Coming home from Dayton
with a short layover in Chicago,
our flight, scheduled for take-off
from O’Hare at nine, is delayed because of
“technical issues.” That’s just the thing
you want to hear waiting to board
a plane. Your thinking goes to ugly
places. And then, on the other hand,
statistically speaking, you are safer in
a plane than you are in a car, technical
issues or no. How bad could it be?
It’s bad. The wait, that is. We’re probably
another hour at the gate. And then
finally, we board. It gets worse: we
sit on that damn plane for another
hour before take-off. The pilot passes
the buck, as he must, and blames
the wait on impending paper work.
It’s nearly midnight, and the flight
is four hours long.
Returning from our travels and
into a recovery Monday, it’s time to
get back into the vinyl stacks and
the alphabetical listening challenge,
and appropriately, we find ourselves
with a band coincidentally named
after our current aviation theme,
Jefferson Airplane. Another record
inherited from my brother-in-law,
Kevin, I kept this one mostly out of an
obligation toward the two classics,
the only two songs I recognize
by title: “Somebody to Love” and
“White Rabbit” on this hilariously
titled compilation, The Worst of
Jefferson Airplane. Grace Slick was
a powerhouse, to be sure, and these
two songs continue to rock more
than 50 years later, and “White
Rabbit” is still pretty freaky.
The rest of this album, certainly
not really their “worst,” is nice, but
fairly skippable. They would save
their “worst” for the eighties: we
built this city–anyone? Was that an
Airplane or a Starship? I don’t know,
but perhaps their biggest rock star
moment was, to me, an embarrassment.
There are hints of that stupidity
here hiding amongst the folky, proggy,
psychedelic 60’s rock. It is, like the flight
home from Chicago on American Airlines,
mostly terrible, with just a few moments
of goodness, like listening to RAYE on
the headphones, or like watching Eugene
Levy drinking vodka and dog sledding
in Finland on the tiny screen
of my cellphone.
Notes on the vinyl edition: The Worst of Jefferson Airplane, RCA Records, 1970, black vinyl.
In case you don’t already know: I’m listening to almost everything in my vinyl collection, A to Z, and writing at least one, sometimes two or three long skinny poem-like-things in response for each artist, and on a few occasions, writing a long skinny poem-like-thing in response to more than one artist. As a poet and a student of poetry, I understand that these things look like poems, but they don’t really sound much like poetry, hence, I call them “poem-like-things.” I’ll admit that they’re just long, skinny essays that veer every now and then into the poetic or lyric.
michael jarmer 