Live At the Monterey Festival

Album Review

Jefferson Airplane was unique among San Francisco psychedelic groups for actually charting a pair of hit singles ("White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love"), but apart from those two radio staples, it was their albums and their live performances that made their reputations. Yet it wasn't until 1969 that they issued an official live album, by which time their repertory and sound had become much heavier than the way it started out. Live at the Monterey Festival captures them earlier in their history, on June 17, 1967, dead-center in the middle of the Summer of Love that their two hit singles helped usher in. They were still a somewhat folk-based group with an interest in blues as well, riding the initial tide of their success four months after the release of Surrealistic Pillow (whose songs make up the bulk of the eight-song set that they played) and with the two hits still fresh; it was also less than a year after Grace Slick joined, when Marty Balin was still playing a prominent (if not dominant) role in shaping the group's sound. The group's sound is very lean and muscular, especially Jorma Kaukonen's razor-sharp lead playing and Spencer Dryden's pounding beat, over Jack Casady's surprisingly melodic bass work — Slick and Balin's voices meld perfectly on "High Flying Bird" and soar on the individual featured numbers. "Today" gets almost a definitive performance, and "Somebody to Love" isn't far behind. "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil" as performed here is possibly the best single live track ever issued by the band. Additionally, the audio version of this set works better than elements of the film of it do — for much of "Today," director D.A. Pennebaker ended up focusing on Grace Slick, who was only playing the keyboard, rather than Marty Balin, who was singing.