Jefferson Airplane - 'After Bathing at Baxter's' (RCA Victor)

Now this record I genuinely love, as it fulfils all of the promise of what late 60s psychedelic San Francisco music was supposed to be. I never have managed to get into the Grateful Dead so this is the pinnacle for me. One could argue that if this was supposed to be a 'drug band' (an appellation frequently used when I was growing up to describe artists such as Ozric Tentacles, Janes Addiction, etc), then After Bathing truly is a record made after having the psychedelic experience, where Surrealistic Pillow was more superficial, being mostly dressed-up folk-pop songs. There's little of that here, with the most folk-leaning moment being 'Rejoyce', though it doesn't take long to reveal itself as a wolf in sheep's clothing, with shifting time signatures, a lurching melody and Ulysses-inspired lyrics that tackle everything from nationalism to marital frustrations. That's Grace Slick singing again, now a more fully-integrated member of the band, and it helps. Her voice helps seal the deal on songs like 'Wild Tyme' and 'Young Girl Sunday Blues', both of which are solid, crunching rockers, and her 'Two Heads' has a pre-punk sneer. The guitar playing in general is where things really lift up on this album, as the three-guitar lineup finally starts to do something useful. It's not a thick wall of fuzz like a Superconductor record, nor delicate, thoughtful musings like Bedhead, but three musicians (and songwriters) with different styles, knowing how to assemble their contributions equally. Jorma Kaukonen I think might be the secret MVP of this band, though I don't know - there are edgy shrieks of psychedelic guitar all over this record, oozing from the corners of 'The Ballad of You and Me (And Pooneil)' and 'Martha' which I assume are him, but maybe not. Nine minutes of side two are given over to the improvised jam 'Spare Chaynge', probably considered an indulgent mess by listeners at the time but actually pretty solid. It builds into some more impressive riffage, but again, it's not too thick or lazy; the rhythm section of Jack Casady and Spencer Dryden, credited as co-composers, finally show their mettle. It's not a throw-everything-into-the-mix psychedelic jam but rather a lurching, jazz-leaning blues-based jam; I'm surprised how much I like it, maybe because it grounds the Airplane into an 'earthier' sound. Maybe I should check out some Hot Tuna records. For the second LP in a row, a Kaukonen composition ('The Last Wall of the Castle') is probably the best song on the album; it's a scorching hot boogie that feels like it's hurtling towards the end of the world while capturing the colours along the journey. But the pop-leaning material is in perfect balance, making this a two-headed beast that feels well-integrated, with hooks that persist fifty years later. This is not just a document of the times but an enduring psychedelic rock masterpiece. I haven't even mentioned 'A Small Package Of Value Will Come To You, Shortly', which utilises musique concrete and other collage techniques to be the most 'experimental' cut there is. 'Won't You Try/Saturday Afternoon' has a nice round-like structure, and is the most obviously drug-referencing lyrics that I could here, but the real 'outer' sounds are 'Small Package' and 'Spare Chaynge'. Jefferson Airplane were a great band but I think recognised for the wrong material. Crown of Creation is a pretty good record too and Kantner's Blows Against the Empire is a very cool thing indeed, though I never picked up either of them, sadly.

Bob Dylan - 'Bringing It All Back Home' (Columbia)

I grew up with an oppositional view of music. Music was so tightly tied to the social aspects of growing up in America in the late 80s/early 90s that it meant something. What bands you liked = who you were. And by my early teenage years I was hellbent on constructing such a personal definition that was unique from the others in my adolescent sphere, yet also grounded in something. I did my research - when I decided that "punk" was the ultimate reaction to the unjust society (which, of course, I had no remote understanding of), I went to the library and properly studied it. Even then I had some respect for the history of music, but only a Gestalt history - where the central figure was Lou Reed, not Dylan. And because I was only capable of seeing culture developments in opposition to one another (rather than synergistically - didn't I learn anything from James Burke's Connections documentary series?), I ended up with a pretty screwed up view. The way I saw it, I liked Descendents and not Smashing Pumpkins like the other kids at my school; this meant that embracing Descendents automatically meant a rejection of everything Smashing Pumpkins "stood for", which by extension was the entire capitalist patriarchal society that dominated the earth. (A funny concept for a band writing songs like 'I Like Food'). So my understanding of music - and believe me, for years, there was nothing else I consumed or thought about except music - highlighted the moments and quotations which supported my already existing narrative. I think that's what everyone does anyway - we pick and choose the facts we like - but how do these existing narratives get constructed? A subject for deeper investigation, maybe when we get around to the R's and do the Stones .... Anyway, I remembered reading about Johnny Rotten making a t-shirt that says "Fuck Pink Floyd", and quotes from SST 80s guys that emphasised their isolation and commercial futility -- this was the language to me. It was us against them, and the history of rock and roll being spewed out by Rolling Stone magazine and the Greil Marcus-style critical canon was privileging the commercially successful artists, not the real innovators. Fuck Dylan, fuck the Stones, especially fuck Zeppelin and Fleetwood Mac and all those dinosaurs -- the real Rock and Roll hall of fame, as I saw it in 1994, should have housed the Dictators and Fugazi, not Clapton and Foghat.

Twenty years later I'm hopefully a bit more nuanced in my view of the world and especially culture. The irony is that I came to embrace many of the so-called 'classic rock' artists who I so blatantly rejected when I was young; I got into classic rock in my late 20s, and particularly Dylan, who I spent years never completely understanding why everyone liked him so much. To me (in the 90s), Dylan was a culturally significant figure who wrote vague, bland folk-rock songs and went through a bunch of phases including a shitty Christian one, and who was worshipped by a legion of obsessive rock writers who were basically being hoodwinked. To me, in this decade, Dylan is fucking awesome, though for reasons that are often intangible. I might still mostly agree with my 90s view, if I were to remove the word 'bland' from the above sentence, but over the years, and especially as I've had my own life experiences, Dylan's power has crept up on me. I'm still picky about his output - this is actually the only Dylan LP I own, and only because i picked it up years ago for dirt cheap and I rarely listen to it -- and I favour the Basement Tapes-era stuff (particularly the 4CD bootleg), the more mystical and funky bits of Desire, and the vastly underrated New Morning album. I think if you care about rock music at all, and I sure do, then Dylan is unavoidable. I didn't try explicitly to like or dislike Dylan - it just happens. Cover versions help, such as Fairport Convention's brilliant renderings or the amazing-beyond-words cover of 'It's All Over Now, Baby Blue' by 13th Floor Elevators. 'Baby Blue' is here to close the LP and I realise while listening to it that it's buried in attitude, as is pretty much everything that makes early Dylan great. I don't want to pontificate on what Dylan 'means' because there's already a huge (and mostly horrible, I imagine) volume of semi-scholarly literature about that. But there's something that grew in me as I became more confident in my own life and creative choices, and that thing is frequently tickled when listening to these overplayed classics. Being an American abroad perhaps contributed to it as well - in Britain I couldn't understand how everyone was just worshipping the man, and my pleas that Neil and Roy Harper were actually better songwriters went unheard -- and eventually I guess I just wore down. Actually when I watched that film I'm Not There, I was quite taken by it - and I realised just how much I was a Bob Dylan fan. And what's also great about confidence is that I'm happy to like anything I like - just wait until we get to the J's and I can write about how brilliant 90s San Francisco pop-punk band J Church are -- without the need for oppositional, elitist demarcations.