Customer Reviews

Blows Against Empire

5 star:		(61)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

First of all, acknowlegements for the use of part of a line from Starship written by Kantner, Slick, Balin and Blackman. In the liner notes, Paul Kantner tells of how he wrote to Robert Heinlein to ask permission to use some of his ideas in the project to which Heinlein replied with some astonishment that his ideas had been used many times before but only Kantner had written for permission.

Secondly, Amazon has the tracklist wrong to the extent that the radio slots for the album are at the end and not the beginning.

Thirdly, I do not want to duplicate my review of the first CD release of this album which can be found on Amazon's pages and which I pretty much stand by today.

Fourthly, I think that this remastering is truly excellent. I say this first and foremost because of the sound. The first time around sounds dark and murky in comparison but here the sound is pristine revealing much more in the process and giving the vocals a lot nore clarity in particular. And, if you never knew why Paul Kantner appreciated Grace Slick's vocals so much you sure do here. Listen to the bonus track of her demo version of Sunrise it is astounding. The Garcia contributions also benefit enormously from the remastering and it makes one wonder how awesome he would have become as a pedal steel guitar player if he had chosen that particular route had he not preferred to go back to the regular (sic) guitar. All of the instruments and vocals are greatly improved.

Next the bonus tracks. Although they do not add per se to the original album as new songs they certainly elaborate on their development. Let's Go Together is presented with alternative lyrics but after several plays I must confess to preferring the original album. I could be getting old and conservative I guess which may account for that. The two demos, Sunrise and Hijack show how the album versions evolved and the remaining two SFX and Starship are valubale too but in different ways. I can only speculate as to whether Garcia and Hart actually called the track SFX but the first thing that came to mind was San Francisco International as in airport or perhaps Space Station. Regardless the effects are great and particularly so on headphones. Finally the live version of Starship is particularly welcome if only because it is an official live version very reminiscent to my ears, of the sound on Bless It's Pointed Little Head. It certainly is a positive indication of what the sound might be if the whole thing were performed live. There are two secret tracks, which Amazon had listed as the first two tracks of Radio Spots for the album which i find cute but also a liitle sad as reminders of the gestation of the Starship from the Airplane but otherwise do not detract from the overall excellence.

Finally the packagaging. Reproducing the original booklet is a nice plus although at my age and with glasses it is a little hard to read. Thank the deity it is not a mini-disc version. But again it is really nice to have and also I really enjoyed the liner notes. Not to do down Jeff Tamarkin, who did a sterling job on the other albums, these liner notes are a little more in keeping with the times in which the album was recorded. More like a insider orientation with subjective aspects, they are a little more rebellious and open and esoteric.

All in all I really really think that this album has stood the test of time even though popular music has changed so much. Releasing it at this time with it's conjunction of the second major diaster of the Bush presidency (three if you count Iraq) may be accidental but it does draw on some parallels with it's original release during the closing years of the Vietnam war. However, the anti-war movement is more divided and muted now than it was then. I was struck by the irony of the line Amerika hates her crazies as I dropped my teenage daughter off at school this morning (what sort of music do you call this she asked as she got into the car)when conformity is the order of the day in the new millenium.

Finally I have to mention the artwork which always impresses me.

FIVE STARS PLUS (please Amazon - just this once can I give it 6 stars.

A rock and roll classic! Created with the help of members from the Airplane, Moby Grape, Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Grateful Dead, Crosby, Stills & Nash and others, this album belongs to a joint effort that also gave us "If I Could Only Remember My Name" (David Crosby), "Ace" (Bobby Weir), "Rolling Thunder" (Mickey Hart), "Garcia" (Jerry Garcia) and "Manhole" (Grace Slick). All of those are masterpieces, and "Blows Against The Empire" is possibly the most ambitious of the lot. Written in a time when people were still going to the Moon, the album tells a science fiction story, with a wonderfully naive concept, about the hijack of the first starship (build in secrecy by the government) by a group of hippies. But, if the cynicism of our days prevents us from "digging" the idea, the music is as strong as ever... from the revolutionary anger of "Mau Mau, Amerikon" till the final explosion of "Hijack" and "Starship"! Only in the recent "Windows of Heaven" Paul Kantner returned to this sort of "free form" cosmic delirium. A must for the sixties/seventies collector and for all the fans of psychedelic rock.

This is not really the Jefferson Starship. This is a project from Paul Kantner and Grace Slick, with the help of alot of friends, recorded during a break from the Jefferson Airplane, just after recording the album "Volunteers". Starship, which evolved from the Airplane, didn't really become an established group until four years later.

This album more or less marked the end of the San Francisco psychodelic and political period of rock and roll. After, this the Airplane went more pop, the Dead went country and everyone else just disappeared. In a way, it does lead into the British progressive period.

This a concept album about hippies taking off in their starship and embarking on a voyage of love and peace. It may sound like a silly, dated concept now, but Kantner is such a strong song writer that the words and music still hold up.

The music is fantastic. A big chunk of it is duets between Jerry Garcia and someone on piano. Could it be Grace Slick? I didn't think she was that talented on keyboards. The piano is upfront, slow and deliberate while Garcia's guitar is playing furiously in the background to set up an etherial mood.

That stands for "San Francisco science fiction."

I've mentioned in other reviews that science fiction/speculative fiction is a lot more important in the thought of the 1960s than many people seem to know. In fact the works of writers like Heinlein and Sturgeon informed those ideals from the very beginning. This album is a terrific example.

Besides being a fine selection of music by some of the best musicians around, it's also a musical adaptation of a theme from a Robert Heinlein novel. (Not the novella "Orphans of the Sky," as one reviewer has suggested, but _Methuselah's Children_, which is the one that introduces Lazarus Long.)

Paul Kantner was (and as far as I know still is) a tremendous fan of SF (science fiction, I mean, though I suppose he was also a fan of San Francisco, being the only member of the Airplane who was actually native to that city). He tried to apply it, too: for example, he and David Crosby once lived together as part of a commune operating on principles derived from Heinlein's _Stranger in a Strange Land_, a book to which Crosby also alludes in his song "Triad."

This album is another result of that fascination. The theme is simple enough: a bunch of libertarian hippies steal a starship. And there's a lot of cool music built around it; Kantner at his best was and is pretty damned good.

He had help, of course. This album was recorded at around the same time as David Crosby's _If I Could Only Remember My Name_ and includes most of the same personnel (notably the late and much missed Jerry Garcia on lead guitar throughout, but also other members of the Dead, the then-recently defunct Jefferson Airplane, David Crosby and Graham Nash, and anybody else who happened to be around).

The musical result could be described using another SF (science fiction, that is) term, this one from Theodore Sturgeon's _More Than Human_: these musicians _blesh_ (blend and mesh) to produce something more than the sum of their separate contributions. Crosby's aforementioned album is another example of this phenomenon, and SF (this time meaning "San Francisco") music of this period generally involves a lot of "bleshing."

The world could use more bleshing. It could also use more libertarian hippies. So if you're interested in any of the above, check out this collection of blows against the empire. The Dream isn't dead.

Warning to unwary shoppers: this is _not_ the Jefferson Starship that you know from later releases. This is the first album to carry the name "Jefferson Starship," and it was mainly a Paul Kantner project that he developed not long after the Airplane went down. The Jefferson Starship of _Dragonfly_ onwards is a different deal.

Other reviewers have already told the tale of this Paul Kantner science fiction project, of how the name Jefferson Starship was chosen as an umbrella title for this dream, this vision that Paul Kantner has which encompassed the musical friends who helped him out in getting the album off the ground.

Despite the fact that I hate the term this really is a concept album in the truest sense of the word reflecting Paul's vision rather than a group of songs very loosely connected with a central theme.

For me this album represents the end of the era associated with the Summer of Love and the start of a growing realisation among many in the musical community that political realities had not crumbled but were back in force in a big way evidenced by the shooting of the students in Ohio. The album, one of a number made by the same loose collection of musicians, is at the pinnacle of achievement for those same people, most of whom had found commercial success in playing their music the way that they wanted to rather than the way the record companies wanted them to.

Blows against the Empire is a symbol of the lengths that would need to be gone to to put into practice those principles that visionaries like Paul Kantner believed in. In fact the reality is that change can only truly come about through constant struggle. Struggle to maintain your beliefs against adversity, struggle to make your voice heard, struggle to achieve. Those values are still valid today, still worth having and still worth striving for.

This is a superb album. If you have not got it you should order one right away and when it arrives, sit back with your headphones on and marvel.

Long before the Star Wars sound effects crew did it, Paul Kantner and Jerry Garcia threw the nearest vacuum cleaner into the mix to emulate the sounds of outer space!

I don't need to add to what's been written except to say that at the tender age of 13, having only recently succumbed to the very real psychedelic temptations that presented themselves in 1970, we really didn't know what to think of this "Hijack the Starship" motif! It didn't dawn on us that this was only Sci-Fi, and we honestly wondered if there really might be a bona fide conspiracy afloat. The other intriguing part (not to mention the sheer quality of the musicianship, here, particularly Gracie's piano) was the mention of my birthday (I was adopted in Marin County).

This album is truly the climax of the Utopian dream as it had been put to music over the four or five years preceding.

I will say that whatever other versions you get, a used copy of the full package original vinyl (with book AND sleeve) is a must. I saw a slightly partied copy for less than five bucks not too long ago.

Regarding "Let's Go Together," I quite frankly prefer the original take (the so-called alternate lyrics version) over the one we all know and love. Yes, that's what I said, the original version is the "alternate" and the "official" version is literally a hack of that version. If you listen very (very) closely (with good headphones) to the vinyl version (the one that we all know and love), you will hear quite plainly the places where he overdubbed Gracie's vocals with his own, changing the lyrics as he went along. It's almost as if Kantner, working after hours, long after the rest of the crew had pronounced this one "done," just couldn't leave it alone, that he just had to somehow rework it so that it would fit into his "Starship" motif. (Paul Kantner? lacking even the tiny amount of creativity it would have taken to let "South America" be symbolic of "Bright Andromeda"!?)

That's all I have to say, except to repeat that this is one of the all-around best albums I've ever heard -- despite its hopelessly poor sound quality. (The first CD was among the most pathetic commercial productions ever, second only to Velvet Underground Live at Max's Kansas City. The first Blows CD was produced from a commercial cassette tape! I'm *serious*! [I'm also an audio engineer by trade.] I cannot distinguish between the two in a blind test, and nobody that I've challenged over the years could either! Its loudest moment was still a full 18 dB below zero!) And no, I haven't heard this release, but have the one where the "alternate" "Let's Go Together" replaced the commonly known track.)

I sit here in my basement, listening for perhaps the 10,293rd time in 20 years to this album and it still sends shivers up and down my spine. It's too bad I'm probably preaching to the choir.

You obviously had the wherewithal to find this album, SO BUY IT! . It only outclasses 99.99% of the "rock and roll" that's released today, even if it is mostly acoustic. And if you're not "experienced," this album will maybe give you a taste of what you've missed.

I own the original vinyl and saw them preform it in L.A.,side two is a obscure classic little known outside Airplane fans,and actually includes several songs presented as a suite. they include Sunrise,Hijack, Home, Have you seen the stars tonight, XM and Starship. the depth of the ideas proposed in this are as revolutionary as the music. Mostly a Paul Kantner effort, along with Grace's soaring backup and excellent piano are standouts as well as Garcia's excellent guitar. The music on this was such a tight symbiosis of talent and the story line make this my all time favorite.

Never heard of "Blows against the empire?" Paul Kantner's ambitious concept album opened to mixed reviews in 1970, and it remains an underappreciated gem today. The album's problem is simply a case of bad timing. At the start of the seventies, the San Francisco counterculture was in trouble: internal divisions were breaking up the youth movement, the political successes of California governor Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon proved that the New Left was not as powerful as they thought, and musical tastes were drifting away from the "flower power" rock that had shaped a generation. The album's central premise, of hippies stealing a starship and leaving earth for an interstellar utopia, would have been a huge hit just a few years earlier, but it rang stale and bitter to many ears, earning harsh reviews from the likes of Rolling Stone Magazine. Nowadays, with the turmoil of the sixties far behind, this album can be fully appreciated for what it is: a remarkable stew of folk and rock, crafted through the collective effort of some of Calfornia's top musicians. CSN fans will appreciate the contributions of David Crosby, and Grateful Dead members Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, and Bill Kreutzman all appear. The liner notes are very insightful, although it would have been helpful to have complete documentation on all the performers on each track. All in all, this is psychedelic rock at its best!

This is perhaps one of the best Kantner/Slick projects that I am familiar with. The music is grand and the lyrics are interesting and poignant.

Grace Slick's album art is also a bonus to this album, which I own on vinyl. It is one of my all time favorite albums.