Got a Revolution! The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane
Formed in San Francisco in 1965, Jefferson Airplane helped pave rock's psychedelic road of the 1960s and 1970s. Tamarkin, who wrote the liner notes for RCA's 10th anniversary CD collection of Airplane songs, offers a fan's notes of the band. Drawing on interviews with the many musicians and others who wandered through Airplane on its way to the heights of musical history, Tamarkin chronicles the course of the band as it soared to its early successes, floated through in-fighting and excessive drug use, and eventually crashed and burned-out in the late '60s and early '70s. Tamarkin effectively traces the ways that band members' egos and their creative differences both molded Airplane and brought it to its demise. He efficiently narrates the early days when its founding members Marty Balin, Paul Kantner and Jorma Kaukonen played folk rock clubs in the Bay area and then, joined by Grace Slick in 1966, took off into new musical directions, changing rock music forever along with bands like Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Grateful Dead. Tamarkin weaves his own adoring interpretations of each song from almost every album into his chronological narrative of the band's history, demonstrating that Airplane's music often reflected the days of their lives. He provides an epilogue in which he brings readers up-to-date on the band's members and a complete discography. Although Tamarkin's hagiographic portrait of the band is hardly objective, his friendship with and complete access to the players in this story certainly makes his account the definitive one.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.