by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The other item on the
two-DVD package I showed Charles last night was Go Ride the Music, another KQED-TV production from Ralph J. Gleason
(though he took no on-screen or on-soundtrack part this time) and director
Robert N. Zagone which takes its title from “Wooden Ships,” a song usually
identified today with the Los Angeles-based group Crosby, Stills and Nash but
also recorded (and performed here) by Jefferson Airplane, since the song was a
collaboration between David Crosby, Steven Stills and the Airplane’s Paul
Kantner. I didn’t think I’d seen this one before but I had — I recognized it
when one of the musicians in an early sequence turns his face to a TV camera
and starts making fun of the image of rock stars as continually doing drugs,
and then says in a mock-pleading voice, “Do you have any drugs?” (Most drug-using celebrities would ask, not for
“drugs,” but for the particular drug they were on and wanted to use at that
moment.) The show is basically a series of performances by the Jefferson
Airplane (filmed in the KQED-TV studio but with a recording crew from Alembic
Sound with Bob and Betty Matthews running fully professional 16-track recording
equipment) and Quicksilver Messenger Service (an outdoor performance at a peace
rally at Sonoma State College). Most of the people who’ve bought this disc from
Amazon.com and reviewed it for them have concentrated their interest on Go
Ride the Music because it’s closer to a
normal rock concert movie (though not by much) and regarded West Pole as a curio and a makeweight.
I noted that I had
recorded soundtracks off the air of both West Pole and Go Ride the Music, and I had also recalled Go Ride the Music as the first part of a two-part program with the
second part featuring the Grateful Dead (and being considerably less
interesting). I had also never seen either of these shows in color before
because back then all I had access to were black-and-white televisions — and in
West Pole the color was distracting
(especially since Zagone got so cute with it, turning the Ace of Cups members
into negative images of themselves and playing around so much with the color
that it’s not until their last song that we realize all the Ace of Cups members
were white — just as when Jimi Hendrix’ Are You Experienced LP was first issued in the U.S. it came in an ugly
cover with a shot of the band with all their faces tinted blue — so you
couldn’t tell that Hendrix was Black and his accompanists, bassist Noel Redding
and drummer Mitch Mitchell, were white). It was considerably less distracting
in Go Ride the Music but the
visuals still got a bit silly — during Quicksilver’s first song, “Warm Red
Wine,” Zagone decided to alternate between vistas of the performance and shots
of the field where it took place empty — which wouldn’t have been so bad except
he decided to add heavy echo to the song, to make it sound distant and remote,
when he was showing an empty field and to remix the sound with full presence
when the vistas showed the actual performance.
At least Go Ride the Music represents the Jefferson Airplane with all but one
of the key musicians in the best edition of the band (drummer Spencer Dryden
had been replaced by Joey Covington, but all the other principals of the best
Airplane — Grace Slick, vocals; Paul Kantner and Marty Balin, guitars and
vocals; Jorma Kaukonen, lead guitar; and Jack Casady, bass — were here) tearing
through a scorching set that starts with “We Could Be Together” and
“Volunteers” from their most openly political album, Volunteers. Accompanied by news footage of Bay Area protests
and radical events (credited to a second director, Rick Wise), the Airplane
play these songs with a sort of scorching, buzzing anger that befits the calls
to revolution made in both songs — in “We Could Be Together” the Airplane sing,
“Up against the wall, up against the wall motherfucker,” and at least one point
I thought I heard the Airplane’s singers utter the M.F. word on American public
television. For the Volunteers album the Airplane sang “motherfucker” but the RCA Victor label
prepared a lyric sheet which censored the word and gave the line as “up against
the wall fred” (lower case) provoking one of the band members to tell Rolling
Stone, “They have to let us sing
it, but they don’t have to let you read it.” and Charles, with his marvelously
loopy sense of humor, riffed on the recent mini-scandal of the newly seated
Democratic Congressmember Rashida Tlaib, who was criticized for saying of
President Trump, “Impeach the motherfucker” — “Impeach the fred. The fred is so
impeachable.”[1] Despite some
strange sound mixing — the version of their huge hit “Somebody to Love” (one of
the two songs, along with “White Rabbit,” Grace Slick brought to the Airplane
from her previous gig with a band called the Great Society, which turned out to
be the Airplane’s first hits) emphasizes Kantner’s and Balin’s backing vocals
and buries Slick in the mix — the Airplane are in good form here, with Kantner
belting out the song “Plastic Fantastic Lover” (the B-side of the original
“White Rabbit” single) far more angrily and soulfully than he had on the studio
record. Their version of “Wooden Ships” is quite a bit more loose and colorful
than the CSN version you probably know, and it ends the program.
Alas, the
version of Quicksilver Messenger Service heard here is not the best one — the one featured on their first two
albums, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Happy Trails: John
Cipollina (lead guitar and vocals), Gary Duncan (second lead guitar and
occasional vocals), Dave Freiberg (bass) and Greg Elmore (drums) — but a later
edition built around folksinger and songwriter Dino Valenti. According to the
band’s Wikipedia page, Quicksilver Messenger Service was originally built
around Valenti, but just after he joined he was arrested for possession of
marijuana and served nearly two years — during which time he wrote the biggest
hit he ever had, “Get Together,” for the Youngbloods, though he signed it “Chet
Powers” because he was worried he would be violating some jail regulation if it
were known he had written a song “inside” and smuggled it out to get it
recorded. When Valenti was released he made a solo album for Epic Records, Children
of the Sun, which is one of the great
unsung masterpieces of the psychedelic era, though continuing the confusion
around his name he identified himself on its cover as “Dino Valente,” with an
“e” instead of an “i.” When his Epic album bombed Valenti was approached by
Quicksilver to join the band after all, and he largely took it over, putting an
end to Cipollina’s long guitar jams and aiming it at the pop-rock market
through a series of sappy songs signed “Jesse Oris Farrow.”
The version of
Quicksilver seen on Go Ride the Music is a six-piece with Valenti and British session keyboardist Nicky
Hopkins added to the original lineup, and Valenti is featured as The Star, wearing an all-white outfit
that makes him look like the leader and belting out mostly his own songs —
though there’s a welcome moment with Cipollina taking back the reins on a
version of the Bo Diddley song “Mona” he also recorded on Happy Trails. Go Ride the Music is a bastard hybrid of concert film and
behind-the-scenes documentary, and it doesn’t help that instead of presenting
the Airplane and Quicksilver in separate but complete sets, first one band and
then the other, director Zagone cross-cuts between them (we get three songs by
the Airplane, three by Quicksilver, then two from the Airplane, a cut back to
Quicksilver’s “Mona” and then one, the “Wooden Ships” finale that gives the
show its title, from the Airplane again), so neither band can build up energy
or mood. He also indulges in the all-too-common convention of band films of the
time, dividing up the screen into boxes so he can show several vistas at once
(it was used in a few dramatic films of the time, notably the original 1967
version of The Thomas Crown Affair, but it was in music documentaries and concert films that it really
became an annoying convention) and doing a lot of abrupt jump-cuts. Still, Go
Ride the Music is a valuable and
entertaining documentary of two of 1960’s rock’s greatest bands in (mostly)
straightforwardly presented live performances.
