like Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company and my favorite band the Jefferson Airplane.

I was in first grade when the Airplane played at the Forest Park pavilion in 1968. If you caught them at a good gig, The Jefferson Airplane played with a feral fury and passion that I've never seen in any other band. The Airplane was a force of nature and their live shows often tinkered with the gears of reality in ways that were both liberating and frightening.

Altamont is an extreme example of what happened when the vibes went wrong and the Airplane lost control of the musical excursion. The Airplane's performances were often erratic because the quality of their playing was intimately connected to the mood of the audience. On those good nights you felt like the Jefferson Airplane could levitate the entire audience and tear a big hole in the fabric of the cosmos, if they chose to do so.

I was totally fascinated with Airplane bass player Jack Casady who always wore dark glasses and a headband which was my idea of a cool fashion statement. For most of that 1968 show, I stood in front of Casady's giant Marshall amps and his bass sounded like some sort of giant earthquake machine to me. I was lucky I didn't go deaf by 8th grade because I attended about a dozen Airplane shows over the next three or four years with my father and we always positioned ourselves in front of Casady's amplifiers. Some kids wanted to grow up and be a cop, a fireman or a superhero but I wanted to grow up and wear a headband with dark glasses and play a bass like a lead guitar player, just like Mr. Cool... Jack Casady.


Jack Casady- Mr. Cool

A few years later, in the 80s, I saw Casady perform with Hot Tuna. I didn't recognize him without his headband and shades and he was playing a hollow body bass like a big sissy boy. It broke my heart to see Mr. Cool's fall from his once mighty psychedelic grace.

The embedded 1968 performance of Crown of Creation on the Smothers Brothers Hour is a good example of Casady's thunderous bass playing and just how perfectly the band sang and played as a unit. The message of the song is quite revolutionary and scared the hell of most straight laced parents. Gracie & Paul got themselves placed on the Nixon's White House enemy list for their radical views.

Note the close proximity of each band member to the others in the performance. Every time I saw the Airplane perform live shows, they always huddled together in an unorthodox closed formation at center stage, as if their intimate proximity to each other, right in the middle of the stage was enhancing their musical communication with each other.

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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt