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Ahuka's Choice: Volume 3

(41k JPEG)
This was the poster for the series (courtesy Scott Abbot).

Dates: Saturday, 5 August 1967 and Sunday, 27 November 1966
Venue: O'Keefe Centre, Toronto and Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco
Sound quality: C+ to B- (Toronto), B+ to A- (Fillmore)
Tree Announcement: 12 August 1997
Requires C-90 cassette

Cassette Side A

Saturday, 5 August 1967, O'Keefe Centre, Toronto
Monaural

She Has Funny Cars [opening truncated on master]
Bringing Me Down [opening truncated on master]
High Flying Bird
White Rabbit
Come Back Baby
It's No Secret
Other Side Of This Life
Let's Get Together
Let Me In
Today
Go To Her

Cassette Side B

5 August 1967 continued

"Canadian" Jam
3/5ths Of A Mile In 10 Seconds
Fat Angel
Somebody To Love

Sunday, 27 November 1966
Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco
Stereo

"Magazine" Jam [opening truncated on master]
Other Side Of This Life

Reviewed by Tim Lucas

From July 31 through August 5, 1967, Jefferson Airplane headlined a memorable series of concerts at O'Keefe Centre in Toronto, Ontario. Billed as "Bill Graham Presents the San Francisco Sound in Toronto," the shows also featured The Grateful Dead and Luke and the Apostles. It was the Airplane's first extended trip outside the United States; they had previously played two single night shows at Vancouver in January 1966 (with Signe Anderson) and May 1967 (with Grace Slick). It was a time of happenings for the band and their audience. During the engagement, the first 45 rpm single from the still-gestating After Bathing at Baxter's album was released: "Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil" b/w "Two Heads."

The Airplane responded positively to the progressive, easy-going vibe of the Canadian city. "Toronto's really nice," Paul Kantner told Ralph J. Gleason upon returning home to San Francisco. "Toronto's getting into a thing. Toronto's probably one of the most advanced towns I've seen outside San Francisco... It's the attitude of the people up there. It's a lot softer. They don't have the war. They don't have Americans and America to contend with." (Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound, p. 146).

The third volume of the Ahuka's Choice series is a souvenir of that momentous excursion. Though the band had been playing various songs destined for Baxter's since May, none of that material was played at this particular show; instead, the Airplane took the opportunity of their week-long appearance at the O'Keefe Centre to spread their wings and diversify their evening performances. On this particular night, they chose to augment their set with six songs not available on vinyl at the time: "High Flying Bird," "Other Side Of This Life," "Go To Her," "Come Back Baby," "Fat Angel" and a long, highly experimental jam that makes the playfully weird excesses of Baxter's seem tame by comparison.

While this particular show has been bootlegged on an Italian CD called Summer Afternoon (which purported to be "Recorded August 1967 at Winterland"!), it was not a complete representation. Now that Ahuka's Choice Volume 3 is here, you can throw that old thing away. It restores a half-dozen (!) songs not included on the boot, as well as some priceless in-between banter.

The mono recording begins in progress, on the first chorus of a spirited, upbeat version of Surrealistic Pillow's "She Has Funny Cars." Spencer Dryden complements his Bo Diddley drum patterns with some Gene Krupa swing, Kantner's Rickenbacker chimes as sweetly as a Grandfather clock, and Jorma Kaukonen's incisive lead promises hotter things still to come. Indeed, the set that follows finds Jorma making frequently brilliant and daring contributions.

An unusually lively performance of "Bringing Me Down" finds Jorma remaining at the forefront, not turning down his guitar and punctuating the rhythm as usual, but maintaining lead volume while playing a wily semi-lead over Kantner's rhythm, thus contributing a dialogue of his own throughout the song. The result is a performance full of cat-scratch swagger and charm. Despite their quality, neither of these first two songs was featured on Summer Afternoon.

Grace Slick's spoken intro to "High Flying Bird" speaks eloquently as to how her star had risen in the group since the performances heard on Ahuka's Choice Volume 2. With two hit songs under her belt, she is still primarily a backing vocalist, but now she is also the band's figurehead and raconteur. This version of "High Flying Bird" is a little more ponderously paced than usually performed, with Marty briefly lending maracas to the second verse (sung by Paul). Grace's lead on the third verse, her first opportunity to fly solo, vocally is outstanding, forceful and confident.

Grace ironically dedicates the next song, "White Rabbit," to the Airheads who she assumes were not allowed to attend the performance: "All the little drug addicts under 18." (According to at least one Fultonian in attendance, Malcolm O'Brien, the age restriction observed by some Ontario venues was 21, not 18, but there was no such law in effect at the Airplane concert series.) Introduced by Jack Casady with a friskier-than-usual bolero bass, this "Rabbit" hops along in lively fashion, with Jorma providing some atypical, stabbing accents. Grace's voice falters in the middle eight, but Jack takes the opportunity to shine. When Grace sings, "... when she was just small," his bass begins a startling ascent into warp speed. Under "your mind is moving low," he plays with unusual animation, and by the time we're cautioned to "remember what the dormouse said," Casady seems determined to beat Spencer to the finish line.

Jorma's hard blues vehicle "Come Back Baby" kicks off a bit tentatively, with Paul Kantner's rhythm guitar seeking the correct sync with Casady's tumultuous bass. They settle on a nice, deliberate pace slower than the whiplash studio version, with Paul contributing an effective, deliberately stumbling rhythm pattern that is genuinely bluesy, building to exciting chord slashings on the chorus. This performance is also parlayed into more of a psychedelic ballroom vamp by Grace's input of colorful washes on Farfisa organ. In fine voice (at this early stage, still rarely exploited in concert), Jorma's lead guitar break is wicked and biting.

"It's No Secret," featuring excellent Marty/Grace vocal interplay, is also distinguished by some atypical guitar work from Jorma, who seems to be looking for ways of infusing even more excitement into this proven crowd-pleaser. He begins by adding rhythmic staccato slashes to the intro, builds to frenzied finger-picking as the song approaches its bridge, but surprisingly drops the ball with an unfulfilled solo; it begins with inspired fury then, just as suddenly, falters. (This song was also not included on Summer Afternoon.)

By the time of this concert, JA had begun playing Fred Neil's "The Other Side of This Life" more and more adventurously, at different speeds and with more improvisation. Here, they rather surprisingly fall back on a version that sounds remarkably like its earliest live performances in meter until Jorma and Spencer spin off from Paul's locked-down rhythm to create some startling, bit-chomping, apoplectic effects. They venture so far into unexplored territory that it takes a surge of rumbling feedback from Casady to bring everyone back to the main beat. The second and final improv finds Jorma spiraling off in more exciting new directions, with Spencer leaving the beat in a vain attempt to follow. After slowing down momentarily, they accelerate once again to a point where the other band members simply stop, leaving the song hovering on the brink of a road not taken.

In contrast, Jorma's playing on the next song Dino Valente's "Let's Get Together" is thin and uncommitted, and the listener can easily imagine his irritation over the way the previous song was allowed to end. Even his usually bracing lead solo limits itself to one or two bass strings, sounding tonally timid and monotonous. Paul and Marty deliver the song in fine voice, however, even though Grace's background harmonies overwhelm Marty's lead in the mix.

Spencer's drums spill out an exciting intro to "Let Me In." Jorma tears through his lead, carrying Spencer past his ability to keep up, and causing Casady once again to reconsolidate the splintering facets with an avalanche of bass. Paul's guitar hits at least one sour note, and the accelerated performance causes him to fudge one line of the song: "You don't even know if there is one gram of you." Another track not found on Summer Afternoon.

Paul's gorgeous, refulgent Rickenbacker commences "Today," poignantly shaded by Jack's bass. Spencer is clearly using this song to catch his breath, essentially keeping the beat on woodblock, and splashing a cymbal or two only when it's necessary to lend added significance to Marty's beautiful vocals. Despite the power of his singing, the performance sounds instrumentally thin until it reaches it climax, when the bass and drums become more assertive and fill in the empty spaces.

Jorma must have gotten a new haircut in Toronto, because the next song is preceded by Grace asking the audience: "What do you think of Jorma's bangs? Let's hear it for Jorma's bangs!" This is followed by a little bit of transitional "Turn Out the Lights" foolishness between Jack, Jorma, Paul and Spencer. Grace maintains her ringmaster pose a little longer, introducing "Go to Her" with some devastating lyric recitations done in the guttural, r-rolling style of Marlene Dietrich: "She waits, she lies / Beaming for you... She waits, she lies / Screammmmmmmmming for you...." This is such a hilarious, devastating parody of Kantner's melodramatic lyrics that it might have cowed any other band from daring to follow through with it. Instead, Jefferson Airplane is challenged into delivering one of the song's finest, fieriest, most exuberant live performances. Obviously, all is forgiven now by Jorma, who cannot resist the opportunities this song provides for incendiary guitar. It's hard to believe they left this one (and the preceding bit of silliness) off of Summer Afternoon!

Side B opens with a lengthy improvisation called here, for lack of a more definitive title, "Canadian Jam." This is a shape-shifting piece, always changing meter in a searching, exploratory manner; Grace plays the Farfisa, Paul produces liquid zips and pings on his guitar, Spencer does some jazzy drum soloing, Jorma plays some mind-bending raga, and Jack's bass roars around like a galloping diplodocus. There is also a bass solo, in which Jack moves from a Spanish bolero to a more introspective, Oriental space, using his instrument in the style of a koto. The band's collective emergence from his solo is particularly inspired, with Spencer and Jorma building on its tranquillity until the band collectively achieves hyperdrive. Not exactly created on the spur of the moment, the Airplane had been playing variations on this jam for several months. (A somewhat longer performance along these same lines appears on the This Is Our Life bootleg, recorded 2/4/67 at the Fillmore.)

"3/5s of a Mile in Ten Seconds" is played with joy and authority, as always. The band's pleasure in playing these riffs, and playing around them, becomes so infectious that Marty actually begins singing the song all over again from the beginning and then, realizing what he's done, conceals his mistake with joyous screams.

Donovan's "Fat Angel" with Marty on bass, Jack on rhythm, and Paul on "effects" guitar (listen for the sitar-like "sighing" component of the music), and Grace once again on Farfisa organ is, as one might expect, another showstopper. Marty's bass on this performance is of particular interest; it begins with the usual two-note repetition, then gradually adds a note or two, lending a skip to the rhythm that makes the performance more spirited as the band gains improvisational altitude.

Jefferson Airplane has given their Canadian audience a wealth of unrecorded material during this performance, and when Marty introduces their last number, "a song by Grace's brother called 'Some Body To Luv,'" the crowd responds warmly and enthusiastically. Grace belts out an excellent, driving version of this hit song. Her superb vocals are complemented by a wonderfully snarling Kaukonen lead. Indeed, Grace's personality on this number shines so strongly that it makes the listener realize that, despite the fact that she had contributed the only hit songs to the band's repertoire, her presence remained fairly secondary in the context of the group, at least at this particular performance.

The Toronto show ends with this performance, followed by a mini-encore set recorded (in excellent stereo!) during a "photo op" staged for an unidentified magazine photographer at the Fillmore in November 1966, the afternoon after the two shows captured on Ahuka's Choice Volume 2. A short, tuneful, countrified, Jorma-driven jam opens things, followed by Marty's embarrassed explanation of what's going on, then another performance of "The Other Side of This Life." (Spencer, who initially sounds impatient to stop screwing around and play the damn song, starts it off by counting to ten!) Always an improvisational launchpad for the band, this 10-minute version is even more unorthodox than usual, as it was played mostly for the benefit of the cameraman, who was probably walking among the musicians and snapping flash pics as they played. A nice curio to have.

Ahuka's Choice Volume 3 presents one of Jefferson Airplane's most popular live performances in more complete form, and with better sound, than anyone has heard since it was played onstage that night in Toronto, thirty years ago. As you listen, try to imagine it's the Summer of Love, and you've bought a ticket to hear the folk rock ensemble that recorded Jefferson Airplane Takes Off and Surrealistic Pillow. Listen to what transpired, feel the shock of the new. This show is a harbinger of wilder times and bigger things still to come, things that didn't have a name yet.

Technical Notes

The cassette from Hell. This is the one Scott sent me when we first started discussing the Ahuka's Choice project. Guess he figured if we could make this mess listenable, we could tackle anything.

The recording is at least four or five generations away from the original. It's picked up plenty of extra noise and some nasty drop-outs along the way, and there's virtually nothing left above 7 kHz. But the performance is so terrific, there's nothing to do but roll up our sleeves and salvage what we can.

The XLII cassette is monaural. The phase coherence of the left and right channels is really poor; if we sum the channels we'll get a swooshy mess. So we have to choose either the left or right channel for our transfer. But which one? Luckily, tape drop-outs tend to occur more heavily in one channel than another. By separately auditioning both channels of each song, we can make a log of where the drop-outs live. Then we can assemble a version comprised of the cleanest material from each channel, with equal-power crossfades to hide the transitions. Sound like a lot of work? Well, it is.

20dB of broadband noise reduction and a dynamic low-pass filter above 8 kHz bring the background noise down to a tolerable level. A 3 dB dip between 60 and 120 Hz tames the smeared thump of Jack's bass, and 4 dB nudge between 2 and 7 kHz restores some clarity in the vocals. The result is far from commercial quality, but it's good enough to appreciate why fans really prize this show.

Like a lot of old Airplane tapes, Scott's cassette has most of the between-song banter edited out in order to squeeze more songs on the tape. In this case the songs were artlessly jammed against each other. I separated them again, adding some (hopefully) tasteful fades to ease the transitions to and from digital black. Some people prefer jump cuts to silence, but sloppy editing drives me to drink. Not one second of the available sound was removed.

[See the Volume 2 Technical Notes for a discussion of the 27 November 66 tracks.]

Contemporary Reviews

The following articles from the Toronto Star were transcribed from microfilm, with personal commentary, by Malcolm O'Brien.

Monday, July 24, 1967, pg. 21

"Concert ends as free-for-all in the big pool"

By CHARLES GEREIN
Star staff writer

When the mob scene cleared from Nathan Phillips Square late yesterday afternoon, it was only the hippies - the barefoot minority in a crowd estimated at 40,000 - who had kept their cool.

Most of the teens in the crowd - the hippies would call them the squares - lost theirs in a mad, stampeding surge to the shallow City Hall pool following a free two-hour concert by the Jefferson Airplane, a San Francisco rock group, and the Toronto groups of Luke & The Apostles and the Spring Garden Road.

And the police - sweating and patient for two hours - finally lost a lot of theirs in a poolside scuffle which resulted in two water splashing youths being led away, one of them dazed and handcuffed.

At least five policemen got a thorough soaking in the post-concert poolside melee that briefly threatened to develop into a mob scene.

The police, about 30 of them, had little in the way of frantic activity during the concert itself. But in trying to keep some semblance of order in the mad surge to the pool, some of the men in uniform made the mistake of getting too close to the water.

Suddenly, to the roars and boos of the spectators, a couple of mad wet constables had wrestled a soaking youth to the concrete and clamped handcuffs on him, hands behind his back.

The youth lay dazed, face down on the concrete for a couple of minutes before they hauled him away, a wet officer on each arm, through a path cleared by a mounted policeman.

Other officers moved in as the crowd, booing and cat-calling, surged closer to the scene. A chant of "We Love Cops, We Love Cops" arose.

"Love" was being thrown back into the hippies' face during the concert, too - in the form of apple cores. The Jefferson Airplane - a rock group of six from the hard-core hippy Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco - had come armed with boxes of apples and suckers, passed out free. Local hippies helped distribute them.

The group's name is a slang term for taking the mind-expanding drug LSD, in other words, a "trip."

Many of the spectators pelted the cores back to the stage area, at both police and hippies.

It rained at noon, and when the sun emerged it was a steamy, sticky and hot scene on the City Hall concrete. The humidex passed the 100 mark in mid-afternoon.

The crowd swelled to an estimated 40,000, the largest ever at the Square. The crowd estimate was made by a city hall official.

There was 36-year-old San Francisco hippy Bill Graham, manager of the Jefferson Airplane. Bustling about in green corduroy pants and cap, black vest and boots. Looking happily harried, like a good business hippy should.

Why the free concert? "Everybody says there must be a commercial angle," says Graham, looking impatient and disgusted at being asked. "We don't have to do this. We do it on the coast all the time."

A build-up for their O'Keefe appearance which opens July 31? "This is not a build-up," said he, registering more impatience. "This is for the people who can't see them at the O'Keefe."

Graham says he doesn't believe in everything being free, "but it's very nice." Free apples? "We can afford it more than the masses."

That's it? "Love. Joy. Sunshine. Peace. The message is, you have a nice time. Only thing we spread, it's nice to get people together and have a good time."

And everybody did - almost everybody except a few dripping policemen.

[Photo caption] CONCERT CLIMAX: Two youths drag a drenched girl through the reflecting pool in Nathan Phillips Square in a water-spattered windup to a free concert featuring the Jefferson Airplane and other rock groups Sunday afternoon. At least five policemen got a thorough soaking in the poolside melee that briefly threatened to develop into a mob scene. Two youths were arrested.

[My recollections: I don't remember seeing apple cores tossed. I knew there was activity around the pool but didn't witness the arrests. What I remember ABOVE ALL (quite literally) was a guy walking around the edge of the taller tower of the two flanking the City Hall. We were all watching him with our hearts in our throats (he was REALLY high - in altitude, maybe 30 floors, not sure). So many people were looking up and pointing that Grace asked what everyone was looking at and she attempted to have a look herself but couldn't see past the stage overhang. The guy actually sat on the edge with his legs dangling off the side. We were aghast. - MO]

July 29, pg. 23

"Whatever it is, it's no drug on the market"

"Even the Jefferson Airplane can't define psychedelic music"

By VOLEMAR RICHTER
Star staff writer

Two months ago a 14-year-old Niagara Falls girl was listening to the first album by a San Francisco folk-rock group, the Jefferson Airplane. It wasn't psychedelic enough, she complained.

What does she know about psychedelia - the mind-expanding drugs? Nothing, of course. Nothing first-hand, anyway. And yet she knew what she expected to hear and what she expected the music to do to her.

Her reaction illustrates the current state of rock'n'roll music industry. People who have never taken drugs are buying the so-called psychedelic records and charts. Radio stations once tried to suppress the music but lost the control over their public's musical taste instead.

New rock groups like the Jefferson Airplane, which opens Monday at the O'Keefe Centre, gain national fame long before they see the inside of a recording studio. Groups get albums into the top ranges of the charts without that once-important single hit record.

Liberated

It's a fragmented, liberated world now, in which rock'n'roll groups are allowed to experiment and play whatever they want. The result is that a large number of inventive and intelligent musicians have been drawn to rock'n'roll. The most imaginative gather around the permissive atmosphere of San Francisco, home of psychedelic music.

"I don't know what psychedelic music means," Marty Balin, 23-year-old leader of the Jefferson Airplane, said when his group was in Toronto this week. "I think the term was made up by the press and the record companies."

"They're talking about the San Francisco sound, too. I don't think any one San Francisco sound exists. There are so many people there, all doing their own thing. They just do what they want to do. There's a feeling, a philosophy though. That affects the music."

That feeling is freedom; the freedom to do what you want, be yourself and, as they put it, "do your own thing." The hippy philosophy - a life based on love rather than selfishness, sharing things, joy, the California fun morality - is all part of it. And securely entangled in it is the drug scene - the taking of LSD, "speed," and other drugs or marijuana, peyote and other turn-on plants.

A sort of artistic anarchy seems to have developed there. New ideas are introduced with every record. The names of the groups - such as the Family Dog, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Country Joe and the Fish, the Loading Zone - symbolize the imagination and irreverence that has entered the field.

With all that going for them, the rock musicians are creating the most exciting, inventive and intelligent pop music its young listeners have ever heard - some say that there ever was.

"It's communication." Balin explained. "Nobody ever communicated as well as we're doing. You never have to explain to somebody our age what a certain song means; he knows right away."

Drugs have made the musicians more aware of human personality and they put that knowledge to work. They choose their words, sounds and vocal styles to manipulate the listener's mind. "White Rabbit," the Airplane's current hit record, is a case in point.

Imagery

"One pill makes you big-ger-rr-rr-rr." Grace Slick sings deliberately stretching the rrs to give the listener the feeling of growing. "One pill makes you small-ll-ll-ll" - and the listener feels himself shrinking to the floor, which is appropriate for the next line: "And the pill that mother gives you, don't do anything at all-ll-ll."

Obviously if it's mother, you've got to be small. Not only does the pill she give not do anything, but the way the line is sung it sounds like it might be "Don't do anything at all."

That kind of imagery runs all throughout this music.

Often the images used are adopted from movies. Most of these songs develop logically from a beginning to an end. Usually they give a small fragment of real life, a dramatic episode - just like a scene from a film. The accompanying music often makes liberal use of ideas from movie soundtracks.

Marshall McLuhan told about it; the S.F. groups saw the principle. Modern kids grew up with TV and movies. They feel their experiences in that context. Parents, of course, don't see the world quite like their children and can't perfectly communicate with them. Other people of the same generation can though. This generation gap is a major theme for the Airplane and the other S.F. groups.

The Airplane has the current No. 3 in the country, Surrealistic Pillow (RCA Victor LSP-3766). The success of that one is also pulling up the first one, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off (RCA-LSP-3584).

Pillow is a varied mother, of folk-rock, folk, blues, and other styles. Styles lose their boundaries in S.F., though. Members of a group each bring their own abilities and the end result is a mongrel of many breeds of music.

The six members of the Airplane have a youthful, fresh approach to their music, full of the joy of discovery and the delights of spontaneity. Most of the S.F. groups have given their music a spontaneous air, a freewheeling, sensual movement that fits the hippy life they are spokesmen for.

The hippy life, based on dropping out of an oppressive society, opening your mind and doing your own thing, is, politically, the most radical alternative yet. This is then a form of protest music.

Add to that the tireless proselytizing about drugs. Sometimes it's straightforward and obvious. Moby Grape, for instance, compares the S.F. turn-on scene with Grandmaw getting tippy on her elderberry wine (Columbia CS-9498).

The Airplane are more subtle, though. Grace Slick's torchy, inventive singing in "White Rabbit" uses Alice in Wonderland imagery to the conclusion: Feed Your Head.

In "Plastic Fantastic Lover," the Airplane is singing about TV addiction. That's not a physical addiction so it must be psychological, exactly what the police maintain happens when you take marijuana. LSD imagery is evident everywhere ("Your love used to echo from my feet to my brain.").

Sensual details like that are designed to stimulate the senses. If you can't stimulate them all, you can at least stimulate the imagination connected with them. Records give you only the sound, but the imagery make this music visual.

Visually oriented

The musicians are after all playing for an audience that is visually oriented.

More visual impact comes from the light shows that accompany the bands in the dance palaces of San Francisco. When the Airplane appears at the O'Keefe Centre next week, they'll have two separate light shows with them.

Headlights of S.F. will show liquid projections on a screen on stage while Sensefex Ltd. of New York will show other effects on screens mounted out in the audience. "These people have really created a new art form. Their work is beautiful," Balin said.

Of course, everybody gives the Beatles credit for starting it all. They made the scene free enough to allow all the experiments and new ideas.

As Grace Slick puts it: "The Beatles changed rock 'n' roll from dum, dum, Dum, Dum, DUM, DUM, Dum, Dum, to dum, clack, drrmp, ting."

[Photo caption: AIRPLANE'S GRACE SLICK 'Dum, clack, drrmp, ting?']

August 1, Front page!

Photo of woman in African print dress and shades dancing beside guy in kind of a mod outfit.
[Caption: THIS IS THE O'KEEFE?]

The normally staid O'Keefe Centre - a hotbed of Toronto culture - took on a mod look last night as young hippies danced in the aisles to the music of the Jefferson Airplane, a rock group in the San Francisco style. Later 300 youths danced on the stage as three groups jammed for 50 minutes. Story, photo on page 19.

from pg. 19....

"Kids dance in the O'Keefe's aisles"

By VOLEMAR RICHTER
Star staff writer

Marty Balin smiled with delight as he looked over the 300 people dancing on the O'Keefe Centre stage last night. And just for fun he acted out the fear on Hugh Walker's face when the whole thing started.

Balin's group, the Jefferson Airplane, rock 'n' roll exponents of the San Francisco hippie-freedom, got the kids dancing in the aisles in a joyous freewheeling happening.

Ushers frantically tried to return them to their seats because, after all, other paying customers might want to see and besides that sort of thing just isn't done at the O'Keefe.

"Disregard the ushers," the leader of one of the three rock groups on the bill shouted. Hundreds of them did and that's what bothered Walker, the Centre's managing director.

Hasty

Over at the side, he had a hasty discussion with Bill Graham, the San Francisco dance hall baron and producer of the show. Graham pointed out that the crowd was peaceful and happy and wouldn't think of tearing up those soft seats or anything else.

"Let's just say it turned out all right," he said afterward, a few minutes before disappearing into a back room for more discussions with five grey-suited O'Keefe managers.

Most of the near sellout crowd last night just watched. Dozens more sat out in the lobbies discussing the whole thing over a few more cigarettes.

But maybe 300 others danced to a pounding, driving, throbbing and oozing trip of sound and color supplied by three bands and two light shows. Here's how it happened.

Appetizer

Before the opening dim of the lights, the three screens on stage were already giving an appetizer.

Centre screen carried the encircled, upside-down Y peace symbol, its colors slowly changing; green on blue, blue on two greens, tan on green and yellow. This screen was filled by Headlights, a group that adds the visual impact to the rock 'n' roll shows at Graham's Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco.

They work with liquid projections - colored oils swirled on a dish and projected - and rotating color wheels and loops of live-action film.

At stage right and left were two extra screens carrying color projection by a New York group called Sensefex Inc. Their work involves the projection of paint-splotch slides, electric motors that twirl the whole thing around. A movie projector showed its contents through a chute of angled mirrors that was also rotated by a motor.

Hippies

On the screens the multi-hued splotches revolved slowly forming a kaleidoscope resembling some protoplasm. Its colors were hard and deeply defined; white Headlights projected soft, gentle colors like early morning.

The audience was liberally sprinkled with hippies - in army shirts and commando hats, in beads and capes, and even in ties and jackets.

First band: Toronto's Luke & the Apostles started off with their hard blues-rock sound. Lead singer Luke (Gibson) hugged the microphone crooner-style as he belted out "My Soul."

The peace symbol started dripping colors and eventually melting away shapelessly under the liquid colors that were applied above it. Bizarre globes turned green, red and back to green and ended like a red sky with stars.

The Apostles did two standard blues, "You Can't Judge A Book By Looking At The Cover" and "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl," both in a tough, heavy lumbering tone, filled with science-fiction and monster noises that were interesting to hear but out of place.

"Schoolgirl" was also done by the next group, The Grateful Dead, but in a looser, freer version, and in the Chicago blues form it came from. It was symbolic of the free music the group plays. They take it easy and put in their improvisations naturally.

That characterizes both the Jefferson Airplane and the Dead, the latter lesser known and less inventive. But the Dead are the true spokesmen for the San Francisco hippie scene and former resident musicians with the LSD Trips Festivals run by novelist Ken Kesey.

(They also have an album that its Canadian distributor can't keep in stock, though the Dead have had no radio hits).

Leader Jerry Carcia's group doesn't have as much substance as the Airplane, but they work together as precisely as parts of a machine. Two-hundred-pound Pig Pen (Ronald McKernan) gives a happy undertone to the music, while Phil Lesh plays complex bass.

No effort

It took the Jefferson Airplane, after intermission to get the dancing started. The taped sounds of a jet heralded their arrival. The group fills to stage front with Grace Slick's torchy vocal, "Somebody To Love."

The Airplane captured that crowd without effort. The quality of their music, its intelligence and imagination superimposed on the necessary beat, drew them out to experience total involvement with sound and color.

This music appeals to the older rock 'n' roll lovers. The young kids can't dance with the tempo transitions. The older ones do a free-form, improvised dance.

Leader Balin, sings in a clear voice. Grace booms and lashes out with hers. Guitarist Jorma Kaukonen puts substance into the group's improvisations, while Jack Casady puts down a solid bass line. Spencer Dryden adds excitement with his drums, and Paul Kantner plays guitar, and sings.

They project the spontaneity freshness of youth. Their music is alive, and communicates clearly despite its complex arrangements and structure.

After the concert-dance, another dance occurs right on stage. This one planned as all three bands jam for a straight 50 minutes.

[Photo caption: HIPPIES GALORE AT ROCK SHOW But the tie-and-jacket crowd was there too.]

Aug. 4, pg. 19 (but not in all editions, maybe only one)

"Airplane 'stag' charge stunt"

Police today dismissed as a publicity stunt a charge that film portions of a stage show at the O'Keefe Centre are "the type shown at bachelor parties."

Controller Alan Lamport said earlier he asked police to view films shown during the Jefferson Airplane show because he had received numerous complaints from people who said they walked out of the show because it was in bad taste.

Lamport said he would demand that the show be closed if the film proves to be "improper."

Sergeant of Detectives John Wilson, acting head of the morality department, said he had checked with O'Keefe officials and they told him there had been no complaints from patrons nor had anyone walked out.

Police said they plan no action and scoff at any suggestion that the film was similar to stag movies. Police did not view the O'Keefe film but said stag movies were much worse.

Neither the Centre nor the Jefferson Airplane group control the movie. It is in the hands of another group, Wilson said. The show closes Saturday night.

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