JEFFERSON AIRPLANE

One more poke at the corpse with this 1989 'reunion' offering featuring most of the lineup that made the band famous. The late Spencer Dryden was not invited to participate, banished like that cousin from a family gathering who got drunk five years ago and tried to feel up your sister in the hotel pool. Even though the band members seemed so enamored of each other they practically dry-humped on the album cover, Paul Kantner still couldn't bring himself to forgive Dryden for past sins during the group's heyday in the late sixties. And that slight tends to jade the over-the-top 'group hug' nostalgia found on songs like "Summer of Love" and "Too Many Years". John Mellancamp drummer Kenny Aronoff fills in for Dryden on the album as well as the supporting tour that followed.

Most fans probably had mixed feelings about the music on this album, and possibly about the idea of the reunion itself. The band presents itself as elder statesmen here, survivors of an era where so many of their peers were left strewn along the trail. Most of the counter- culture swagger is gone, replaced by a collection of backward-looking and sometimes overbearing anthems for a generation of sit-in/love-in/free concert festival refugees. The music itself is quite good, thanks to a host of guest musicians including several members of Toto, Jorma Kaukonen's little brother and fellow sixties survivors Flo & Eddie. Ron Nevison, fresh of reclamation projects with Chicago, Europe and Survivor provides a fine studio production sheen for the music.

The group are clearly enjoying their roles as elder statesmen, and like I said the music is pretty decent throughout, although the lyrics tend to be somewhat self-indulgent at times and border on preachy with tracks like "Now is the Time", "Freedom" and "Solidarity". "Now is the Time" sounds more like a Starship tune than an Airplane one, and the band only approaches their classic Airplane sound with the brief instrumental "Upfront Blues". Everywhere else the music is firmly rooted in that eighties sound of easy-listening sheen and rather vapid lyrics. And since this is at heart a San Francisco band the themes cover all the requisite bases: PETA ("Panda"); power to the people ("Solidarity"); activism ("Freedom"); and enlightenment ("Planes"). Every ticket is punched.

The overall mood though is nostalgic, most notably on the sappy "Summer of Love", "Madeleine Street" and most palatably the easygoing "Too Many Years". The sentiments are understandable given the time and the age of most of the musicians on the record but for anyone looking to rediscover the magic of Jefferson Airplane, this is not that album.

I'm a little surprised the group didn't crank out at least one more of these given the modest success they enjoyed from album sales and the tour that followed. Then again, most of them had other things going on and residual royalties from their back catalog were probably more than enough to keep them in Metamucil and methadone, and the nineties weren't very kind to most of the rock dinosaurs anyway.

This isn't a bad album, it's just not very special either. Props to (most of) the band for managing to put aside past differences and crank out an entire album's worth of material. But the time was long past for Jefferson Airplane in 1972, let alone 1989, and this one will always be relegated to somewhere near the bottom of the list when their entire discography is considered. Two stars since many of their hardcore fans probably enjoyed the flashback, but not recommended for the generations of Airplane listeners like me who weren't actually 'there' during that brief period when this group and their music ruled. We have our own jukebox heroes.

peace