From: wpmadden@eos.ncsu.edu (Bill Madden)
Subject: Wooden Ships @ Winterland
Organization: North Carolina State University
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1992 20:58:49 GMT


Reprinted without permission from an article by Charlie Johnson, in 
"The Record Exchange Music Monitor," a monthly publication by a chain
of record shops in North Carolina and Virginia called The Record Exchange.
The Record Exchange sells new and used vinyl and CD's, domestic and import.
I am in no way affiliated with the store, just a damn satisfied customer.

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		"Wooden Ships At Winterland"

	I've always felt blessed to have expericenced, on its home turf,
the final chapter of what I consider the true golden age of rock,
in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1969. The first show I saw, in a junior
college gym, featured a couple of new local bands, neither of which had
an album: It's a Beautiful Day and Santana. I quickly discovered the city's
great concert venues, like the Fillmore and Winterland, and heard more 
great rock in on year than the rest of my life before or since-the
Grateful Dead, Creedence, Country Joe McDonald, Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks,
Seatrain and many others, including my favorite band, Jefferson Airplane.

	The music was everywhere. It spilled out of clubs and bars, 
reverberated in parks and amphitheaters and flowed at street corner be-ins.
It was cheap and often free. It was our literature, our Bible, and our
government. Despite our "do your own thing" ideal, we hippies, unlike today's
splintered alternative culture of ravers, new wavers, Deadheads, headbangers,
etc., were amazing[ly] unified, making it possible for the music to speak
for us all. And nobody spoke for us as eloquently as Jefferson Airplane. How
many band today are literate enough to write a song out of bits and pieces
of James Joyce's 'Ulysses,' with lines as powerful as "War is good business,
so give your son/And I'd rather have my country die for me." ("ReJoyce")?
Their songs traced our steps, from flower power to revolution; reflecting
our obsessions, our defiance, our jubilation and our fears. The worst fear
was stagnation and conformity: "Soon you'll obtain the stability strived for/
In the only way that it's granted/In a place amoung the fossils of our 
time..." ("Crown of Creation").

	One show from 1969 was particularly memorable, a night at Winterland
with the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. As always, the place was 
packed-anyone up front who needed a rest room was out of luck unless they
wanted to walk there on headtops. There was more Patchouli oil in the air than
oxygen. Someone behind me was blowing soap bubbles filled with hashish smoke,
producing an exotic aroma when one popped near me. The Dead played first,
a set of long jams included one on "Lovelight" which seemed to last for 
days. After the Dead Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady played a warmup set as 
Hot Tuna, a sub-group they were evolving. The the others apeeared: the 
beautiful, darkly humorous Grace Slick; Marty Balin, the pop balladeer; the
brooding, political Paul Kantner; Spencer Dryden, the straight-ahead drummer.
They opened with "We Can Be Together," a new song which would appear on 
"Volunteers" later that year. The crowd roared its approval at the lines 
"We are forces of chaos and anarchy/Everything they say we are, we are/And
we are very proud of ourselves." Live, they Airplane seldom sounded like
their studio albums. Their live sound was thin, unbalanced, slightly out of
tune, loose-but absorbing. They never seemed to play anything the same way
twice. They diverged and converged, bouncing odd riffs off one another,
sometimes seeming to surprise each other as much as the audience. The 
sound was like intoxicating, drifting smoke, punctuated by random rays of 
blinding light.

	During a long rendition of Jorma's "Embryonic Journey," Grace
disappeared from the stage. When she came back, the Grateful Dead were behind
her! The two bands formed a huge emsemble which held together surprisingly
well through several songs. Then a buzz started at the front of the stage
and swept back through the crowd as two more musicians popped up out of the
crowd to join the supergroup. I soon learned what the buzz was about:
the extras were Steve Stills and Graham Nash! Someone began a series of
unfamiliar lilting guitar notes that gradually turned into an intro. I
didn't recognize the tune until Paul Kantner stepped up to the mike and sang
the first line: "If you smile at me, you know I will understand..." It was
"Wooden Ships," a Kantner-Stills-Crosby collaberation which had just 
appeared on CSN's debut album and would also be recored by the Airplane
that year. The song is an apocalyptic monologue about counter-culter survivors
sailing away from a mad, self-destructive world. Stills and Nash added
rich harmonies, Jorma swapped guitar leads with the Grateful Dead's Bob
Weir and the song swelled to awesome proportions. A chant began behind the
rest of the texture, which became recognizable as "go ride the music, go 
ride the music..." Then it concluded, with the last line sung a capella
by the whole cast: "We are leaving, you don't need us." The crowd was hushed
for a moment as the words hung in the air.

	I can still hear them. "We are leaving, you don't need us."
They seemed like a credo, a capsule explanation of my generation during 
those years. We _did_ leave a troubled world for a brief, exhilerating time.
We'd all return, of course-the Airplane to wane into the disappointing 
Starship, the rest of us, except for a few drug casualties, to take up
relatively ordinary lives. We accepted realities we couldn't change, 
reluctantly woke from the nost beautiful dream we'd every have. But we'd never
be the same.

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Note: DBVI tells me this is probably Saturday 69.10.25 Winterland billed
as: Jefferson Airplane; Grateful Dead; Sons Of Champlin; Hot Tuna.
Dead's setlist:
Good Lovin>Drumz>Good Lovin,Me & My Uncle,China>Rider,Casey
High Time,Dark Star>St. Stephen>The Eleven>Lovelight.

Wm
-- 
Bill Madden
wpmadden@eos.ncsu.edu
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Newsgroups: rec.music.gdead