Today, Yesterday, and Tomorrow...

[thisnewday]

Been working, the past couple days, on finding lyrics for the Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow, After Bathing at Baxter's, and Crown of Creation, albums which I recently got on CD. Or maybe I should say the I've been trying to find accurate lyrics for them. Seems like these internet sites all copy from the same source, and repeat the same mistakes, without considering whether the words actually make sense or not--notwithstanding that some would argue that they never made sense in the first place.

(The rest of the story, here, is that I have the same albums on vinyl 33s, from when they were originally pressed, some thirty-six years ago. Like lots of things that've been part of my life, they're literally--and i suppose figuratively--in the attic now and the playback equipment is irrepairably broken. I like to blame the latter on "early alzheimers," but you know that ain't it. Heh.)

Anyway, aside from taking that sometimes scary, sometimes pathetic trip down memory lane, The Airplane was a band I listened to in its early days and whose wordcrafting i thought well of. And I sort of wanted to find out if that held up. You know, after being straight and sober for nearly four decades. (Me, not them.)

Surrealistic Pillow, of course, is ranked among Rolling Stone magazine's "100 Essential Albums of Rock and Roll." But the question, for this writer, is whether the lyrics stand on their own as poetry, independent of the band's undeniable status as cultural phenomenon--which can be, and most often is, based on very different criteria.

Without getting into a line-by-line analysis, which I haven't really done for myself and won't do here, my impression is that the Airplane is typical, in one crucial respect, of groups in other genres and eras. Because the music itself carries so much of the message (and at times powerfully masks what would otherwise be obvious shortcomings), the words don't have to communicate nearly as precisely as when we're relying on the spoken or written word alone.

That said, it occurs to me that when I taught rock music as modern poetry, to high school students in the late 'sixties, I failed to make this point. (This was just before I made that apparently irrevocable crossing to the "other side.") So, guys, if there's any of you out there, listen up. For extra credit you can email me half a page or so on Grace Slick's references to the writings of James Joyce in the album After Bathing at Baxter's. I swear I'll sneak into the school district's record storage and change your grades. (Offer subject to verification of student I.D. Void where prohibited by law. May cause rectal bleeding in those with previously-diagnosed acute tight-ass syndrome.)

Anyway, after several days, I have most of the lyrics. At the very least, they're a treasure trove of incindiary one- and two-liners as well as some quite lovely lyrical progressions bridging several stanzas. Of course, there's the predictable assortment hippy-dippy exhortations to more or less get high and run bare-ass naked through an age of impending nuclear apocalypse. But even in those there's the occasional gleam of a bright and everlasting truth.

Not the least of which is what the Doremouse said: "Feed your head." Which is what some of us, myself included, need to get about doing. Peace...

LPK
LiveJournal
11.6.2003