Got a Revolution!: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane

By Jeff Tamarkin

Book Overview

"Jeff Tamarkin is an able guide through the tangled history of one of the Sixties' most musically visionary bands." --Rolling Stone

From a renowned music journalist, a close-up portrait of Jefferson Airplane, chronicling the band's origins in 1965 San Francisco and their role in defining the sound and culture of 1960s and 1970s rock 'n' roll.

The most successful and influential rock band to emerge from San Francisco during the 1960s, Jefferson Airplane created the sound of a generation. Their smash hits "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit" virtually invented the era's signature pulsating psychedelic music and, during one of the most tumultuous times in American history, came to personify the decade's radical counterculture and paved the way for other Bay Area music greats, including the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin.

Having worked closely with Jefferson Airplane for more than a decade, Tamarkin had unprecedented access to the band members, their families, friends, lovers, crew members, fellow musicians, cultural luminaries, even the highest-ranking politicians of the time. More than just a definitive history, Got a Revolution is a rock legend unto itself.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671034049
• ISBN13: 9780671034047
• Release Date: July 2005
• Publisher: Atria Books
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.6" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

THE AIRPLANE HISTORY THAT FANS HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR!

I had waited impatiently for many years for someone to tackle a complete history of one of my favorite bands, Jefferson Airplane, and when I finally saw the book in my local store, and then the author's name on the book itself, I knew right away that all would be well. I had enjoyed Jeff Tamarkin's wonderfully well-written, impeccably researched, enthusiastic and informative liner notes for various Airplane and Hot Tuna CDs for quite a while, and sensed that he was the perfect man to handle this job. Happily, that indeed turns out to be the case, and his Airplane history, "Got a Revolution: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane," featuring all those qualities that made his liner notes such a joy, is the volume that I and many others had been waiting for. Tamarkin not only gives us a thorough history of this seminal San Francisco group--starting in 1965, when Marty Balin (nee Martyn Buchwald) decided to put a new kind of band together--but also follows it through its dissolution in 1972 and on to its various offshoots (Jefferson Starship, Hot Tuna, KBC Band, etc.). Covering the pre-hippy days of the mid-'60s, through the Nixonian years and right on to J.A.'s reunion in 1989, Tamarkin also gives us a concise primer of a fascinating period of recent history. The book is replete with details of the band's principals but not exhaustingly so; that is, it never gets bogged down with excess back story, but rather gives us all the info we need to understand all the band members as fully fleshed-out people, limiting their back biographies to quick 10-page chapters. I have been a fan of Marty Balin, Paul Kantner, Grace Slick, Spencer Dryden and especially Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady for almost 40 years now, and still found an incredible amount of unknown information about them in this fast-moving history. (Spencer Dryden was Charlie Chaplin's nephew?!?! Who knew?) With chapters arranged in cliffhanger fashion, with a fascinating cast of characters and with many astounding stories, this book really does pull a reader in. And yet, Tamarkin does not yield to the temptation to sensationalize his tale. Indeed, to his credit, he admits right up front that there remain many "Airplane mysteries," and lets it go at that. Yes, there are many juicy stories (I love the one about Jack sitting in the mud puddle on DMT, and Grace's escapades in Germany...not to mention that Reality D. Blipcrotch episode!), but many readers, I suspect, will be surprised that this book remains fairly levelheaded, with a minimum of wild sex and drug anecdotes. The anecdotes ARE there, but only enough to give us a feel for the time, place and characters. (One gets the feeling that Tamarkin could regale us with even juicier tidbits over a few drinks one evening.) The author has been given access to virtually every principal character in the Jefferson Airplane story, and the hundreds of hours of insider interviews have helped make this history practically definitive. On another note

A good history lesson for those who weren't there

Because I was too young to be aware of them during the 60s, my first memory of this group was thru the songs Miracles and Runaway during the 70s and it's Starship period. Although I have certain fondness for these songs, many older fans view this era as lacking compared to their Airplane material. Even more fans find their 80s stuff less appealing...a sentiment with which I happen to agree. (We Built This City has to be one of the more excruciating songs of the 80s.)Learning about the Airplane thru articles and Behind the Music episodes, I was not impressed. All the members struck me as extremely self involved, childish, drama prone and spoiled. There seemed to be a lingering bitterness especially in regards to Marty Balin's feelings toward Grace Slick. But since the 60s are a continuing source of fascination for me, I picked up this book.Reading the book, I'm still not impressed with the individuals in the band as people. (No one comes off as particularly pleasant) But I did come away with an appreciation for their desire to push the envelope with their music. Even Grace Slick who has often appeared to take a blase attitude toward her music and life in general is shown as a relatively strong composer and musician.Tamarkin is effective at capturing the environment and atmosphere of San Francisco in the 60s and 70s. He also gives a fuller if not complete picture of peripheral band members such as Papa John Creach, Signe Anderson (the original female singer of Airplane) and others. We also learn of the band's failed business dealings and contract disputes. Overall it's a good history of the culture of the 60s and all it's craziness. I'd recommend that one read Joel Selvin's Summer of Love as a companion to this book. Those not familiar with the history will receive a fuller picture as a result.

The First and Definitive Tribute to Jefferson Airplane

I have in my treasure-trove of personal memorabilia a letter from a friend, postmarked from San Francisco in September 1965, where he describes hanging out with a newly formed band with the strange name of "Jefferson Airplane" and auditioning to be their lead singer. He didn't make the band; thus, when their debut album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, was released in mid-1966, he was not on it. My local record store didn't carry it, and no one who worked there had ever heard of them. How things would change within less than a year, when a song called "Somebody to Love" was all over the radio and Jefferson Airplane was all over television.Jefferson Airplane was a swirling mass of contradictions. Their fan club slogan, "Jefferson Airplane Loves You," was perfect for the Summer of Love, yet the band was split into two, sometimes three, contentious camps. Their politics were extreme radical left; they made no bones about embracing Red China, yet if they had ever appeared in that country, they would have undoubtedly wound up underneath some tanktread. They also embraced, and utilized, the capitalist system in their business dealings to the hilt. And while espousing an idealistic communal style that publicly eschewed materiality, they were poster child limousine liberals. Their music was by turns brilliant and crap, with some of it standing up after hundreds of listenings over three and one-half decades, while others were unlistenable from Day One. Yet their influence on the culture for several mad, insane years was undeniable.Jeff Tamarkin chronicles the entire process from the beginning to the present in GOT A REVOLUTION!, which is a history of Jefferson Airplane (and its offshoots) collectively and its members individually. It is an amazing work on a number of levels. Tamarkin was able to obtain the cooperation of almost all of the individuals directly or indirectly involved, and he deals with conflicting versions of events colored by time, perspective, and drug-induced illusion. He is an unabashed fan of the band --- to even contemplate a work of this scope and complexity, one would have to really love, or really hate, them --- yet his account of the band, if not the times in which they lived, is surprisingly objective. Grace Slick and Paul Kantner come off the worst, in terms of their wild and destructive behavior, and yet even they possessed some redemptive qualities, outside of whatever musical talent they were blessed with.Tamarkin additionally does an excellent job of tracing the history of each member of the group, the events surrounding them, and the band members' individual and collective discography. I was constantly and continuously impressed with Tamarkin's accuracy with respect to events involving the band. Though not directly in any of the events that he describes, I was a bystander at several of them (the infamous Akron Rubber Bowl concert of 1972 being but one) and his ability to put the reader into the setting while getting it right

You Say You Want a Revolution, Wehell You Know...

What a great read this book is! It is hard to put down as the author keeps you hooked on the next installment so that you just motor on smoothly to the end.Sitting on my shelves is the first book I ever read on Jefferson Airplane, a 1969 book by Ralph Gleason, sandwiched between Hank Harrison's book on the Grateful Dead and the inevitable Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. Tamarkin's excellent tome now joins it and will probably become the definitive word on the subject. It certainly fills the void that has existed for some years since the Gleason book was published and the Airplane metamorphosed into Starship. Coming relatively soon after Dennis McNally's biography of the Dead, these books between them shine a spotlight on the musical and social revolution that was spawned in the 1960's and for which San Francisco assumed the mantle of world leader.Jeff Tamarkin, as others have alluded too, bases his book on his prior research and knowledge of the central characters involved. He has done a tremendous job in being fair to everyone which is to be lauded. He does not skip over the relationships between the band members and the cast of others who flit throught the story, he does not glorify nor condemn the use and abuse of chemicals nor does he try to do anyone down. His writing displays his skill with words which he has honed over the years in his other job and the end result is an excellent read, informative with an insider's view and an outsider's perception.To me the most telling part of the tale is the story of Matthew Katz whom the author notes would not be interviewed but answered e-mails. That must be an extraordinary tale in of itself. Personally I find thet the author has a gift of bringing the characters alive so that we feel that we know them. Indeed there are many diehard fans who follow the band as it is presently constituted almost everywhere and are long past being considered starstruck. This book is the story of a community. It places the band in the context of the times and yet at the same time portrays them as human beings as well as star musicians. It is a story of fame and closeness, of rivalry and emnity, of individuality and shared companionship. I am sure that some who read this will be shocked, perhaps awed, by some of the events contained within the book and that many will be fascinated by the twists and turns described therein.Jeff Tamarkin has certainly succeeded with this labour of love in bringing the inside story of Jefferson Airplane to the world. His story deserves every success and it is a story that anyone interested in the era or the music should read. At least twice.

Jefferson Airplane Biography Takes Off!

I have been looking forward to the publication of an authoritative book on Jefferson Airplane for a long time! Ten years ago (in my review of `Jefferson Airplane Loves You' in Holding Together #16 in fact), I urged Jeff Tamarkin to use the wealth of inteview material he had amassed in researching the Box booklet as the basis for a full-length biography of Jefferson Airplane. If I'd had the time and the contacts, it's a project I would love to have undertaken myself. Tamarkin did have those opportunities - and it would appear that he's made the best of them, for at long last the book that he's written is out in the world. It runs to over 400 pages, including 16 pages of black and white photographs, some of which have not been published before. It has a foreword by Jan Wenner and an introduction by Paul Kantner. Tamarkin then proceeds, over the course of thirty five chapters, to tell the tale of the turbulent flight of the mighty airmachine - essentially from its inception in1965 until the Airplane re-union of 1989. In order to do this, he has interviewed most all of the (surviving) key participants in the turbulent tale - not only all the band members from the various incarnations of JA (and HT/JS) but many of the managers, producers, back-room staff and friends of the bands as well - and some of these he's interviewed more than once. (In fact, excerpts from some of the early interviews did appear in Relix magazine a few years ago.) He's taken all that information, some of it conflicting - as people's recollections and opinions inevitably differ - and has tried to make sense of it, forging it into a readable narrative of shape and substance.But after all the hard work on Tamarkin's part and the eager awaiting on ours, what you want to know is: is it a good book (in terms of style, content, veracity and explication)?The short answer is yes - at least on three and a half out of four counts; (I personally would have liked to read way much more analysis and interpretation - "the why of making music," as Kantner terms it in his introduction).What Tamarkin has produced is in fact a very good book. It's a highly readable account of the life and times of the band. The story is built up chronologically by introducing the key players one at a time, in each case supplying enough background to explain how they got to the point where they founded/joined Jefferson Airplane and in some cases how they came to exit it as well. For anyone previously unfamiliar with the detailed history of JA's inception and early days, this will make fascinating reading. Coverage of the remaining five years of Jefferson Airplane gets a slightly less comprehensive treatment and the life and times of Hot Tuna, Jefferson Starship (then SVT, Vital Parts and so on) even less so - though Tamarkin obviously does hit the key events and seismic shifts in some detail. What they did and what happened to them is entertainingly and faithfully narrated (the Matthew Katz legacy, the sexual pairi