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Volunteers

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Jefferson Airplane

 
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Sums up the currents of hippie culture like no other album could

  • We Say...

    Review by Jim Farber

    If you had to sum up the tribal connection and confrontational politics of hippie culture in 1969 in just one album, you couldn’t do better than Volunteers. As much a placard as a piece of music, the album found this San Francisco collective marching through a suite of electric protest songs.

    The high-pitched set kicks off with “We Can Be Together,” which declares “we are dirty, lawless, violent and young,” and ends with the title track, which employs the same chords as “Together” but in an intensified version, topped by the orgasmic cry “up against the wall/motherf---ker/Tear down the wall.”

    The disc proved once again the Airplane had their finger far up the anus of America in the ‘60s. Two years earlier, they nailed the blissful psychedelic Summer of Love with “Surrealistic Pillow.” Here they were screaming bloody murder, right in step with the culture.

    Of course, all that would render the album just a historic time capsule if its music didn’t rock so hard or flow so beautifully. All four of the band’s stars compete in top form on the disc. Paul Kantner’s chords never sounded more pitched and beautiful than on “We Can Be Together.” Jorma Kaukenon fashions the most shimmering guitar hook of his life on “Good Shepard.” Marty Balin yelps to the sky in the title track, while Grace Slick hits one of her comic-absurdist peaks in “Eskimo Blue Day,” with its deathless refrain “doesn’t mean s--t to a tree.”

    Volunteers isn’t all fire and outrage. “The Farm” epitomizes going-up-the-country pastoral warmth, while “Wooden Ships” (in a more desperate version than heard on Crosby Stills and Nash’s debut that same year) has a post-apocalyptic sense of sadness. Together, the music both sums up a particular moment in youth culture and transcends it. Any listener looking for music electrified by “which-side-are-you-on” defiance couldn’t find an example more rousing or true.

  • They Say...

    Review by Jim Newsom, All Music Guide

    Controversial at the time, delayed because of fights with the record company over lyrical content and the original title (Volunteers of America), Volunteers was a powerful release that neatly closed out and wrapped up the '60s. Here, the Jefferson Airplane presents itself in full revolutionary rhetoric, issuing a call to "tear down the walls" and "get it on together." "We Can Be Together" and "Volunteers" bookend the album, offering musical variations on the same chord progression and lyrical variations on the same theme. Between these politically charged rock anthems, the band offers a mix of words and music reflecting the competing ideals of simplicity and getting "back to the earth" vs. the overthrow of greed and exploitation through political activism, adding a healthy dollop of psychedelic sci-fi for texture. Guitarist Jorma Kaukonen's beautiful arrangement of the traditional "Good Shepherd" is a standout here, and Jerry Garcia's pedal steel guitar gives "The Farm" an appropriately rural feel. The band's version of "Wooden Ships" is much more eerie than that released earlier in the year by Crosby, Stills & Nash. Oblique psychedelia is offered here via Grace Slick's "Hey Frederick" and the ecologically tinged "Eskimo Blue Day." Drummer Spencer Dryden gives an inside look at the state of the band in the country singalong "A Song for All Seasons." The musical arrangements here are quite potent. Nicky Hopkins' distinctive piano highlights a number of tracks, and Kaukonen's razor-toned lead guitar is the recording's unifying force, blazing through the mix, giving the album its distinctive sound. Although the political bent of the lyrics may seem dated to some, listening to Volunteers is like opening a time capsule on the end of an era, a time when young people still believed music had the power to change the world. [The 2004 reissue of the album comes with the addition of five previously unreleased bonus tracks recorded live at the Fillmore East on November 28 and 29, 1969: "Good Shepherd," "Somebody to Love," "Plastic Fantastic Lover," "Wooden Ships," and "Volunteers."]

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