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After Bathing at Baxter's

Released November 27, 1967

For their third album (and second with the now-solidified classic lineup), the Airplane could very easily have worked to capitalize on their growing success and created a record that would have been readily accessible for the masses. From a business perspective, this would have been the wisest choice: strike while the iron was hot, with two top-10 singles and a no. 3 album already in the bag. There were also the tens of thousands of kids descending on their home city (seemingly) searching for new ways of thinking and being. But in the heady musical ferment that defined 1967, Jefferson Airplane would instead respond to significant new developments in rock and choose a different path for what became the cryptically-named, highly experimental After Bathing at Baxter's.

The first of these was the arrival of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album that became more than just an album — it was a major cultural event. In fact, on April 4, 1967, shortly after the Fab Four completed the record, Paul McCartney visited San Francisco and hung out with the Airplane. In the photo below, he is seen loosely jamming with Paul Kantner and Jorma Kaukonen:

Sgt. Pepper's effect on the popular culture of the 1960s has been somewhat diminished by the passing of nearly sixty years, and one can venture into hyperbole in trying to describe its impact. But make no mistake: Sgt. Pepper was a revolution in the production techniques of popular music, in ways too numerous to expound upon here. It spurred further experimentation, in how rock and pop were written and performed and in how it was recorded, among artists on both sides of the Atlantic. Our protagonists were among those who most keenly felt the reverberation of Pepper. Paul Kantner would later tell the story of a night in a Seattle hotel lobby, when he and David Crosby (soon to be fired from the Byrds) stayed up till dawn playing a tape of the album on repeat to about a hundred rapt young fans. Said Kantner: "Something enveloped the whole world at that time and it just exploded into a renaissance." The complex arrangements and use of the studio as an instrument on the Beatles' album would inspire the Jeffersons to explore the same on their next record. Indeed, what music they had recorded up to that point for album #3 was largely scrapped after Sgt. Pepper's release, and the Airplane went back to the drawing board.

The second major musical development of 1967 that pushed the Airplane in a new direction was the arrival in America of two other, much heavier acts from the UK. Actually, the first of these bands was fronted by an American — a 24-year-old from Seattle named Jimi Hendrix. In September 1966, a month after the Airplane Took Off, Hendrix himself took off on an actual flight from New York to London. Chas Chandler had discovered this explosive young guitarist at the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village and offered him a deal. Backed by a new band he put together with Chandler (bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell), Hendrix cut a few singles, then an album titled Are You Experienced. If Sgt. Pepper rewrote the rules of music production, The Jimi Hendrix Experience's debut album rewrote the rules of rock guitar. What Hendrix did with six strings and heavy distortion was so fresh and unprecedented that the new countercultural rag Rolling Stone, apparently unprepared for this startling new sound, described the album as "unrelentingly...inartistically violent" in their review that fall. Hendrix took the UK by storm, then returned to America in June '67 — a mere nine months after his departure — and let his home country know just who the fuck he was with an appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival. As the LA Times later described it, Hendrix "graduated from rumor to legend" with this ground-breaking performance. The climax of his awe-inspiring, feedback-drenched performance, which had already blown the minds of the musicians watching in the wings, was the fiery sacrifice of his guitar. After the Mamas and the Papas closed the festival that night, the Experience, the Dead, and the Jeffersons stayed up and jammed together until dawn. The musical cross-pollination that followed altered the course of the Airplane.

Two months after Monterey, Cream appeared in San Francisco for the first time with a run of shows at the Fillmore from August 22 to September 3. Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker's brand of monstrous, virtuosic, amplified psychedelic blues had a seismic effect on the subsequent history of SF rock. Together with Hendrix, Cream pointed the Airplane away from the gentle, subtly psychedelic folk-rock of Surrealistic Pillow towards something much, much jammier and fuzzier. "Probably the single most important event was when Eric Clapton came over with Cream and played the Fillmore," Jack Casady would later say. "That and Jimi Hendrix electrified every musician as far as playing in a rock band that would just peel paint off the walls. Everybody got louder and harder and tougher after that." Comparing "The Last Wall of the Castle" and "Spare Chaynge" from Baxter's to...well, any of the tracks from its predecessor reveals just how profoundly the feedback-driven acid rock of Hendrix and Cream altered Jorma and Jack's musical outlook.

• Side one

Streetmasse
1: The Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil (4:35)
2: A Small Package of Value Will Come to You, Shortly (1:34)
3: Young Girl Sunday Blues (3:33)
The War Is Over
4: Martha (3:26)
5: Wild Tyme (H) (3:09)
Hymn to an Older Generation
6: The Last Wall of the Castle (2:41)
7: Rejoyce (4:01)

• Side two

How Suite It Is
8: Watch Her Ride (3:11)
9: Spare Chaynge (9:12)
Shizoforest Love Suite
10: Two Heads (3:13)
11: Won't You Try/Saturday Afternoon (5:02)

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