The first time I heard "Somebody To Love" on the radio was the musical turning point of my adolescent years. The Jefferson Airplane was the soundtrack to my high school/early college years. They are among the few artists I listened to all those many years ago that still pop up in my listening rotation a few times a year.
Paul Kantner's song writing dominated their third and fourth albums, After Bathing At Baxter's and The Crown Of Creation, so it shouldn't be much of a surprise that two of his most ambitious compositions bookend these two albums. Baxter's kicks off with the epic psychedelic maelstrom "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil", a halucinatory rumination on life and death. Crown of Creation ends with "The House at Pooneil Corners", a dark crushing bulldozer of a tune that opens with the same feedback shriek that ends Pooneil on the previous album but instead contemplates the possibility of nuclear armageddon. Doing the late night show on my college radio station, I would occasionally segue the two tunes together just so I could hear how it sounded.
I think I'll rip a few tracks, both studio and live versions, and stitch them together with Audacity just so I can stream them through the big system tonight.
