After Bathing At Baxter's

VINYL FORMAT. Bitten by the `60s San Francisco bug of extended musical explorations, the Jefferson Airplane flew into song-suites on After Bathing at Baxter's. But rather than being an organic jam-fest, the album took the Airplane`s singular white R&B jams and bled them into one another. The "Streetmasse" suite, for instance, combines two typically electrifying Airplane performances—"The Ballad Of You & Me & Pooneil" and "Young Girl Sunday Blues," both of which give off the adrenaline of an Americanized early Who with female harmony vocals--through a warped pastiche of vocal and percussive noodling ("A Small Package Of Value Will Come To You, Shortly"). San Francisco`s cultural evolution didn`t just affect the structure of the songs on After Bathing at Baxter's. No longer hiding behind the metaphors of the first two albums, the Airplane were now openly voicing the thoughts of their constituency—"There is a new way of thinking," sings Paul Kantner on his "Wild Tyme," and the very title of the "Hymn To An Older Generation" suite speaks for itself. "Spare Chaynge" is a nearly ten-minute instrumental led by Jorma Kaukonen`s spaced-out guitar, the closest the Airplane had yet come to the musical free-for-all of their San Francisco brethren.