In 1967, there was simply not a cooler American band than Jefferson Airplane. Remember that at the time Jimi Hendrix was mostly having his name made in England, the Grateful Dead hadn’t yet found their feet, and psychedelic pop had rendered all but the most progressive-thinking bands obsolete. The problem was that few could tell by the two big Airplane singles that had graced the charts thusfar: “Somebody To Love” and “White Rabbit”. Sure, those songs were nice, but people were not fucking prepared for what was to come with After Bathing At Baxter’s. Most of all, RCA realllly didn’t know what the fuck was going on. I mean, how dare a band take four months to record a flippin’ rock and roll album? This stuff was supposed to be the sounds of teenagers banging on things and screaming, right?

If Sgt. Pepper was the first time that the music world was forced to look at the album as it’s own artform, then After Bathing At Baxter’s was the album that cemented the fact that long-players weren’t just a fad, but especially that these things were pieces of art and expression which weren’t necessarily just a place to put ten singles and some filler. And the best part? After Bathing At Baxter’s did all of these things without actually being popular with the AM radio listeners that had popularized, say, “My Best Friend” the previous year.

For the uninitiated, earlier Jefferson Airplane albums had mostly fixated on vocal oriented folk-pop with some slight blues leanings. But after a few years of touring until their teeth were ground to dust, this band was ready to blow some fucking minds. They weren’t actually all that into the three-minute pop songs that RCA would have preferred the band to keep churining out. Nope… they’d become a muscular live force by mid-1967, dabbling in winding improvisations that rarely mirrored what the band had done on record up to this point. Not just the musical quotient, either. You have to remember that the Airplane had *three* lead vocalists - the Johnny-one-note Paul Kantner, the frustrated lounge singer Marty Balin, and the meek-yet-brazen Grace Slick. And these three people were singing all over each others paths. The band figured that once everyone knew the backbone of the songs pretty well, then the sky was the limit. Play it however the fuck you want, someone will eventually figure out how to follow what you’re doing.

So basically, it helps to throw out all of your preconceived notions about Jefferson Airplane when listening to After Bathing At Baxter’s. As a matter of fact, I’d implore you to go and find a copy of the album immediately, disregard everything I’ve just said and drop the needle on side one… and dig that opening feedback!

Yes, you’ll immediately notice on After Bathing At Baxter’s first track, “The Ballad Of You, Me & Pooneil”, that drummer Spencer Dryden has become a robotic space cadet of a drummer… but only to accentuate Jack Casady’s bordering-on-lead-guitar basswork. And Casady’s lines left lots of room for Jorma Kaukonen’s lead guitar to only jump in when applicable, just long enough to melt your brain with some unexpected and sun-fried guitar work that most better-than-average wouldn’t dare to tabulate. But his atmospherics left space for Paul Kanter to not only play just enough rhythm guitar to keep the song afloat, occasionally interjecting his sardonic nasal voice to offset the psychedelic soul crooning of Marty Balin. And of course, there was always Grace Slick - alternately the glue that held the listeners attention, but daring enough to throw out vocal lines that could derail the group at any second. And that’s just the first fucking song, people. Check it out:

Yeah. And then that track disintegrates into a sound collage of drums, xylophones and a crowd speaking gibberish, only becoming clear when Spencer Dryden shouts out the classic line “No man is an island, he’s a peninsula!”.

That’s a more interesting six minutes than most bands are able to pull out of ten years worth of writing. But to dwell on specific tracks on Baxter’s is to miss the point entirely. And critics only got it half right back in the day when they called it a druggy mess. It was a druggy mess, but one that worked on multiple levels. You got numerous excursions into instrumental psychedelia, (”Spare Chaynge”), that sat effortlessly along acoustic passages, (”Martha”), but no one track overpowered the journey. Everything is on an even playing field here, and it’s all part of the experience, one that Jefferson Airplane would recreate onstage night after night until… well, it’s best that we don’t talk about what the band became, isn’t it?

After Bathing At Baxter’s was only recorded on an eight-track machine. Of course it took four months to finish. It’s taken people forty years to only half-understand what the hell is going on. This was a band that took advantage of their access to a recording studio to find themselves, their sound and also, you know, define an entire period of American rock and roll. My friends, if that doesn’t make After Bathing At Baxter’s one of the most important albums of all time, I’m not sure what the hell you guys expect out of music.