Life can exist on other planets, in other solar systems, in other galaxies and universes.
J. Posadas, Flying Saucers, the Process of Matter and Energy, Science, the Revolutionary and Working-class Struggle and the Socialist Future of Mankind, 1968
Atomic war is inevitable. It will destroy half of humanity: it is going to destroy immense human riches. It is very possible. The atomic war is going to provoke a true inferno on Earth. But it will not impede Communism.
Destruction always comes before creation.
J. Posadas, War is Not the End of the World, 1972
I find myself dragged back to my schooldays once more; this time it’s my first day at Southland Boys, and there’s a music lesson. The younger boys’ music teacher wasn’t Jean France but a tall, bearded and irascible chap known, not to his face, as Stretch, who also doubled as an art teacher, of the opinionated type who’d later offend me by scribbling academic shade lines on a cartoon I thought was pretty good, of an aardvark-looking alien scientist. But that first day, Stretch was late to music class so we waiting in the corridor getting to know each other, jostling for status, eager for entertainment, all noisy, and he caught us, which was perhaps his plan, and caned every single one of us.
Then, when we were seated on our sore arses (actually I have no memory of whether our bums or our hands were the target on that day) he played an LP and we heard crackle, crowd noise, and then “gimme an F! gimme a U! gimme a C! gimme a K!” It was the version of “Feel Like I’m Fixing To Die Blues” on the Woodstock LP set, and we were listening to Country Joe MacDonald, fronting a band known as The Fish, leading the audience in spelling out a word – “What’s that spell?!? What’s that spell?!?”
“FUCK!”
The recording wasn’t perfectly clear and I was somewhat in denial, and the cyclostyled lyric sheet with its whiff of meths said “F.I.S.H. Fish.” Nice save, but soon after this we learned that Fish was the headmaster’s nickname which was also of course verboten, so that interpreting that day’s lesson in free speech, from our caning for talking to the fuck cheer to the playing of Neil Diamond’s “I Am I Said” that followed it, has been like standing in an echoing cave of cognitive dissonance with my feet wet. I guess, if I have to guess, that Stretch was being what later came to be known as transgressive in what later came to be known as a subversive way that, as we say now, flew under the radar, and that the reasons for this had something to do with his anger.
A few years later I collected Country Joe records. They had a sound I appreciated, and when I stumbled across Electric Music For The Mind And Body on YouTube the other day that sound was still there, a psychedelic two-guitar and organ sound based on folk and blues, not innovative the way British psych bands were with their more direct experience of Eastern (Indian, but also Mitteleuropean) ideas and their attachment to straight-ahead R&B rhythms, but nonetheless beautifully brittle, limpid, crystalline music that sounded, and still sounds, as soaked in LSD as any sheet of blotting paper that ever went through the mail. It helped that organist-guitarist David Bennet Cohen used a Farfisa organ, the same Italian brand that Richard Wright played in Pink Floyd, rather than the more familiar Hammond, and that lead guitarist Barry Melton applied tremolo, reverb and fuzz liberally, and liked to play the strings behind the bridge, long enough on a semi-acoustic, with their thumb-piano timbre.
And Country Joe Macdonald, whom his parents had named for Josef Stalin, felt like a man you could trust; he sang in a nasal everyman whine, in tune and with a fair bit of power, and laid it on the line, with zero commercial tropes, and nothing to hide, what we used to call “letting it all hang out”.
The two most interesting songs on this, today, from neglect*, hidden treasure of an album for me recently have been two about strong women; “Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine”, a fear-of-feminine-chaos portrait of an Aquarian witch:
The joy of life she dresses in black
With celestial secrets engraved in her back
And her face keeps flashing that she's got the knack,
But you know when you look into her eyes
All she's learned she's had to memorize
And the only way you'll ever get her high
Is to let her do her thing and then watch you die
And “Grace”, a sublime electric tone poem of a valentine, dipped in Sandoz and shyly dedicated to one Grace Slick, which ends with a repeated “I love you”. From this, and from the relatively fair and respectful tone of “Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine” which is barely jarring today, we can gather that Joe MacDonald is a relatively enlightened man for his times, as we might expect of someone named after Stalin in the USA in the 1940’s.
Grace Slick, soon after the writing of “Grace” and for quite some time to come, was one of two lead singers, the other being Marty Balin, in another, sprawling and equally spiked, S.F. band called the Jefferson Airplane (“the Airplane, man”); the very greatest of all these acts and also the least consistent and most cringeworthy. Traits which are not mutually exclusive.
The Airplane originated out of a folk-blues tradition that supplied the gentle, sentimental chord changes that would fill their early albums, and covered Fred Neil who would become a close friend they would dedicate songs to. When Grace replaced Signe Anderson after the band’s first LP Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, she brought a couple of darker, more assertive songs both of which would become canonical, her brother-in law Darby Slick’s “Someone To Love”, and her own “White Rabbit”, plus a more provocative approach to what became the band’s vinyl activism, their growing belief that they could change the world through agit-pop propaganda and the anti-capitalist example of the odd free concert. The Airplane’s secret weapon and Achille’s heel was that Grace dared the men around her to go further. Which made the band deservedly rich, and did help to change the world, maybe in ways they never imagined. Max Bell, in an excellent interview cum portrait in Louder (“Arrested more times than Lemmy. Took more drugs than Winehouse”), writes “sexism was not on her agenda”, meaning Grace Slick paid no real heed to anyone else’s expectations in ordering her life, but she did subtly undermine it in her songs, with a second wave feminist snark which makes her the first, and for quite a while only, such thinker in a successful rock act. My favourite example is “Two Heads” from After Bathing At Baxters, which reminds me of Auden’s Shield of Achilles.
Noone will know you've gutted your mind
But what will you do with your bloody hands?
Your lions are fighting with chairs
Your arms are incredibly fat;
Your women are tired of dying alive
If you've had any women at that
Wearing your comb like an axe in your head
List'ning for signs of life;
Children are sucking on stone and lead
And chasing their hoops with a knife;
New breasts and jewels for the girl
Keep them polished and shining;
Put a lock on her belly at night, sweet life
For no child of mine
Which is the kind of attack on the patriarchy that never dates, just ask Pussy Riot. “Two Heads” shows how subversive meanings could be be encrypted into the psychedelic kaleidoscope, to be interpreted by prepared minds, and it also shows the uniqueness of Grace Slick’s song-writing style, which is not derived from folk or blues so much as her interpretation of the art song within her own peculiar compositional limitations as a pop singer. No pop song was ever more powerfully subversive than “White Rabbit”.
One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall
A song introducing the red pill/blue pill concept to a counter-culture which became the nursery of modern conspiracy theory, updating Alice In Wonderland and Alice’s Adventures Through The Looking Glass for the chemical age, but also, coming from Grace as it was, making a statement that women have as much right to indulge in psychic exploration, and thus as much right to control their own minds and think their own thoughts, as men do. An artist bold enough to cover “White Rabbit” can still be making a statement today; here’s an impressive 2021 reading (let’s forget the anti-drug German black metal version) from the Swedish singer Ängie, who made her name with women-like-drugs-too statements like “Spun” and “Here For My Habits”, within a smartly succinct rearrangement from producer Harrison First.
And here’s a reggae version from 2021 where Shniece Mcmenamin does the vocal honours over Prince Fatty’s dub arrangement, cheekily titled “Black Rabbit”, only fair when you remember Grace miming “Crown Of Creation” in blackface on The Smothers Brothers TV show.
Crown Of Creation is my favourite Airplane album, because the folkyness and all the traditional forms in their music have become so dissolved in acid that the band now plays as one single electrical organism. We have some of Marty Balin’s best songs, and Balin’s a singer so sweet that even his later AOR work, even a FM radio hit like “Hearts”, is pleasing to my ear and something I still seek out occasionally. We have Jack Casady, the best bass player on the West Coast, wrapping himself around the songs like a boa constrictor, we have Jorma Kaukonen (“a guy who travels with machineguns, knives, macho bullshit lead guitarist crap.” – Marty Balin) breaking out a set of modal ideas that no-one would ever copy, Spencer Dryden’s drumming flawlessly corralling this river of madness in whatever direction it wants to go, and spare guitarist, and the closest thing to an official Mr Slick in those days, Paul Kantner, with his unpretentious chord progressions and apocalyptic ideas, whose “Crown Of Creation” riffs on and quotes from John Wyndham’s 1955 post-apocalyptic young adult novel The Chrysalids, one of those visionary works that chimed with the times, to flatter its audience and put the old guard on notice.
Soon you'll attain the stability you strive for
In the only way that it's granted
In a place among the fossils of our time
In loyalty to their kind
They cannot tolerate our minds
In loyalty to our kind
We cannot tolerate their obstruction
Paul Kantner’s musical progressions can have a clunky quality, and he was obviously outclassed by the singers and musicians around him, but he’s an extra dimension to this multidimensional band, and it’s when Kantner’s at his best, the band supports his wild ideas, and Grace Slick keens her loudest at the top of the choral harmonies that the Jefferson Airplane takes off with booster rockets attached.
Have you seen our saucers?
You see our lights in your western skies,
California's rainbow skies;
Your government tells you another missile is flying;
Have you any idea why they're lying,
To you, to your faces!
Did they tell you?
Have you seen our saucers?
Her face was pretty but you let her go!
Your mother needs you now she's getting old
Have you seen our saucers?
Star children on the black road to salvation;
You've got to care for the needs of your planet;
Children of the forest and child of the Woodstock nation;
Catch the dawn that once was there;
First born atomic generation;
Open the door,
Don't you know that's what it's for?
If you no longer have faith in political action you can console yourself that some man-made disaster or alien intervention will put an end to the old order, and that in the postapocalyptic conditions that follow you and your friends will prove most adaptable or amenable, and your ideas will come to prevail (see also “Wooden Ships”, a group fantasy created by Kantner with close friend of the band David Crosby and Stephen Stills and also recorded by Crosby Stills and Nash). Yet these songs are powerful, and they are more emotionally convincing than the more baldly revolutionary “We Can Get Together” from Volunteers.
All your private property is target for your enemy
And your enemy
Is we
We are forces of chaos and anarchy
Everything they say we are we are
And we are very
Proud of ourselves
Up against the wall
Up against the wall motherfucker)
Tear down the walls
Tear down the walls
In the 1950’s the Argentinian Trotskyist J. Posadas had been the leader of the party’s Fourth International bureau for South America, before splitting the bureau over his support for nuclear war, then further differentiating himself and his supporters by bringing UFOs into the mix as likely to be socialists and supporters of the communist revolution on Earth with their advanced weapons. In Marxism this type of heresy, an over-literal interpretation of Marx’s stated faith in the inevitability of communism’s eventual victory, is known as accelerationism (I’m not yet clear whether or how the modern tech-and-meth Fall-analysing philosophy of the Nick Lands school of that name is related to the classic Marxist version). The Jefferson Airplane, as fake revolutionaries, and the Posadists, as real revolutionaries likely to be tortured and killed for their beliefs, shared the same set of zeitgeist obsessions at the same time in history; the Airplane’s close friend Fred Neil wrote “The Dolphins” and left the music industry to dedicate his life to dolphin research, while Posadas also believed that, if the aliens were delayed, human-dolphin interactions would lead the way forward, presumably because dolphins are communists.**
Marty Balin left Jefferson Airplane in 1970, disillusioned by the disaster at Altamont and the death of Janis Joplin; when Slick left the band the name was dropped and Kantner continued as Jefferson Starship – eventually Slick and Balin would join the Starship and commit one of the greatest atrocities against legacy of any band, “We Built This City”, with the able assistance of Elton John’s lyricist Bernie Taupin. But they’d also record “Miracles”, in which the voices of Balin and Slick weave their old magic, and that’s how I’d prefer to leave them.
* Country Joe and the Fish won’t be neglected by the sort of people who still listen to the Grateful Dead, but if you ever catch me writing about the Grateful Dead just shoot me on the spot. For me The Fish, and the Airplane, as real or imagined revolutionaries, contain a meaning that carries beyond their self-indulgent musical milieu, unlike all those musos obsessed with mere music and its fusty traditions.
** Posadas also said that jokes would be unnecessary under communism, which makes sense if humour is merely a coping mechanism for pain and a way of deflecting violence that will no longer exist, and a way of attracting attention and rewards that will be fairly distributed in the workers’ paradise. Even the dad joke, a form of microaggression currently necessary to signal dad status non-violently, will be unnecessary when test-tube and vat breeding replaces the nuclear family.
Maybe, under true communism, which has of course never been tried, we will find ourselves laughing often without the need for jokes, as the dolphins do.
algorithmic generation – “Enchanted Sky Machines” (live version) by Judee Sill