University of Virginia Library

'Blows Against The Empire'

Marooned On Kantner's Jefferson Starship

Grace Atop Rex: Time Has Not Been Gentle

PAUL KANTNER

JEFFERSON STARSHIP

Blows Against The Empire
(RCA LSP-4448)

By Rob Buford

Cavalier Daily Staff Writer

Ever since Alice's White
Rabbit disappeared
underground, buried beneath
the flippancy of Grace Slick
with Abbie Hoffman begging
entrance at Tricia Nixon's door
for Finch College's class
reunion, even as Hot Tuna
sprang from Jefferson Airplane
— which at least showed
nothing is impossible — it was
inevitable.

Inevitable because Paul
Kantner wanted it thus. He
leans that way as a matter of
principle, or habit, or maybe
Kantner is just full of it, but
his Jefferson Starship and its
Blows Against The Empire are
lost in space, which only goes
to show what time can do to a
fine group. Inevitable.

In fact, you might say that
Jefferson Starship is what the
Seventies have done to rock —
not the limestone of a James
Taylor or a Cat Stevens, more
like the landslide you expect
when granite starts to slip —
the very firmament trembles as
the fractures spread.

The interface which has
become Kantner's very own
Starship, including David
Crosby, Harvey Brooks, Jerry
Garcia, and Graham Nash, is
notable for its able crew, but
even more for how badly
Starship works.

Through the relationship
between the revolution and its
music has seldom been hard to
discern, the best rock of the
Sixties always maintained a
certain distance from political
rhetoric. After all, it was the
sound itself — lots of it —
which carried form and
substance: medium became
message. From that pure state,
the ensuing variations ranged
from the Grateful Dead in
concert, to the Doors, who
ultimately went to the top by
way of studio recordings.

If the influence of
profitable record albums,
helped in the assimilation of
art form of lyrics and their
importance in rock music. And
the words, oddly, keep getting
noisier as the beat goes on and
the sounds diminish.

Listen to "Mau Mau
(Amerikon)":

And so on, until the idea
refuses to go away that the
message is not only quite —
how to say it?, militant,
hostile, mad, or maybe just full
of it? The music grudgingly
evaporates for the jaded
rapturous radicalism of Paul
Kantner and the cultural
despondency of Grace Slick.

If this seems harsh, then
remember exactly who the
musicians are aboard this spacey
Starship, and your
expectations collapse to the
tune of packaged apocalypse,
cold turkey in a can.

"We are the people our
parents warned us against,"
judged Jerry Rubin, and
likewise, Starship is the
outcome its flower children
ancestors must have dreaded
like future sorrow. Now, when
the "people play" the game is
Rock'n Growl, and the
trivialization of a revolution is
complete.

As though the world of
CSN&Y's "Ohio" gradually
outgrew its boundaries,
Kantner's Starship turned to
the cosmos and set sail. "Let's
Go Together" is the rally
cheer:

Where to, mac? Well, you
see, the fiction goes like this:

STARSHIP

People (people!) Needed Now

Earth Getting Too Thick

Move On Out

To The

Cool & The Dark...

We intend to hijack the first
sound interstellar or interplanetary
starship built by the people of this
planet...Embarkation date: Mill 4
(App. 1989-9).. —involving light
years...

And thus goes the message,
Consciousness — IV, and one
could at least expect the pace
to quicken, but it does not.
The haze gets thicker, the
point of it all fades away, and
the sound is smothered in
Starship whinings and wailings.
The effect is amazing. It
becomes possible to sit before
a typewriter reviewing the
album and forget it is yet
playing away in the same
room.

Complete with a handy
little illustrated manual by God
Tunes (All Rights Reserved)
including a complete transcript
from Kantner's Mission
Kontrol, there are finally
exceptions to the godawful
deadness - First a small song
called the "The Baby Tree",
which prefigures the coming of
Kantner's and Grace Slick's
baby, a girl just recently born
in real live America. Shortly
afterward there is another
surprise, itself a celebration of
the same birth, "A Child Is
Coming."

IT'S GETTIN' BETTER

LIKE A MORNIN' TO BE BORN

But if Starship gives any
clues, what took off as the
Airplane has since crashed, and
it will take quite a few repairs
to get it in the air again, high
and headed somewhere, where
it all belongs.

The Pooh