Friday, May 2, 2014

Jefferson Airplane

This was an interesting one. I heard it right before dinner one evening; a sort of march/tango tempo, followed by some singing about pill-taking, mushroom ingesting, rabbit chasing (which made me think of the bunnies we had, Cocaine and Quaalude) and other strange stuff done by a girl named Alice. Almost haunting in a way, even if I had no idea what was being sung about. The next track, "Embryonic Journey", was a solo guitar instrumental piece, equally haunting, but brief. After dinner was done, I went and seized the album cover to see what I had been hearing...
Whoa!...that's not what I was expecting to see! It looked old, like from a different time and place altogether, all the way down to the record label and the inner sleeve. But I found it fascinating. I always thought it strange that one of the leading psychedelic bands of their day made their first compilation album look like an old Victrola 78 from the 1920s. The other odd thing was that I seemed to remember hearing this before...where or when was it?...and then I was remembering the Blue house for the first time since we'd moved from there...that's where I heard it first! My first memories were starting to come to me, even back then, but it wasn't until I got older that they started to have more meaning to me, not just nostalgia.
Within the past week, Geoffrey has seen the image of Nipper on another RCA label, and has seen the vintage painting of him on the inside gatefold cover of this one, and he thinks it's brilliant. He'll ask me "What's the doggy doing?". He requests the same three songs that I liked from it, and so maybe I'll have to find a copy of Alice In Wonderland and see what he thinks of it.