The Songs - Volunteers

This is another entry in my ongoing “songs that visited me and decided they wanted to stay” series. I hope you like these enough to become a paid subscriber, because I really need you! I only ask for $5 a month.

This one is a free to all….

Volunteers - Jefferson Airplane

Look what's happening out in the streets
Got a revolution (got to revolution)
Hey, I'm dancing down the streets
Got a revolution (got to revolution)
Oh, ain't it amazing all the people I meet?
Got a revolution, oh-oh
We are volunteers of America

It’s so easy to be cynical about the 60s but whenever I hear songs like this I feel like marching on the Pentagon and sitting cross-legged around the wire while chanting “Om” until the building levitates. Or something like that. I forget the exact story but the 60s sounded like a gas.

There is something charming in the political naivete of bands like the Airplane, who were clearly out of fucks before being out of fucks was de rigueur. They lived and loved together, and agitated the shit out of every “establishment” person they came into contact with. Once during a gig in Germany singer Grace Slick nearly caused a riot by mocking the crowd for losing WW2. She was a college classmate of Nixon’s daughter, and was invited to a White House reception in which she planned to spike the President’s tea with 600 micrograms of LSD. They don’t make Grace Slick’s anymore. She made Jim Morrison look like Dean Martin.

Her band also created some of the best songs of the decade…..drug-drenched snap-shots that somehow don’t sound dated even though I can list 100 reasons why they should. For a time, they could out-Stone the Stones and out-Dead the Dead. Jorma might have gone on FOREVER sometimes, but he and Kantner were much more musically inventive than their neighbors Garcia and Weir. And anybody who considered the Stones revolutionaries clearly never heard the Airplane. This was a band that included the lyric “up against the wall, motherfucker” in one of their CHORUSES. Compare that to the whiny “what can a poor boy do / ‘cept sing for a rock and roll band?” cop-out, and tell me who you want to go to war with?

They were Hunter Thompson’s favorite band. What else do you need to know?

The song “Volunteers” needed to be written (and released) because things were moving so fast. You could not sit on a song like this anymore than you could sit on a song like “Ohio”. You wanted it to play as you were looking out your window.

So after waking up one morning to the sound of a “Volunteers of America” truck across the street, they just swiped the same riff they used for another song they had (“We Can Be Together”) and that was that. If you’re gonna steal something, it’s best to steal from yourself. It just SOUNDS like generational marching music, in the same way that fife and drums were centuries earlier. It’s barely 2 minutes long, but in my head it’s lasted since I’ve been old enough to know better. When I hear it I get pissed off and I get excited and I feel like running through a wall, which I presume was the band’s intention. It’s still my favorite rhythm guitar playing of all time.

This was a band that featured 2 lead singers. One of them, Marty Balin, had the balls to take on the Hells Angels all by himself at Altamont, jumping off the stage into a scrum as the Angels were beating on a woman in the crowd….and getting knocked out with a weighted pool cue for his efforts. It was more than even avowed tough guy Keith Richards would dare do later the same gig, and even now I think the Angels were lucky that it wasn’t Grace Slick who took them on.

In short, the Airplane walked it like they talked it. Eventually, just like everybody else at the time, they drugged and fucked too much and got sick of each other…eventually splintering into numerous sects. The most egregious of these became “Jefferson Starship” (and later just “Starship”), who were responsible for perhaps the worst hit song in the history of popular music, “We Built This City”. The song shamed Grace Slick so much that she quit the music business entirely and became a painter. The band’s other lead singer at the time, Mickey Thomas, became infamous for coming to Scranton for a show, getting drunk at the old Hilton’s bar, and pulling the rock star card on the wrong girl. Her West Side boyfriend ended up stomping Thomas into the hospital.

So yea, it didn’t really end well.

But man….what a start. I don’t know if music was BETTER then. That’s subjective for sure. What I do know is that it meant more. It could and did stop wars.

Where is today’s marching music?

In a bit…

—tf

Songs That Visited Me and Decided They Wanted to Stay

Intro
In a Big Country
Found Out About You
Tutti Fruitti
Surrender
Who Knows Where the Time Goes?
Nightswimming
Fast Car
Take Five
Romeo and Juliet
Wichita Lineman
Waterfall
There She Goes
A Sort of Homecoming
Purple Rain
Nights On Broadway
Tough All Over
What Am I Doing Hangin’ ‘Round
Inside Out
Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More
America
Thirteen
I Wish
Love is Alive
Back in the High Life Again
Volunteers
The Show Goes On
Mike Collins
Fall Down
Green Grass & High Tides
Tom Sawyer
Mainstreet