Intro: without any direct connection a priori (though, thinking again about it, perhaps I was in a psychedelic state to give Marie-George Buffet 5 points...), I recalled the song I propose as today's song following a short discussion in the comments section of my friend Dan's post about the French candidates to presidency (you should do that politiquiz as well: as for myself, I got Sarkozy and Bayrou on the top places with 10 points both- never mind whom I got on the third place :-)- and I trust the French will be smart enough to do likewise in their fast approaching elections...).
But to get to the gist of this post. Today's song is a classic by a band that belonged (to some extent) to the "oldies" category already by the time I was born (notwithstanding that they had two successor bands and thus "continued" far in the 90's...). And that happened quite some time ago :-). Nevertheless, this band (co)pioneered the whole psychedelic rock movement and managed to create some immortal and superb (or, even better: immortally superb) songs. If you haven't yet realized (shame on you! :-)) which band I am talking about, this is the folk-rockers band Jefferson Airplane, of course! Their wikipedia entry is almost exhaustive this time and these guys are probably very well known anyways, hence I don't think there is any scope for me to write more about them here. Instead, let me put some links to clips from YouTube (by now, this should clearly come forth as my favourite place online!) with Jefferson Airplane performing some of their masterpieces. And let me start with my favourite from them and today's song and probably their most famous creation (song written by singer-songwriter Grace Slick): White Rabbit (with a great live performance at Woodstock, 1969!). The wicked lyrics for this song are here- and I leave it to you to figure out what Grace is singing about :-). An equally popular hit was Somebody to Love (yet again from Woodstock '69), written by Grace's brother in law (it was all in the family...) or try this version from Monterey, 1967. In my opinion these two musical gems mentioned above outweigh everything else from Jefferson Airplane, but there are also other very interesting songs from them, such as: Today, Volunteers, Crown of Creation. Listen also to the beautiful instrumental piece they played very late in 1996, Embryonic Journey- with the occasion of their induction in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (and this should say a lot: they were inductees in the same year as superlative musical phenomena like Pink Floyd and David Bowie, who are my all time favourites, so there you go, I shared this secred with you- but I'll talk about them with many other occasions...). Enjoy Jefferson Airplane's masterpieces for now!
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