Live Jefferson Airplane CDs sound familiar

CDs of the Jefferson Airplane’s live performances have been pretty limited over the years, but that’s about to change.

The Collectors’ Choice Music Live series plans a quartet of live albums from 1966-68, including one that captures Grace Slick’s debut as the band’s vocalist. The CDs are due Oct. 26.

Knowledgeable fans won’t get too worked up. These four recordings already are well-traveled on the Internet, most prominently on the authorized online music service Wolfgang’s Vault.

Meanwhile, on the Grateful Dead beat, Warner and Rhino get back to vinyl with "The Warner Studio Albums,"
a five-LP boxed set. It marks the 40th anniversaries of “Workingman’s Dead” and “American Beauty.” List price for the Dead LP set is $135; shipping starts Sept. 21.

MP3 downloads of the same four Jefferson Airplane concerts (and many more) are for sale on Wolfgang’s Vault for $4 to $10 a shot. Audio ranges from just OK to surprisingly good.

Some of these recordings came to Wolfgang’s as part of a music and memorabilia deal with the Airplane, Starship and Hot Tuna that was announced a month ago.

Band guitarist Jorma Kaukonen said at the time: “These recordings are like a window into a time long gone and vaguely remembered. I hear them and I find myself saying, ‘We were pretty good!’ I’m glad somebody saved them for posterity.”

The CDs set for fall release are “Live at the Fillmore Auditorium 10/15/66 Late Show”; “Signe’s Farewell, Live at the Fillmore Auditorium 10/16/66″; “Early & Late Shows — Grace’s Debut, Live at the Fillmore Auditorium 11/25/66 & 11/27/66″ — “We Have Ignition, and Return to the Matrix 2/1/68.” We’re guessing these are working titles.

Packaged with the CDs digipacks are notes by Craig Trent ("Take Me to a Circus Tent: The Jefferson Airplane Flight Manual") and “rare photos.”

Collector’s Choice’s Music Live label took flight this year with releases by Johnny Winter, Hot Tuna and Poco.

Sony’s Legacy series released a live double-CD Airplane album last year as part of its well-received “Woodstock Experience” series.

The Grateful Dead vinyl set’s albums are “The Grateful Dead” (1967), the psychedelic duo “Anthem of the Sun” (1968, original mix) and “Aoxomoxoa” (1969, original mix), “Workingman’s Dead” (1970) and “American Beauty” (1970). The Dead box set comes with a 1967 single version of “Dark Star” (b/w “Born Cross-Eyed”) if you make buy via dead.net

The Dead albums come on 180-gram vinyl at RTI using lacquers cut from the original analog masters by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering.

No. 33: ‘Eskimo Blue Day’

“Volunteers” found Jefferson Airplane in a radical mood. The 1969 album was overtly political, while most of the San Francisco group’s works to date had been concerned with romance, whimsy and matters of the head.

“We are forces of chaos and anarchy,” Grace Slick and Marty Balin sang on the opening track, “We Can Be Together.” The song shocked the squares and delighted the freak faithful with its soaring cry of “Up against the wall, motherfucker.” The band had plugged into radical chic.

More widely quoting swearing followed on “Eskimo Blue Day,” the seventh track, which saw the group embrace another social revolution: the nascent ecology movement.

“The human name doesn’t mean shit to a tree,” the lyric went, this news just in from the closest redwood.

The lyrics came from Slick, who shared songwriting credit with her Jefferson Airplane bandmate and lover Paul Kantner. The words exhibited her razor-wire ‘tude and his love of the obscure and exotic. The song seems to anticipate an awareness of global warming by decades — most likely luck, a psychedelic mindset and coincidence, but who knows.

Consider the evidence, in lyric fragments:

Snow cuts loose from the frozen
Until it joins with the African sea
In moving it changes its cold and its name …
If you don’t mind heat in your river and
Fork tongue talking from me …
Snow called water going violent
Damn the end of the stream

“Our greed does mean shit to a tree.” Slick said years later. “The trees are dying. All of our separating ourselves from the planet is stupid because, the larger picture, whether or not you become president of Bank America has nothing to do with evolution.”

The Airplane had become heavier in its old age, with “Eskimo Blue Day” a fine example of its late-period aggressive psychedelics, driven by the team of guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and bassist Jack Casady. The song begins moody and midtempo, building into a rock grove and then setting off a firestorm of distorted guitar, bass and drums.

After the song charges into head-banging territory, it returns to a hurricane eye of calm before charging off yet again. The dynamics over its 6 1/2 minute run are breathtaking. “Eskimo Blue Day” would become a showcase of the Airplane’s late-60s live shows and was part of their Woodstock set.

“Eskimo Blue Day” ends with what could be a glacier breaking apart, perhaps a man-made explosion, maybe the end of the world. An appropriately mysterious end to a baffling and prophetic song.

• Read lyrics to “Eskimo Blue Day” by Grace Slick and Paul Kantner.
• Buy “Volunteers” on iTunes.