This is what it might have looked like if Balin's original idea was used. Pink works better, and he thought so too.
They don't get enough love, is what I'm saying. For why? Perhaps it was their shift into hectoring agit-prop, confused science fiction, and a string of ragged albums. And then the Starship, which has dated as well as toweling headbands and legwarmers. I reckon it was the drugs becoming more important than the tunes, but what do I know? Their first three albums remain paradigms [oh, fuck off - Ed.] of 'sixties culture, focused like a crystal lens onto the times they were made, clear and color-saturated.
Takes Off is the modern sound of folk-rock, from Marty Balin's band. What set it apart from the hootenanny hayriders was a for-the-times lyrical edginess, pencil-fucked by the prudes at RCA, some neat acid-etched guitar and Jack Casady's frankly mindblowing bass, recorded unusually close. Signe Toly Anderson and Skip Spence left before the second album, replaced by high society sex tornado Grace Slick and jazzbo sticksman Spencer Dryden. 8/10
Balin took a slight but significant step back for Surrealistic Pillow, the band creating as a whole, and the sound expanded into something immediately new - by turns battering and sharp or shimmering gentle. Slick brought two songs from the underachieving Great Society, the hit Somebody To Love and the psycho bolero White Rabbit, which sounded like nothing else more than anything else, and still does, only more so. Here's the sound of the summer of love happening, breaking through the concrete and diffusing rainbows into the air. Only Electric Music For The Mind And Body caught the mood as perfectly. 10/10
After Bathing At Baxters shows the perils of freedom, of over-indulgence. Arriving in late '67, it prefigured the end of the decade and the sun setting on the Age of Aquarius after barely nudging over the horizon. Balin was sidelined to one song and experimentation was valued for its own sake. Again, it's a perfect encapsulation of the times, but the times were already troubled, and the lack of focus, of a cohesive identity, that was to plague the band's later releases was apparent in the wider context of a counterculture uncertain how to replace mindless hedonism with something lasting. Yes, it's a nearly great album, but that nearly is crippling. In spite of some rave reviews, Baxter's fell short of its lofty aim. Grace Slick: "We figured we were going to produce the most brilliant album released in rock ... we had no idea what we were doing." I blame the drugs. 9/10
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