Hippies vs. Punks: Jefferson Starship's Red Octopus (1975)

Three big names in rock'n'roll died in January. First, David Bowie, followed by Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey, and then Jefferson Airplane's Paul Kantner. So far this month, Earth, Wind & Fire's Maurice White has passed. The new year has been rough on radio stars of the 1970s.

At the job, my coworker likes to listen to the local hipster radio station, KEXP. (Today the station is celebrating International Clash Day.) On his birthday, January 8, KEXP devoted an entire day to Bowie music, which was then repeated on Monday, January 11 in memoriam. The DJs spoke in hushed, awed voices about what Bowie had meant to them and how his death had knocked them breathless.

To mark Paul Kantner's passing, the station played a sprinkling of songs, something off the super-historical After Bathing at Baxter's (1967), as well as cuts from Crown of Creation (1968) and Volunteers (1969). But that was about it. All stuff from the band's psychedilc Hippie heyday and nothing from Kantner's days at the helm of Jefferson Starship in the mid- to late-1970s, a time when Kantner and his mates in Jefferson were just as popular and commercially successful as they were in the 1960s.

But Kantner fared better on hipster KEXP than Glenn Frey. From what I could tell, even in memoriam, not one Eagles tune was played by the station.

Which got me thinking. I listened to a lot of radio as a kid in 1975, a time when all three artists -- Bowie, Kantner and Frey -- filled the airwaves. One of These Nights (1975) was huge and the Eagles were generally well received by the Hippies, and Jefferson Starship's Red Octopus (1975) occupied the #1 position on the Billboard 200 list of top albums for 1975 several different times in the late summer and fall. Bowie's Young Americans (1975) never made it to #1, but two Bowie singles, "Fame" and "Golden Years," were huge at the same time as Jefferson Starship's hit single "Miracles."

"Fame" and "Miracles" both have this murky voodoo quality that sort of terrified and mesmerized me as a sixth grader. Since it is a Hippies vs. Punks thesis that 1975 is an all-important year, I decided to study Red Octopus all week to try to divine what was going on in the national consciousness at a time prior to the first wave of UK Punk and when Disco was just starting to dominate the landscape.

The obvious thing listening to Red Octopus is its corporate sensibility. It sounds like it was pumped out of the PA at a cineplex or mall. Grace Slick's paeans to love sound like ready-made commercial jingles for Jiffy Lube or Holland America Line cruises. To be fair, the two instrumental tracks -- "Git Fiddler" and "Sandalphon" -- are good, as is "There Will Be Love," where there is some interesting multi-vocal Hippie harmonizing going on.

But the power of Red Octopus is in Marty Balin's seven-minute masterpiece, "Miracles," the single version of which was chopped in half to excise a line about cunnilingus: "I had a taste of the real world when I went down on you, girl."

Listening to "Miracles" repeatedly this week I couldn't help imagining myself as some solid American male in 1975, a Teamsters business rep or pool equipment salesman, driving around in a Ford Crown Victoria, pulling into the lounge at a Holiday Inn or a Best Western, ordering a 7 and 7 at the bar and kicking back and listening to Marty Balin sing "If only you believe like I believe, baby," while scanning the trim in the room. Then at the same time across town at some Hippie fern bar a longhair was basically engaged in the same pursuit. That's a cultural commons that we once had in this country. And to think that it was, however briefly, maybe six or seven years in the 1970s, Hippie based is nothing short of a miracle to me.

Hippies vs. Punks: Balin (1981)

Something unusual happened on the way home from work last night. I was on the train reading; I had my earbuds in, and I was listening to the research subject for this week's Hippies vs. Punks post, Marty Balin's solo debut full-length record, Balin (1981), when suddenly I could take no more and thumbed my iPod over to Interpol's El Pintor (2014).

This is out of the ordinary because even taxing albums, like last week's Land Speed Record (1982), I am able to fully immerse myself in repeated non-stop listening for the duration of the work week. But Balin's slick commercial amalgamation of disco-pop-rock proved too much for me.

To get the sonic flavor of the album all one need do is sample the lead track, "Hearts" (see the YouTube above), which reached #8 on the singles pop charts, the highest position a song by Marty Balin ever achieved.

"Hearts" is a perfect example of the default sensibility of white middle-class America at the dawn of the Reagan Age. A ballad dominated by its "Cinderella's Ball" high school slow dance synthesized keyboards and its back beat, "Hearts" conjures up a time of suburban prosperity, stability and safety.

The other single from Balin to chart was "Atlanta Lady," another lite rock ballad with a discernible back beat:

Interestingly, Marty Balin didn't write any of the material on Balin besides sharing a credit for "Lydia!," my favorite track on the record, a disco rocker that has the Jefferson Airplane founder singing about subways and freeway overpasses:

Balin is a largely pristine commercial album. It reached #35 on the Billboard charts. (The only clunker is "Elvis and Marilyn," a song co-authored by Leon Russell, Kim Fowley and Dyan Diamond.) As Stephen Thomas Erlewine reports in his AllMusic review, Balin is a valuable aural document of the early 1980s rock-disco-soul steady state:

Marty Balin left Jefferson Starship in 1978, not long after "Miracles" gave the group a Top Ten soft rock hit in 1975, thereby providing a window into the world the singer inhabited when he went solo in 1981 with Balin. He largely abandoned songwriting -- he collaborated on one song on the record -- in the pursuit of being an AOR superstar. The 1981 eponymous album was indeed a hit thanks to the gorgeous soft rock staple "Hearts," written by longtime friend Jesse Barish, as was a good chunk of the rest of the album. Some of Balin follows the direction of "Hearts" -- "Atlanta Lady" and "Music Is the Light" both softly shimmer -- but the album overall plays like a sampler of the mainstream rock sounds of 1981. On "Spotlight" and "I Do Believe in You," guitars are cranked up to 11 so they can fill an arena, "Tell Me More" cops some of Michael McDonald's Doobie Brothers disco-soul, and "You Left Your Mark on Me" and "Elvis and Marilyn" flirt with new wave while "Lydia!" outright embraces it, sounding a bit like Donnie Iris. Maybe this hodgepodge didn't do much to establish Balin as a recording star at the time -- certainly it didn't please some Jefferson Starship fans -- but as an artifact of early-'80s rock, it's wildly fun and somewhat compelling.

I chose Balin for today's post because it was produced in 1981, and I thought it would be interesting to contrast the creative efforts of a Founding Father of the San Francisco Sound of the 1960s (the sound more than any other that defined the Hippie Zeitgeist) with a Hardcore Punk album like Land Speed Record or a New Wave Hip Hop/House Music record like Tom Tom Club, both also produced in 1981. Plus, having recently viewed Gimme Shelter, I was impressed by Marty Balin's display of personal physical courage when he jumped into the pit in front of the Altamont stage and mixed it up with the Hells Angels.

The takeaway is the obvious one. By 1981 all fight or even the ability to critique society was bleached out of the Hippies. They were integrated back into the mainstream capitalist paradigm as entrepreneurs, lawyers, tradesmen, accountants, what have you; they were looking for and sometimes achieving commercial comfort. Of course a society with a background sound of Balin, The Doobie Brothers and Earth Wind & Fire is long gone. It seems from this vantage point a society more orderly than anything we will ever again encounter. Maybe it was that orderliness, that saccharine commercial tidiness with the compact clean guitar solos set off in spotlight which proved too much for me.

Hippies vs Punks: Jefferson Airplane at Altamont

Last Friday night convalescing from a mystery virus I watched the Maysles brothers' (with Charlotte Zwerin) Gimme Shelter (1970). The documentary chronicles the U.S. tour of the Rolling Stones in the autumn of 1969. The film is famous because it captures the Hells Angels riot at the Altamont Free Concert, a moment that is widely accepted as the shattering of the Hippie dream of a "Woodstock nation," the Utopian aspiration that the Western youth could come together at free rock'n'roll festivals, practice "peace & love," and somehow spontaneously heal the rancid body politic.

Woodstock took place in August of 1969. The Rolling Stones weren't there. A free concert in early December at the end of their U.S. tour, a tour which was criticized by Ralph Gleason for its high ticket prices, was a way to mollify critics and tap back into the Woodstock magic. (Michael Lang, one of Woodstock's co-creators, also played a role at Altamont and can be seen in Gimme Shelter.)

The Maysles come down strongly -- the way Zwerin edits the film -- on blaming the Hells Angels for the violence. There are numerous shots of the Angels guzzling canned beer and clubbing concert-goers with weighted pool cues.

Seeing the documentary again, what impressed me about the Altamont sequence -- I've seen Gimme Shelter numerous times over the years -- is how excellent Jefferson Airplane was, not only the band's sound and how they looked on stage, but how they stood up to the Hells Angels -- Marty Balin even pitched himself into the crowd to try protect people and got knocked unconscious by the Angels for it -- and how Grace Slick spoke to the audience and tried to calm the situation.

When I was at the university in the 1980s, Jefferson Airplane, at that point known as Starship, was the worst of the old Hippie bands trying to stay on the gravy train by crafting New Wave pop songs to fit the barren "It's Mo(u)rning in America" Reagan-era Zeitgeist, songs like the brain-dead, chest-thumping "We Built This City." I remember being offended by seeing Grace Slick yukking it up with Dick Clark on American Bandstand:

But clearly at Altamont Jefferson Airplane comported themselves in a heroic manner, far more so than the Rolling Stones. The genius of Gimme Shelter is in its shots of the audience, Jagger powerless onstage, reduced to a spectator performing "Under My Thumb," as the Hells Angels knife to death Meredith Hunter:

We'll have to return to Altamont. It is a goldmine. The Hippies realized in real time their dream had died. This is December 1969, which sets the stage for the freak-out year of 1970.