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Crown of Creation

Released August 1968

Crown of Creation landed late in the summer of that most infamous year, 1968. The album marked yet another stylistic shift for the Airplane, resulting in their darkest and most subdued sound yet. Gone were the (in many ways naive) idealism and optimism of "Wild Tyme" and "Won't You Try/Saturday Afternoon"; instead, Crown of Creation closes with the all-out apocalypse that is "The House at Pooneil Corners". Whereas the last album's "Pooneil" was a childlike celebration of beauty and love, ending with only a brief rumination on mortality, this album's "Pooneil" is a disturbing prophecy of nuclear annihilation as foreshadowed on the cover. No hope or mirth is offered anywhere — only visions of human folly resulting in our own extinction. "Everything someday will be gone except silence," wails Marty, "Earth will be quiet again/Seas from clouds will wash off the ashes of violence/Left as the memory of men/There will be no survivors, my friend!"

The abandonment of starry-eyed romance and flower power of Baxter's and Pillow was in keeping with the general trends of 1968. Much ink has been spilled over the socio-political upheavals of that year: the Tet Offensive and growing, often militant domestic opposition to the war; the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy two months apart; and the chaotic, divisive presidential election in which the "silent majority" chose Richard Nixon. The unrest was not limited to the United States — protests and strikes in May nearly led to revolution in France, a move toward liberalization in Czechoslovakia was crushed in August by a Warsaw Pact invasion, and in October, Mexican university students demanding reform were massacred by government forces. The turmoil of 1968 inevitably informed Crown of Creation. In fact, the band had supported and involved themselves in RFK's primary campaign, and they recorded the last two tracks for the album ("Chushingura" and "If You Feel") at RCA Studios, just four miles from the Ambassador Hotel, on June 5 — the very same night Kennedy was assassinated.

• Side one

1: Lather (2:57)
2: In Time (4:12)
3: Triad (4:54)
4: Star Track (3:09)
5: Share a Little Joke (3:07)
6: Chushingura (1:18)

• Side two

7: If You Feel (3:22)
8: Crown of Creation (2:54)
9: Ice Cream Phoenix (3:00)
10: Greasy Heart (3:26)
11: The House at Pooneil Corners (5:50)

Links

"Crown of Creation" on The Ed Sullivan Show, September 29, 1968: courtesy of the official Ed Sullivan YouTube channel
"If You Feel" in Hamburg, October 5, 1968: Mimed video on the official JA YouTube channel

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