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I have in my treasure-trove of personal memorabilia a letter from a friend, postmarked from San Francisco in September 1965, where he describes hanging out with a newly formed band with the strange name of "Jefferson Airplane" and auditioning to be their lead singer. He didn't make the band; thus, when their debut album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, was released in mid-1966, he was not on it. My local record store didn't carry it, and no one who worked there had ever heard of them. How things would change within less than a year, when a song called "Somebody to Love" was all over the radio and Jefferson Airplane was all over television.
Jefferson Airplane was a swirling mass of contradictions. Their fan club slogan, "Jefferson Airplane Loves You," was perfect for the Summer of Love, yet the band was split into two, sometimes three, contentious camps. Their politics were extreme radical left; they made no bones about embracing Red China, yet if they had ever appeared in that country, they would have undoubtedly wound up underneath some tanktread. They also embraced, and utilized, the capitalist system in their business dealings to the hilt. And while espousing an idealistic communal style that publicly eschewed materiality, they were poster child limousine liberals. Their music was by turns brilliant and crap, with some of it standing up after hundreds of listenings over three and one-half decades, while others were unlistenable from Day One. Yet their influence on the culture for several mad, insane years was undeniable.
Jeff Tamarkin chronicles the entire process from the beginning to the present in GOT A REVOLUTION!, which is a history of Jefferson Airplane (and its offshoots) collectively and its members individually. It is an amazing work on a number of levels. Tamarkin was able to obtain the cooperation of almost all of the individuals directly or indirectly involved, and he deals with conflicting versions of events colored by time, perspective, and drug-induced illusion. He is an unabashed fan of the band --- to even contemplate a work of this scope and complexity, one would have to really love, or really hate, them --- yet his account of the band, if not the times in which they lived, is surprisingly objective. Grace Slick and Paul Kantner come off the worst, in terms of their wild and destructive behavior, and yet even they possessed some redemptive qualities, outside of whatever musical talent they were blessed with.
Tamarkin additionally does an excellent job of tracing the history of each member of the group, the events surrounding them, and the band members' individual and collective discography. I was constantly and continuously impressed with Tamarkin's accuracy with respect to events involving the band. Though not directly in any of the events that he describes, I was a bystander at several of them (the infamous Akron Rubber Bowl concert of 1972 being but one) and his ability to put the reader into the setting while getting it right is incredible.
While he occasionally lets his worldview color secondary events (the Black Panthers were, alas, not the innocent victims he infers them to be, and Ronald Reagan's presidency couldn't have ignored AIDS for several years before declaring the condition a national emergency in 1981 because he wasn't elected until 1981), he does get everything about the Airplane right while including, well, damn near everything, from Grace Slick's notorious appearance in blackface on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, to the infamous record jacket cupcake tracing, to Marty Balin, valiantly but in vain, single-handedly taking on a contingent of Hell's Angels while the band played on.
A history of Jefferson Airplane was overdue; that the first one should also be the definitive one is a tribute to Tamarkin and his work. It is impossible to read GOT A REVOLUTION! without going to the record collection and pulling out records with titles like Surrealistic Pillow, Crown of a Creation, Volunteers, and After Bathing at Baxters, and listening to them over and over again. If they are not a soundtrack to a life, they are at least the theme of it. And GOT A REVOLUTION! is the story of it. Highly recommended.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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