Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Some people think these guys are a bit of a hippy joke. The Airplane weren’t the Dead were they? But I think Grace is amazing. Great voice – truly a distinctive artist who doesn’t get any respect. Janis gets it by aping the great blues singers, Grace was an original. She took her own road. Who sounds like Grace? Noone. Noone has since either. Now Paul Kantner I can live without. The wacky space lyrics I can live without. But the two solo (duo?) albums they made (at least the two I’m most familiar – Sunfighter and Baron Von Tollboth and the Chrome Nun (the title says it all) were pretty darn interesting – and genuinely original. Once you hear them it’s hard to forget them I will say. The weird thing about the Airplane and these guys solo was their tunes had the strangest structures – like they didn’t quite know what they were doing, that they heard a certain sound but couldn’t quite get make it happen. They didn’t rock out – not until the Starship at least, and apart from Jorma’s little sidetrips they didn’t do the blues. I need to get hold of Manhole at some point but these two albums have much to discover. Probably sold nothing when they came out. Listen to Across the Board off Baron. Really scary stuff. “man’s only got one finger’ indeed. But listen to her voice! And where did Fishman come from? “the son of calaban”? Or Silver Spoon from Sunfighter– about cannibalism. Makes Kate Bush seem boring and normal. Shame she ended it all with the FM crap they moved onto – I guess they needed the money at that point. Anyway don’t believe what you’ve heard. Believe what you hear. I’m glad I found this again.
0 Comments:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
