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Ahuka's Choice: Volume 4

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This was a local newspaper ad for the show (courtesy John Addie).

WORLD PREMIERE RELEASE
Date: Friday, 10 October 1969
Venue: The PNE Agrodome, Vancouver BC
Source: Original mono audience cassette
Sound quality: B-
Tree Announcement: 12 February 1999
Requires C-90 cassette

Cassette Side 1

Won't You Try / Saturday Afternoon
Somebody To Love
Young Girl Sunday Blues
Wooden Ships
Volunteers
Rock Me Baby
Fat Angel
Plastic Fantastic Lover

Cassette Side 2

Greasy Heart
We Can Be Together
Crown Of Creation
3/5ths Of A Mile In 10 Seconds
Jam > You Wear Your Dresses Too Short
Wild Tyme
Ballad of You And Me And Pooneil [truncated on master]

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Here is a cassette J-card created by Scott Abbot.

John Addie has created downloadable .PDF files for a CD booklet and tray card.

An eyewitness report by recordist John Addie

This was a great concert. It was held in the PNE Agrodome, which is a circular dome-shaped building that a lot of bands played in at the time. It held about 4000 to 5000 people and featured the worst sound in Vancouver. Most bands had to deal with a great echo bouncing back to them (because of the circular design) from the sound system and compensated by trying to up the monitor sound. I think that you can hear Paul asking for this during the concert. The Airplane seemed to put the echo to good use by using it to build on their vocals. After the first few songs when they seemed to get used to the echo, it became almost like a "Surround Sound" concert, adding much to the effect.

The stage was at one end of the building and was about 5 1/2 feet above the floor level. I know this because one of my friends ended up in front of the stage. During "Pooneil," Gordon kinda lost it and was moving his head forward and back in a frenzy, but in time with the music ... long hair whipping around wildly ... almost banging his head on the stage directly under Marty’s microphone. He recalls opening his eyes and looking at Marty’s feet and then looking up and Marty was looking down at him with a big grin on his face.

I think that the music speaks for itself. By this time, Jorma had moved into "extreme electric" playing. He was pushing out notes with a ferocity that I had not heard before. I have always liked the ending notes on "Other Side Of This Life" from the Pointed Head album where he twists the sound into a electric buzz, and here he played with the same kind of intensity. Jack remained close to the drums and moved around the back of the stage. Paul was on stage right and was quite animated. I didn’t fully appreciate Paul’s playing until that night. His guitar was "ringing" support to the rest of the band. And then there were the vocals from Marty and Grace. They seemed to have reached a point where their vocals climbed and soared over each other. They seemed to feed off each other until the shriek of their voices matched the guitar ... OK, perhaps I overstate it, but Marty especially was in fine form!

For me, the high point of the night was the "Jam > You Wear Your Dresses Too Short." After Marty’s vocal, the band played and then Jack took over and forced the band "downward" until they reached the bottom end. He stayed there for a bit and then Jorma and Spencer took over ... driving the rhythm faster and faster and higher and higher until the end ... truly a cathartic ending. From there, they drove into "Wild Tyme" and then "Pooneil."

I don’t remember the encore numbers. I do remember "Pooneil" ending, and the band leaving the stage. It seemed that there was an "awed" hush over the crowd for a while as if the force of the music had left people drained. Then they started clapping and stomping their feet and the sound of that started to build. It must have been 5 minutes before the band came back to the stage ... the people just would not let them leave! Usually at a concert, people start applauding and shouting as soon as the concert ends. In this one, it felt like the music had knocked you flat out on the floor and you first had to pick yourself off the floor before clapping and shouting. Truly a unique experience!

I had brought two tapes, and planned to get all the Airplane’s set between the two tapes. As it turned out, I was able to recognize that the Side A tape was nearing an end after Jorma’s song and "Fat Angel," so was able to do a flip, rewind to the start of the B tape and start the second side. But, after the electricity of "Dresses" and "Wild Tyme," I was "unable" to figure out that the tape had ended and thus I missed recording all of "Pooneil" (except the opening shriek of Jorma’s feedback) and the encore. Quite frankly, not getting this concert version of "Pooneil" onto tape qualifies as "the tragedy of the twentieth century."

It was a great concert. The Ace of Cups opened the show. The played a short set, about 30 minutes, and they really sounded great. HeadLights provided the light show. The light show was "rear-projected." It was a mix of movie clips, photos and colors. There would be short clips and figures and shapes moving in and out of focus, with the colors forming a moving wall of undulating shapes and colors. It was amazing ... images would swim into focus (like a Buddha figure) and then mutate into something else. There was no duplication of images, just constantly changing images that worked together tremendously. During the "Dresses" jam, Grace stood with her back to the audience and swayed with the music, looking up at this light show ... it was that good! HeadLights put on the best light show that we had/have seen in Vancouver, period. About 2 weeks after this concert, I saw the Airplane at Winterland with the Grateful Dead, The Sons of Champlin and Doug Kershaw. During the Airplane’s set, I remember the light show starting out on the wall at the far corner of the building and building into a dragon’s body and head so that it undulated from the corner, along the wall, round the corner and over the stage. It was a fantastic effect with the colors changing, the forms growing, undulating with the tail moving up and down as the Dragon’s head reached the stage while the Airplane played. Absolutely mesmerizing.

To these ears, it was one of the best performances I’ve heard from the Airplane, and one of the best concerts I have seen.

Ahuka’s Choice is a great idea. I hope that others will enjoy this music.

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This image appeared along with the following review. Scan by Scott Abbot.

A Contemporary Review

From the Vancouver Province, Saturday, October 11, 1969, p. 31.

"Jefferson Plane flies the trans-love path"

By Brian McLeod

An airplane is a vehicle capable of taking any number of people higher, farther, faster and in more comfort than any other known to man. The Jefferson Airplane is such a vehicle.

The group's performance at the Agrodome Friday night was one superlative after another. First there were the lights. They came from behind the white wings of the screen which hovered over the stage, with their power plugged in to San Francisco.

They were the famous HeadLights of that city, and they lit up the road that led back to the good vibes of 1967. There was no meaningless assortment of liquid dyes to be found here. These were directions in color and light that led the collective heads of the audience into an almost indescribable space.

Then there was the Airplane, taxiing slowly down the runway with no opening fanfare or bravado. Just streamlined determination to make good things happen out in the sea of a capacity audience that was stretched out in front as far as the eye could see.

The Jefferson Airplane was there when it all started in 1967. In fact, they were one of the reasons it happened. But since that time there have been increasing rumors that the heavier instrumental oriented groups have undermined the impact of the vocal cords and straight ahead music of the Airplane.

Nice try.

Friday night, the Airplane wrote music on the walls, in the air, and in the minds of everyone who watched longer than 30 seconds. The guitars were there, with their own patented, beautiful brand of shriek. The drums still carried and the voices still haunted. Grace Slick, Marty Balin, Jorma and the rest are still the epitome of good music. In fact, if anything, they have improved in a way that most major artists find impossible. They have taken a style, and encouraged it to evolve.

The best examples were their renditions of "Somebody To Love" and "Plastic Fantastic Lover," which grew in front of our eyes.

Something very beautiful happened at the Agrodome Friday night. A band of musicians and a capacity crowd got on one level of communication and became brothers of the instant.

Please come back soon, Airplane, and do it again. In the meantime, "fly trans love airways," and we all know it will get you there on time.

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This image appeared along with the following review. Scan by Scott Abbot.

Another contemporary review

From the Vancouver Sun, Saturday, October 11, 1969, p. 31.

"Grounded -- With No Excuse"

By Jurgen Hesse

What do I say? The Jefferson Airplane never got airborne? It crash-landed in the Agrodome Friday evening? It didn't take off?

All of this and more -- the group turned in one of the dullest performances it has been my misfortune to endure.

There is simply no excuse for a seasoned, well established and highly priced rock group to be listless.

The six musicians, including singing star Grace Slick, were weak in the rhythm section, the bass guitar sounded mushy, and the lead guitar had no sparkle.

If the Airplane is overconfident it needs to be grounded. If the musicians are tired of playing together they should disband, as did The Cream and others.

If the group was simply under the weather we could forgive and forget. I have a strong notion that the Airplane's heydays are over.

My reasoning is this. I remember last year's concert by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Jimi was not in form, and his two fellow musicians were drawn down under the leader's blue funk.

In the case of the Airplane, where no single musician ever stood out, it's less likely that six of them would suffer simultaneous depression.

Could I have been wrong?

I don't think so. My sensory perception told me that the kids in the aisles were disappointed too. Once or twice the Airplane would strike up some promising chords, and the kids would stand on the seats, the surest sign of an electrified involvement.

Some stood up, but sat down again when nothing happened.

The light show was the best part of the evening. It was a kaleidoscopic feast for the eyes.

So what about the backup group? Sometimes it happens that these second-rate groups turn in a better show than the stars, as it was with the Blues Image versus the Iron Butterfly.

Not so.

I guess I could wax enthusiastic over the fact that for the first time in Vancouver we heard an all-girl rock group.

But I do get uptight when these girls from the San Francisco Bay area who call themselves Ace of Cups -- which I presume is a pun I don't get -- are turned loose on an audience before they are ready.

Their guitar work was less than acceptable, their rhythm offbeat, their coherence spotty. And their singing, well, I think we have a right to demand that they sing in tune. They didn't, and that hurts.

There is obviously a good reason why girls haven't formed rock groups before now. Perhaps it is because they lack the discipline and toughness of men. Who knows?

They finished with a simple song which all five of them sang without accompaniment. That held promise, but then they should appear under a different guise.

An acquaintance of mine, a young high school teacher, put it best when he said: "I really like them. For the first time I've heard chicks singing what it's like to be a woman rather than singing something written by Burt Bacharach" (a prolific songwriter in the United States).

Reviewed by Tim Lucas

This powerhouse performance by Jefferson Airplane was recorded on a date virtually equidistant between their two most famous appearances -- at Woodstock and the ill-fated Altamont Speedway free concert. The concert took place on an evening of triumph for the counterculture, with Paul Kantner announcing from the stage that US President Richard M. Nixon's "Operation Intercept" (an attempt to seal off the influx of marijuana into the United States from Mexico) had been discontinued. It was this episode that inspired Grace Slick to write the song that became the A-side of the Airplane's next single: "Mexico" (recorded the following February).

Vancouver seemed to be a good town for hearing new and rare Jefferson Airplane material. When they first played there on January 15, 1966, the Airplane performed two songs they would never formally record: "Lay Down Your Weary Tune" and "Feel A Whole Lot Better." On the night of this 1969 performance, they treated their audience to a preview of material from their forthcoming album, Volunteers (released the following month), and peaked with the first-known live performance of "Baby, You Wear Your Dresses Too Short." So this fourth Ahuka's Choice recording finds the group getting the hang of playing some of their ambitious Volunteers material live, fireballing new paths of exploration through some familiar numbers, serving up one of their best-ever jams, and also notably, retiring a popular Baxter's track after playing it live one last time.

A blazing performance of "Won't You Try/Saturday Afternoon" opens the show, and sets the tone for the evening. Paul's Rickenbacker 12-string chimes both plaintively and joyously, Jack Casady's bass booms around the boxy auditorium, which also seems to embolden the volume of Spencer Dryden's drumming, and all three voices -- Paul, Grace Slick, and especially Marty Balin -- are heard in full sail. The only flaw here is that the details of Jorma's lead work get a bit lost in the room's hollow acoustics.

The song apparently provoked a standing response in the front rows, and there are yells from the rear ranks to sit down. Grace asks, uncertainly, "Sit down?," to which Marty energetically rejoins, "No, stand up and dance!"

"A song for our President," Paul says, introducing "Somebody to Love." A solid performance, with a great, Krupa-esque drum break by Spencer, but on the whole, it's too similar to the song's rendering at Woodstock to be considered one of its more adventurous undertakings.

Played onstage in 1969, "Young Girl Sunday Blues" is beginning to sound a little anachronistic, and according to Scott Abbot's JABase, the Airplane included it in their live set for only two more performances. Marty's vocal is sublimely confident, but his and Kantner's voices almost sound at odds with the chemistry being cooked up by the band. Spencer's power drumming, Jack's wobbling bass, and most of all, Jorma's frenetic, spiky lead guitar tend to overwhelm the song's waterfall-colored lyricism, and the song ends on a floundering, splashy note.

The first of the Volunteers songs to be played is "Wooden Ships," which is given a gorgeous rendering. This recording affords a rare opportunity to hear Spencer's live drumming on this track, which was one of his finest concert showcases. Opposite to the more biting, rhythm-accentuated approach to the song taken by his successor, Joey Covington, Spencer's approach is primarily decorative, providing delicate accents, rolling oceanic fills, and ice-sheets of cymbals, giving it not only a sense of rhythm but atmosphere and art direction. Dryden's subtle approach invites the band to follow suit, and Jack's majestic, full-bodied bass and Jorma's stirring, melodic lead compares well with the studio version. It's also interesting to note that the song is still new enough for Grace to take its apocalyptic scenario seriously; she gives the lyric a straight, dramatic reading, without the self-consciousness she was prone to bring to it later.

Between songs, Paul asks for the stage monitors to be turned up, indicating that the singers are having a hard time hearing themselves through the echoey acoustics of the PNE Agrodome. Once satisfied with the improvement, he mentions something the band heard just before boarding the plane to Vancouver.

"Project Intercept has been stopped," Paul announces to cheers and applause, "so we'd like to play this for all the American tourists ... A song we call 'Volunteers of America.'" This is where Jorma catches fire, squeezing lightning out of his fretboard, and Spencer can be heard plainly accepting the challenge to keep up with him, clobbering the hell out of his kit. Kantner can still be heard playing his rhythm part with a careful precision that quickly faded from live performance, given the band's tendency to carry this anthem straight into the stratosphere. Always a crowd pleaser, here the song is still a fresh-sounding addition to the repertoire, with all the players clearly energized by its clarion riff.

Jorma steps to the fore with an infectious, danceable, double-time rendition of "Come Back Baby," similar to the 1967 studio version that remained unreleased at this time. With Marty supplementing the drums on maracas, the instrumental break finds the band cooking at full steam.

The audience claps along with the sinuous, mood-inducing intro to Donovan's "Fat Angel," with Jorma's lead rising through the tribal rhythm like threads of incense. Low yet emphatic drumwork provides a shifting tumult under Marty's steady, mantra-like bass. Paul's Rickenbacker colorings ping and yawn, stretching the aural canvas, and his vocal adds the line, "Fly Orange-uh Sunshine - gets you there on time." As fine as this performance is, it is not substantially different from the live version recorded for Bless Its Pointed Little Head a year earlier, and Jorma's leads are studied to the point of such perfection that he seems to be quoting himself. A highlight of every Jefferson Airplane concert since 1966, "Fat Angel" was always a tour de force, but it was ceasing to evolve. The band would remove it from their set list by the end of the month, after three more performances. It would remain in drydock for almost 30 years -- until Jefferson Starship briefly revived it on a 1996 acoustic tour.

Dedicating a lot of songs at this performance, Paul and Marty dedicate "Plastic Fantastic Lover" to nine PSA (Political Science and Anthropology) professors recently fired from Vancouver's Simon Fraser University. According to John Addie, the professors were fired "because they wanted students to be in control of their education, and by extension, the department. This was a long-standing dispute that actually brought censure on the university from some of the educational licensing bodies." (Marty also mentions that the Airplane played an afternoon concert at SFU, but there's actually no record of that. They did play at the other university in town, University of British Columbia.) The band delivers a juggernaut rendition, with Spencer's drums accentuated with Marty's maniacal tambourine, and a relentless up-and-down-the-neck bassline from Jack.

Apparently absent from stage for the last three songs, Grace returns for "Greasy Heart." By this performance, the band have learned to recreate the song's studio sound much better than in its more diffident, jazzy interpretations played on their 1968 European tour. This version rocks, and Grace is in terrific voice.

"This is 'Together'," Grace sets up the next number, "'We Can Be Together," which is the first half of Volunteers, which is the first part... of a complete." This was only the third time this classic anthem was played live, and the formality and ambition of the composition still sound a bit adversarial to the band's inclination to freer, interpretive playing. When they reach the "We are forces of chaos and anarchy ..." part, everything drops away but Paul's electric 12-string, then Spencer's drums bang on the one beat, followed by power chords from Jorma that recall "Won't You Try?" Both Spencer and Jorma can be heard trying to tease the song in new directions, but as they quickly learned, this is one of those songs that needs to be played as it was written and recorded. Listen to how triumphantly the three voices pull together at the end.

Next is an ebullient "Crown of Creation," with the rhythm section working brilliantly together. A near-perfect reading, with the audience suitably awestruck into silence during the almost a capella finale.

"3/5ths of a Mile in 10 Seconds" is given an almost unrecognizable, speed-crazed intro, and the song itself careens along much like the live version on BIPLH, only faster. Heroic work by Spencer here, trying his best to keep up with Jorma, whose fingers zip through this song like greased lightning; at one point, you can hear Spencer actually cut back on his fills and concentrate merely on keeping rhythm, perhaps to catch his breath, but it's a shortlived retreat from the frontlines. This version doesn't end so much as froth over, like a boiling kettle.

And then the highlight of the evening, an extended improvisation that seems to not only thrill the audience but catapults the band to a new plateau from which there is no returning -- at least not this night. It begins with a deep, trembling, lysergic Casady intro reminiscent of "Bear Melt," to which are gradually added audience claps, authoritative drum fills, and Jorma's spiking rhythm thrashes. The jagged rhythm becomes a lead, as Paul supplements the soundscape with Fat Angelic grace notes. Lead exclamations, chicken scratches, wah-wah. Imagine "Bear Melt," "Fat Angel" and "Plastic Fantastic Lover" spun in a blender, a whirlwind, a maelstrom. Paul discovers two sweet high notes and twiddles them, tickles them until they become a chant that somehow steals the lead away from Jorma, and then Marty enters ... singing (for the first time anywhere) "Baby, You Wear Your Dresses Too Short." The lyrics seem to float around the jam, not changing it, never imposing their own form on it, and the performance is absolutely unlike other versions of this song you may have heard. Musically, it winds tighter and tighter and tighter, until it actually has to slow down and come back down to earth to reach a proper crescendo!

The show probably should have ended here, but the band soldiers on through a thoroughly whipped rendition of "Wild Tyme (H)." With no energy left for anything but a perfunctory run-through, the band sounds shaken out of register by the miracle they've just worked, and the different components never really gel. Jorma lashes the song with some amazing, dexterous playing, and the song doesn't even resume after the lead. It was the last time they would play this song live, and it remains retired to this day.

Incredibly, Marty marches back to the mike to introduce the ultimate Airplane showpiece, "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil." How they could have pulled off this titan in the shadow of another is hard to comprehend, and only those in attendance will ever know whether or not they did ... because John Addie's tape runs out mere seconds into the opening sonic caterwaul!

He was there, but the rest of us will just have to dream ...

©1999 by Tim Lucas

Memories from Gordon Watson

The Airplane is far and away my favorite rock band of all time. They were, in their prime (and if the fall of ‘69 wasn’t their prime, I don’t know what was) not only a phenomenal band, but to me, the living embodiment of whatever San Francisco and the whole counterculture represented. They were to me as gods and the 10/10/69 concert at the Agrodome was in a sense my farewell to godhood -- theirs and my own. I was pretty unhappy with my relatively humdrum existence. I had just graduated high school, was still living with my parents and in my heart of hearts I was probably hoping that Grace or Marty would pull me out of the crowd and carry me away to post-hippie paradise a thousand miles away on Fulton Street. For two years I had been closely following the Frisco scene in various California underground papers and was desperate to grab even a tiny piece of it. If I had been more self-confident or self-reliant and did not have an international border to cross, I might have been one of the stoned teenage thousands who gravitated to the Haight-Ashbury and its sordid aftermath. I had just spent part of the summer living in a loose community of bush freaks on a beautiful wild and natural beach on British Columbia’s outer coast and was desperate to find some way to make that summertime state of bliss permanent. I was never to succeed, but that’s another story.

October 10, 1969 was 10 days before my 18th birthday. I had seen the Airplane in concert once before, on May 27 1967 in Vancouver. In the fall of ‘69 I was still ingesting psychedelics. On the night in question I (foolishly) figured my enjoyment of the Airplane could be greatly enhanced with chemical assistance, and so I swallowed a tab of mescaline just before I left for the gig. I still lived in the suburbs then and it was a half-hour by bus to the Agrodome. I remember, while walking up to the bus stop, I saw an extraordinary fireball streak across the early evening northern sky above the mountains, to this day I don’t know if it was real or not, but otherwise could sense nothing from the mesc. By the time the opening act, the Ace of Cups (an interesting all-woman band from San Francisco) was halfway through their set, I was concerned I wasn’t getting off. I had taken this type of mescaline before and had no problems, so I was baffled. Providentially, I ran into a friend who was dealing acid and he gave me the gift of a red barrel -- down the hatch. In retrospect, it was an incredibly stupid thing to do. I had always taken psychedelics in relatively safe, controlled environments with friends and here I was jumping off a metaphorical cliff in a roomful of 5000 strangers. I’ve always thought that what ensued must have been due in part to the double dose of hallucinogens. Mescaline was noted for taking a while to come on. However, it was much more controllable than acid; I always thought of it as LSD with a steering wheel. I think the mescaline must have come on at last, because I was shortly launched into an extraordinarily intense visual and sensory experience.

By the time the Airplane took the stage I was being launched like a Saturn 5 rocket into unknown territory. I managed to worm my way through the crowd until I was directly in front of the stage, which couldn’t have been more than 5 feet high, as I could rest my arms on it. Therefore my memory of what actually took place on that stage are hazy and are as much subjective as objective, thanks both to my altered consciousness and to the fact these events took place nearly 30 years ago. I remember some vivid images, but if it wasn’t for John’s tape, at this late date I would have no idea what was played that night apart from a few standouts like “Pooneil 1.” I felt myself to be an integral part of what was going on, part of some kind of mass extended orgasm of which the Airplane was the roaring, pounding center. It was about as holistic an experience as can be imagined.

This perception was aided immeasurably by the light show, Glen McKay’s Headlights. Because the lightshow was rear-projected, it was as though the Airplane were playing in front of some massive living, pulsing, multicolored, constantly-mutating alien organism. It was up there on the screen and we could see right into its cellular structure. (If there’s one element of 60s music culture that I’m sorry has been lost, it’s lightshows. Today’s rock audiences -- even at Pink Floyd concerts -- simply have no idea what they’re missing.)

Grace was wearing a leather vest. In fact she was dressed head to foot in some kind of black leather pantsuit with slightly bared cuffs and a slightly bared hem on the long-sleeved jacket. I think the jacket must have zipped up the back, as I can remember no visible front zippers, and it had a crew neckline. What I sure as hell do remember is that my acid-enhanced vision was able to perceive that Grace was apparently wearing nothing under the top part of her garment, her nipples were frequently visible as they hardened and softened under the sheer soft leather. Needless to say I found this a fiercely erotic sight. It’s a good thing Grace wasn’t more endowed; it would have been too much! She looked radiantly beautiful and this was her glory days, she would turn 30 that month. I remember watching her dancing and swaying behind the amps during some of the longer instrumental breaks, arms raised, eyes closed, smiling, glowing.

The other band member who made a particularly strong visual impression was Jorma. John describes him as looking 7 or 8 feet tall, and while this is a slight exaggeration, he did look massive. He stood slightly to my right, his left side toward me, on the right-hand side of the stage looking much of the time across the stage to Casady, Kantner and Dryden. This was an extremely tight, focused band whose members listened to and watched each other very carefully. Again, it must have been the acid, Jorma was wearing a tight T-shirt and every time he hit a really powerful note or chord, I swear the veins on his seemingly grapefruit-sized biceps popped out like dock ropes. He looked to me like the then-unknown Arnold Schwarznegger. Jorma looked every inch a Byronic rock star, and his wild hair completed a mightily impressive picture; “what a profile!” as we’d say now.

Spencer, as John notes, seemed completely wired. He was wearing shades and some kind of hat was constantly moving, playing rolls and little filigrees during every break. For me, his departure from the band a few months later was the end of the Airplane. As someone in Rolling Stone commented at the time, “With Spencer leaving, there go the polyrhythms.”

Casady, at the center of things, seemed to be wielding some enormous power, barely held in check playing “Yggdrasil Bass,” and seemed to be channeling the voice of the Earth itself. He always played with an air of total concentration.

Well, anyway, you can hear what happened on the tape. I’ve been berating John for 30 years about his failure to change tapes and the resultant loss of “Pooneil 1,” because it was a staggering performance. I “kinda lost it” somewhere in the middle of Jorma’s titanic solo, managed for a few moments to hook into the Clear Light and leave my body entirely. When I came back to my physical self I found myself looking at a pair of black leather boots. I looked up and there was Marty standing at the mic above me with both hands on the mic and smiling down as if to say “Hey, man, you finally got off!” I must have been quite a sight in my throes of ecstasy. What could I do but smile back. It was a perfect moment. I’ve joked to friends for years that what happened during the song was that my twin chemical trajectories -- the acid and the mescaline -- finally merged and my head exploded. I’m sure that somewhere on the dusty ceiling of the Agrodome ceiling may still be found a few of my addled brain cells.

“Pooneil 1” was the last number and I guess they did an encore, but I’ve no idea what it was. All I knew was that I was stoned cold blue death, the gods had departed and that the place sure looked ugly with all the house lights up. To my lasting good fortune, three close friends suddenly materialized out of nowhere. They had been up in the stands and were watching my pale shaggy blonde hair illuminated in the stage lights. Thank god for friends! They came down to collect me, not having any idea how stoned I was. We went back to the house of one of them where we sat up until dawn, listening over and over again to the just-released Abbey Road. I managed to hang on, somehow, and finally came back to earth. Next came the dawn and I was driven home. I slept for an hour until my father woke me up at 8 AM to go and look for a job! Some aspects of youth are better off forgotten.

Years later, I got a graphic-designer friend to do up a sweatshirt with a slogan that read: “I last took LSD on October 10, 1969.” I’ve never dared wear it in public, and it no longer fits me anyway. But somehow it sums up the way in which the Airplane concert was the end of an era -- of the 60s and my teenaged innocence of rock, when it was vital, interesting and not mass produced or mass marketed. I haul out the Airplane records every now and then and during some songs in particular (“Wooden Ships,” “Today,” “Won’t You Try,” “Martha,” “Comin’ Back To Me,” “Come Up The Years” and a few others) almost weep from nostalgia and for everything that was lost with that era, both for me personally and in several larger senses.

I haven’t heard John’s tape in more than 25 years. I eagerly await its transfer to CD to convey the glorious madness, titanic power and transcendently beautiful magic of the 1969 band.

Thanks to all you folks who have helped bring this project to fruition.

March 1999

Technical Notes

Volume 4 comes from the only known recording of this "forgotten" performance, the original C-120 monaural cassette, recorded by John Addie on a Sony TC-100 portable with its stock handheld microphone. John notes, "I was sitting stage left, slightly behind and above the stage, looking down at and across the stage. This was one of the few positions where there were not a lot of people sitting. The tape is raw and I was probably not positioned best for the music ... especially Jack’s bass, which sounds boomy. However, the building echo which is added to the vocals adds a different flavor to the sound."

Before sending the cassette, I suggested that John make a pair of backup copies on premium tape using Dolby C. The first copy was made without incident, but the original tape jammed during the second dub, resulting in a short but nasty wrinkle. Luckily, the unwrinkled sound had been preserved on the first copy, so I asked John to send that copy along with the original.

Upon receiving the tapes, I found that the original was hopelessly jammed. So I carefully broke open the cemented-together halves of the cassette shell, and gingerly transferred the ancient tape to a modern Maxell C-110 shell. This eliminated the jam and allowed the tape to play perfectly, except for a few brief sections in which the tape is unrecoverably stretched.

Tape hiss was suppressed with a dynamic low-pass filter. A gentle EQ nudge between 2 kHz and 7 kHz helped to bring out a bit of lost sparkle.

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