Kronomyth 9.0: LEAVING ON A (SORT OF) HIGH NOTE. Rolling Stone ripped this a new one on its release, but I never read Rolling Stone. Bark didn’t bite in my book; it was eclectic, sure, but adventurous too. Long John Silver is the last adventure of the Jefferson Airplane. The album cover was designed to shock: it converted into a box to store your weed. The music is also designed to shock: “Easter,” “Son of Jesus,” “Eat Starch Mom.” If you haven’t been offended by Grace Slick already, I can’t imagine being offended now. I felt that Bark showed a band moving in different directions, while LJS is the same band expending the last of its increasingly directionless energy. The record does make a strong case for bringing Papa John Creach on board, as his violin mixes sweetly with the rest of the band and gives the songs a strange, spectral and almost elegiac quality. It had become clear, however, that Slick/Kantner and Kaukoken/Casady had split into separate factions. Kaukoken’s “Trial By Fire” and Kantner’s “Alexander The Medium,” for example, sound like the work of different bands. Slick and Kantner had grown long in the tooth by this stage, writing meandering protest songs and science-fiction fairy tales that felt like Hawkwind transported to an alternate, acoustic universe. As unfocused as it is, LJS is seldom less than interesting. The opening pair of tracks, “Long John Silver” and “Aerie,” are fearless in their freedom and artfully conceived in spots. You’ll find exciting instrumental passages, thought-provoking themes and blows against the establishment—in other words, the same ingredients that are synonymous with the best of Jefferson Airplane. What you won’t find on here is a hit single or definitive moment in the history of the Airplane, making it one of the least essential (if not the least essential) album from the original group. But even a bad Jefferson Airplane album is better than most things, including nearly all of the Jefferson Starship albums that came after.
[Review] Jefferson Airplane: Long John Silver (1972)
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“It was an experiment, I didn’t want to repeat the same album.” – Brian James, explaining MfP in an 
“Anal is the word. They were a terrifying group of people to work with because they were so unable to experiment.” – 
Kronomyth 2.0: TAKEN FOR GRANITE. Mount Rushmore’s second, final album doesn’t audibly improve on the formula of the first. It’s psychedelic blues rock played with some measure of competence but not enough personality. Mike Bolan is a decent guitarist, and there are moments when the band flashes some instrumental chops (“Toe Jam,” “Love Is The Reason”), just not enough of those moments to justify forty minutes of your time. Producer Ray Ruff doesn’t do the band any favors; the production is downright listless in spots (“10:09 Blues,” “I’m Comin’ Home”). The group still continues to struggle with writing their own material, digging back to the original lineup’s repertoire for two tracks and taking Mose Allison’s “V-8 Ford Blues” for a spin. The originals from Glen Smith aren’t very (original), constituting standard blues exercises. I will tell you, “10:09 Blues” is a slow train comin’. 
Kronomyth 7.0: HOLY COWBOY. Gram Parsons didn’t join The Byrds, he hijacked them. Calling this album a “complete reinvention” or “radical departure from the past” doesn’t capture the shock of hearing Sweetheart of the Rodeo for the first time. By turning their back on their psychedelic past, The Byrds helped to create a new genre of music: country-rock. Of course, there was always the undercurrent of folk/country in the music of The Byrds, but we never knew how deep those waters ran until Rodeo arrived. Chris Hillman’s roots were in folk music and, as a Christian, songs such as “I Am A Pilgrim,” “The Christian Life” and Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd” were likely already familiar to him. Byrds fans, however, were unprepared for an entire album of country classics complete with pedal steel guitar, fiddle, banjo and mandolin. As for 
Kronomyth 2.0: THE BARD’S TALE. A hastily conceived followup to the band’s first album was recorded to capitalize on the band’s newfound success. The Book of Taliesyn, named after a bard of Arthurian legend, should have exposed myriad holes. Instead, it exposed listeners to a more progressive side of Purple that showcased fantasy (“Listen, Learn, Read On”), classical music (“Anthem”) and prog majesty (“Shield”). It was an explosive cover of Neil Diamond’s “Kentucky Woman” that became the album’s hit single, although I would tell you it’s the least interesting thing on here. A heavily edited version of “River Deep, Mountain High” fared well as the album’s second single; as with their cover of The Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out,” the most interesting music occurs in the classically influenced intros and instrumental solos. Despite the short distance since their debut, The Book of Taliesyn is a confident step forward in songwriting. “Shield” is as good as anything to come from the pens of Jack Bruce and Peter Brown, while the guitar solo from Ritchie Blackmore is head and shoulders above his work on 
Kronomyth 4.0: CAMPING TRIP. Steeped in my suburban ways, I couldn’t pretend to tell you what “Eye of Fatima” really means. The mind on drugs makes interesting connections, and suddenly Egyptology and conspiracy theories get swirled together into a rock & roll road song that clangs noisily into the gears of our mediocracy like a perfectly placed wrench. Even MTV played an unwitting part in the conspiracy, featuring a music video for Fatima in which the members of CVB, choreographed in what can only be described as a collective lurching, threaten to tumble off screen as the very musical firmament cracks and splits beneath us. The Campers signing to a major label should have heralded a flying-pig apocalypse. Instead, “Eye of Fatima” gave us a mere glimpse into the end of days. The rest of the record is a refinement of their last, with producer Dennis Herring presumably helping the band reign in their eclectic tastes and shaping their strangeness into solid song structures. The references to classic rock are largely absent this time, but their sweetness and charm continue to rise to the surface in wonderful songs such as “She Divines Water” and “Life is Grand.” From a musical standpoint, two things always jump out at me when I listen to Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart: that Jonathan Segel’s violin has largely supplanted the traditional role of the lead guitar (mabye it always did) and that it has a lot more horns and harmonicas than any other CVB album. Despite the challenges of working with an international record label that people had actually heard of, OBRS stays true to the band’s guiding principles. You’ll still find Ukrainian swamp country stomps (“Eye of Fatima, Part 2”), sympathetic socialist stories (“Tania”) and goofy country songs (“Never Go Back,” which first appeared on 1987’s Vampire Can Mating Oven EP). If I stop short of calling OBRS their best album, it’s because the last three records are largely of a piece. “My Path Belated” and “Wishing To Course” spring from the same source of inspiration, “One of These Days” and “Borderline” too. The album production progressively smoothed out the rough edges with each album (insert image here of angry alt-rockers shaking their tiny fists at promotional posters of 
Kronomyth 4.2: HELLO, IT’S ME AGAIN. This is a story of three hellos, beginning with the debut of The Nazz, which featured a slowed-down and slightly tortured version of this song. Several years later, Todd Rundgren polished it up for his magnum opus, 
Kronomyth 7.0: I LOVE IT, SO SIOUX ME. The general consensus among critics is that The Top is the bottom where The Cure are concerned. I’ll confess to being a bit underwhelmed by it in the beginning too. It’s not the cavalcade of hits you’ll find on the albums before (
Kronomyth 6.0: RUNAWAY TRANE. Just a few days after recording the first session for Miles Davis’ Milestones, John Coltrane, Red Garland and Paul Chambers (with Art Taylor) returned to the same studio to record Coltrane’s next album, Soultrane. This time, Coltrane’s entrance is immediate and his presence is enormous. “Good Bait” is a tuneful number from Tadd Dameron and Count Basie that delivers instant gratification and stands as the album’s most hummable track. Coltrane completely overshadows everything until Garland slips in an impossibly cool solo, and you’re reminded that you’re listening to three-fifths of the world’s greatest quintet and arguably its greatest quartet. “I Want To Talk About You” is a Billy Eckstine ballad featuring Coltrane’s big, beautiful, lyrical passages and a completely different solo from Garland rendered in dream-like clusters of notes. The second side comes out swinging with “You Say You Care” (from Gentleman Prefer Blondes), with Coltrane and Garland serving up another great set of solos and Taylor getting into the act with some art-ful playing. “Theme For Ernie,” written for alto saxophonist Ernie Henry (who died of a heroin overdose at the end of 1957), has some gorgeous melodic shifts that remind me of The Beatles’ “Michelle.” The album ends with another sped-up Irving Berlin song, “Russian Lullaby,” with some breathtaking soloing from Coltrane. Commentator Ira Gitler famously referred to Trane’s performance on this track as “sheets of sound” because the notes create a continuous stream of music; the music literally explodes from Trane’s tenor in a gush of creative force that somehow, impossibly, is shaped by will at the speed of thought. It reminds me of those Michael Jordan highlight reels when they would slow the video down and you would see Jordan making millisecond adjustments in a way that could only be described as instinct and intelligence perfectly comingled. Despite the absence of a Coltrane original, Soultrane is every bit as essential as 
Kronomyth 5.0: CANONICAL ENO. Standing on the beach on a foggy day, I’ve heard the foghorn of passing cargo ships as a profound and solitary “I am” hurled against the vastness of the ocean (the bay, in reality, but that’s not nearly so poetic). It is a declaration of existence, adventure, futility, freedom and imprisonment; a song of the human condition wrapped in a single sound. Discreet Music is that sound realized as a symphony. Eno’s idea was to create ambient music that, true to its name, would insinuate itself into the listener’s environment, who could in turn choose to listen to it or ignore it and let it recede into the background. The fascinating thing about Discreet Music is that it does both: one moment, you’re listening to it intently, the next moment you find you’ve drifted off into the deep waters of different thoughts. Eno tries to reduce the magic of it to science with a little diagram on the back cover explaining how his synthesizer was processed through an equalizer, echo unit and delayed tape recorder to achieve the effect. Science be damned, this is musical sorcery of a most bewitching kind. The second side of Discreet Music is Eno’s treatment of a chamber performance of Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major, cut into pieces and tied together in a post-modern piece of art that is mournful, grotesque and beautiful all at once. In the traditional sense, Discreet Music really isn’t music, and this is where Eno’s peculiar genius pays off: blurring the distinction between sound and music while drawing listeners into a unique and compelling musical environment. While many have pointed to Music For Airports as the definitive ambient work from Eno, Discreet Music made many of those discoveries first and remains for me the most brilliant example of his ambient experiments.
Kronomyth x.x: GARGLING MAN. The Legion of Mary recordings are sort of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you have songs that you rarely hear from Jerry Garcia, like “Freedom Jazz Dance” or “Valdez In The Country.” On the other hand are songs from Merl Saunders that you’ll probably never want to hear again, like a version of “Boogie On Reggae Woman” in which the man literally manages to sing and gargle at the same time. Legion of Mary wasn’t a band so much as a pseudonym for the collaborations between Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders that took place during the Seventies—in this case, between the winter of 1974 and the summer of 1975 while Garcia took a break from touring with the 
Kronomyth 10.5: BAIL BON. Bon earned a second reprieve from his infernal estate, to amble among us in ghostly form once more, with the release of ’74 Jailbreak. Issued as a mini-album during the doldrums of the mid 80s, this is catch-all compilation that collects a handful of songs that slipped through the cracks when the labels assembled the original Australian and international releases of T.N.T. and 
Kronomyth 1.0: ALL THINGS MUST NASH. If “Our House” was the best Beatles song the band never wrote, then Songs For Beginners is the best Beatles solo album that none of the Fab Four ever released. That’s not to suggest that Graham Nash was consciously copying The Beatles or Bob Dylan, at least not anymore than anyone else, but his first album combines British pop, ballads and a social conscience in the best possible ways. Though the last member of Crosby, Stills and Nash to release a solo album, Nash made it the best of his career. Honestly, the first three solo albums from Crosby, Stills and Nash were better salve to the wounded hearts of their fans than what John, Paul, George and Ringo had to offer. When I tell you that Songs For Beginners is my favorite solo album from Crosby, Stills or Nash (Neil Young’s Harvest is better in my opinion), it’s with the caveat that I’m a anglophile at heart. Beatles fans should immediately warm up to “Military Madness” and “Be Yourself;” Bobby Keys’ sax solo on “There’s Only One” will also feel like a bit of home. CSN fans will instantly recall “Chicago,” introduced a month earlier on the live 
Kronomyth 5.0: GRAHAM BOND’S DARK FORCE.