AFTER BATHING AT BAXTER'S

The year 1967 was America's Summer of Love, a time when idealistic youth fled the doldrums of their conservative communities all across the USA and flocked to the city of San Francisco in droves in order to find a piece of all that peace, love and free drug-fueled sex emulating out of the city's Haight-Ashbury district. While many bands are associated with the time and place where it all played out, JEFFERSON AIRPLANE remains the band that many first think of when referring to this particular music scene and indeed the year 1967 was the AIRPLANE's peak as it started it out with its amazingly popular "Surrealistic Pillow" which yielded two top 10 singles and ended with its complete transmogrification into a bonafide art rock band. In between the band engaged in a massive touring schedule and even played at the Monterrey Pop Festival in June. In fact, JEFFERSON AIRPLANE was the most popular act in the USA in 1967 and even found its popularity spreading all across the world.

The band didn't squander its success either as it engaged in its massive tour circuit and TV appearances from the release of "Surrealistic Pillow" in February, 1967 all throughout the year while the band members were enthusiastically working on a followup album. While initially JEFFERSON AIRPLANE was quite content with the psychedelic pop direction that propelled the band's music into the limelight, the members of the band like many musicians of the day were profoundly impacted by the release of The Beatles' game-changing album "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club" which was heard like a shot around the world that pop single oriented albums were out and that the era of conceptually focused art rock albums that offered more freedom were in. JEFFERSON AIRPLANE like many of the era immediately scrapped all its plans and started anew and fearlessly moved on well beyond its pop rooted comfort zone.

The band wasted no time and crafted its first art rock album in time to release at the end of the year in November. The results amounted to the first of its most interesting period and AFTER BATHING AT BAXTER'S came out only nine months after "Surrealistic Pillow" but saw the band maturing from its psychedelic singer's oriented pop simplicity to a bonafide proto-progressive art rock band. With a nebulous album title that referred to the group's code work for LSD and provocative counterculture album cover that satirized the shallowness of American consumer culture, JEFFERSON AIRPLANE hadn't abandoned its hippie ideals and revolutionary thinking that were drowned out with in heavy doses of drug use but rather took it all to the next level. While the band's pop single days were over and the band never scored another top 10 in its career, the album was touted by critics as one of the West Coast psychedelic rock scene's most mature undertakings finding praise as far afield as the hi-brow musical world of the UK.

The first impression AFTER BATHING AT BAXTER'S will give you is that JEFFERSON AIRPLANE had embarked on a journey of a newfound artistic freedom and breaking the shackles of the whims and profit seeking margins of the record label (RCA in this case) although it is true that the fast-changing music scene had record companies thrown off their game in the late 60s and RCA was gambling on the "Sgt Pepper's" effect that AFTER BATHING AT BAXTER'S would be met with the same chart success but unfortunately America wasn't quite ready for such heady art rock and the album was a disappointment in terms of initial sales despite raving critical reviews. To many this album will sound a bit amateurish with sloppy musical performances that embraced a bit of dissonance and off-kilter vocal harmonies which were in stark contrast to the slick pop aesthetics of "Surrealistic Pillow." Soulful lyrical content back by extended folk rock backing and slightly askew guitar accompaniments were prognosticating the world of post-punk and avant-prog long before either genre came to be.

Another aspect that made BAXTER's substantially different was the fact Paul Kantner picked up the songwriting slack as Marty Balin became ever disillusioned by the band's drug use antics. Kantner offered a much looser form of songwriting that found greater doses of garage rock nonchalantness to the mix however Grace Slick proved herself to have a much greater range on her vocal abilities and delivered some of the best performances of her career. Overt anti-war lyrical content had evolved beyond the "tune out, drop out" years of hippie ideals and taken into the realms of pure protest in the vein of many folkies of the era such as Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton and Pete Seeger. The album also featured more anarchic sounds with acid rock guitar sounds let off the leash as well as the highly experimental 9-minute track "Spare Chaynge" that sounded like an early Krautrock offering that would eventually become popularized by Germany's Amon Duul II" with its thundering bass rolls and provocatively dissonantly hypnotic guitar riffing.

When all is said and done, AFTER BATHING AT BAXTER'S proved to be an extremely influential album on many of the progressive rock bands that would emerge in a few short years and what the album lacked in terms of popularity at the time, it more than made up for in ingenuity and maturity that steered the band into the direction of one of the 60s most forward thinking bands which kept the band relevant well beyond the fleeting year of The Summer of Love. AFTER BATHING AT BAXTER'S is without a doubt an acquired taste as it lacks the instant liability factor that its processor endeared fans with. On the contrary, this album is a dark and brooding social critique steeped in harsher tones and musical delivery systems. It's a fascinating work that while not exactly perfect showcased many of the elements that would become progressive rock staples. Loose freeform compositional structures finding unpredictabilities and moments of non-rock instrumentation such as a flute only elevated its art rock status into one of the most innovative albums of 1967. It took me a while to warm up to this phase of JEFFERSON AIRPLANE but in the end this album has become more interesting the more i've listened to it.