Got a Revolution! : The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane [Hardcover]

Jeff Tamarkin (Author), Jann Wenner (Author), Paul Kantner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 3, 2003

Jann Wenner, editor-in-chief and publisher of Rolling Stone, wrote, "the classic [Jefferson] Airplane lineup were both architects and messengers of a psychedelic age, a liberation of mind and body that profoundly changed American art, politics, and spirituality. It was a renaissance that could only have been born in San Francisco, and the Airplane, more than any other band in town, spread the good news nationwide."

Jefferson Airplane, the most successful and influential rock band to emerge from San Francisco during the 1960s, created the sound of a generation. Their smash hits "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit" provided the soundtrack to the Summer of Love, virtually inventing the era's signature pulsating psychedelic music, and came to personify the decade's radical counterculture. Their appearances at the landmark Monterey Pop, Woodstock, and Altamont rock festivals -- the only band to play at all three -- placed them on the front lines during one of the most exciting, tumultuous times in American history. Their confrontational lyrics and alternative lifestyles often cast them as "outlaws in the eyes of America." Jefferson Airplane didn't just dominate American popular culture at the peak of the '60s; they transformed it.

Got a Revolution! is the first full-length biography ever written about Jefferson Airplane. Jeff Tamarkin, veteran music writer and historian, has worked closely with the former members of Jefferson Airplane for more than a decade and penned more than twenty-five Airplane-related album liner notes. Those who lived it tell the story: the band members, their families, friends, lovers, crew members, and fellow musicians. The book's all-star cast includes Fellow rock legends David Crosby, Janis Joplin, Donovan, the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, and Paul McCartney, to such larger-than-life cultural figures as Robert F. Kennedy, Bill Graham, Abbie Hoffman, the Hell's Angels, and even Richard Nixon. It's a tale of complex people with complex relationships living under the spotlight during a complex time.

To the public, they were prototypical free-loving, good-time hippies, but to their inner circle, Jefferson Airplane was a paradoxical bunch -- constantly at odds with one another. Jefferson Airplane's members were each brilliant, individualistic artists who became the living embodiment of the ups and downs of the sex, drugs, and rock and roll lifestyle.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Formed in San Francisco in 1965, Jefferson Airplane helped pave rock's psychedelic road of the 1960s and 1970s. Tamarkin, who wrote the liner notes for RCA's 10th anniversary CD collection of Airplane songs, offers a fan's notes of the band. Drawing on interviews with the many musicians and others who wandered through Airplane on its way to the heights of musical history, Tamarkin chronicles the course of the band as it soared to its early successes, floated through in-fighting and excessive drug use, and eventually crashed and burned-out in the late '60s and early '70s. Tamarkin effectively traces the ways that band members' egos and their creative differences both molded Airplane and brought it to its demise. He efficiently narrates the early days when its founding members Marty Balin, Paul Kantner and Jorma Kaukonen played folk rock clubs in the Bay area and then, joined by Grace Slick in 1966, took off into new musical directions, changing rock music forever along with bands like Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Grateful Dead. Tamarkin weaves his own adoring interpretations of each song from almost every album into his chronological narrative of the band's history, demonstrating that Airplane's music often reflected the days of their lives. He provides an epilogue in which he brings readers up-to-date on the band's members and a complete discography. Although Tamarkin's hagiographic portrait of the band is hardly objective, his friendship with and complete access to the players in this story certainly makes his account the definitive one.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"A definitive history of the San Francisco band...thorough and colorful." -- Los Angeles Times, March 16, 2003

An exhaustive treatment--an absolute trove for those with an Airplane itch--of what was an exhilarating, but exhausting, time." -- Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2003

Fred Dellar Mojo There's a cliché about how certain rock publications induce the reader to immediately head for the record racks and once more indulge in the described music. But, cliché or not, Got a Revolution! is the kind of book that achieves exactly that aim. It's a superb (and hefty) chunk of writing that documents every twist and turn in the ever-evolving life of a great American band -- the basis not just for an engrossing TV documentary but for a whole damn series. The amazing thing is that Jeff Tamarkin delivers nothing but the truth. Hollywood scriptwriters could hardly come up with anything so attention-grabbing. Now excuse me while I replay Jefferson Airplane Takes Off and Surrealistic Pillow for the first time in years. Damn Tamarkin, he's got me hooked! -- Review

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Atria; 1 edition (June 3, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671034030
• ISBN-13: 978-0671034030
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #877,588 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

For more than two and a half decades, Jeff Tamarkin has been one of the most respected and prolific music journalists in the country. For 15 years he was Editor of Goldmine, the bible of record/CD collectors. Prior to that, he served as the first Editor of CMJ and as Editor of Relix. He was also the first Editor of Grateful Dead Comix, has written for dozens of publications, including Billboard, Pulse, Creem, Mojo, Newsday, Harp, Boston Phoenix, Tracks and ICE, and has contributed to the Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music and the All-Music Guide. He has written the liner notes for more than 70 CDs, including most of the Jefferson Airplane catalog, as well as related CDs by Hot Tuna, Jefferson Starship and solo albums by the members of those bands. Jeff has also served on the Nominating Committee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and as a consultant to the Grammys. As a consultant to the Music Club CD label, he assisted in releasing over 180 reissues and compilations, in styles ranging from jazz to country to pop. Got a Revolution! The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane (Atria Books) was his first book. Published in June 2003, it was the first biography of this legendary San Francisco band, and was written with the cooperation of all of the band members. From 2002-2006 Jeff has been the Editor of Global Rhythm, the leading magazine for world music and global culture. He is currently the Associate Editor of JazzTimes. He lives in Hoboken, NJ, with his wife, the novelist and Boston Globe book columnist Caroline Leavitt, and their son, Max.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The First and Definitive Tribute to Jefferson Airplane, June 14, 2003

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Got a Revolution! : The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane (Hardcover)

I have in my treasure-trove of personal memorabilia a letter from a friend, postmarked from San Francisco in September 1965, where he describes hanging out with a newly formed band with the strange name of "Jefferson Airplane" and auditioning to be their lead singer. He didn't make the band; thus, when their debut album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, was released in mid-1966, he was not on it. My local record store didn't carry it, and no one who worked there had ever heard of them. How things would change within less than a year, when a song called "Somebody to Love" was all over the radio and Jefferson Airplane was all over television.

Jefferson Airplane was a swirling mass of contradictions. Their fan club slogan, "Jefferson Airplane Loves You," was perfect for the Summer of Love, yet the band was split into two, sometimes three, contentious camps. Their politics were extreme radical left; they made no bones about embracing Red China, yet if they had ever appeared in that country, they would have undoubtedly wound up underneath some tanktread. They also embraced, and utilized, the capitalist system in their business dealings to the hilt. And while espousing an idealistic communal style that publicly eschewed materiality, they were poster child limousine liberals. Their music was by turns brilliant and crap, with some of it standing up after hundreds of listenings over three and one-half decades, while others were unlistenable from Day One. Yet their influence on the culture for several mad, insane years was undeniable.

Jeff Tamarkin chronicles the entire process from the beginning to the present in GOT A REVOLUTION!, which is a history of Jefferson Airplane (and its offshoots) collectively and its members individually. It is an amazing work on a number of levels. Tamarkin was able to obtain the cooperation of almost all of the individuals directly or indirectly involved, and he deals with conflicting versions of events colored by time, perspective, and drug-induced illusion. He is an unabashed fan of the band --- to even contemplate a work of this scope and complexity, one would have to really love, or really hate, them --- yet his account of the band, if not the times in which they lived, is surprisingly objective. Grace Slick and Paul Kantner come off the worst, in terms of their wild and destructive behavior, and yet even they possessed some redemptive qualities, outside of whatever musical talent they were blessed with.

Tamarkin additionally does an excellent job of tracing the history of each member of the group, the events surrounding them, and the band members' individual and collective discography. I was constantly and continuously impressed with Tamarkin's accuracy with respect to events involving the band. Though not directly in any of the events that he describes, I was a bystander at several of them (the infamous Akron Rubber Bowl concert of 1972 being but one) and his ability to put the reader into the setting while getting it right is incredible.

While he occasionally lets his worldview color secondary events (the Black Panthers were, alas, not the innocent victims he infers them to be, and Ronald Reagan's presidency couldn't have ignored AIDS for several years before declaring the condition a national emergency in 1981 because he wasn't elected until 1981), he does get everything about the Airplane right while including, well, damn near everything, from Grace Slick's notorious appearance in blackface on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, to the infamous record jacket cupcake tracing, to Marty Balin, valiantly but in vain, single-handedly taking on a contingent of Hell's Angels while the band played on.

A history of Jefferson Airplane was overdue; that the first one should also be the definitive one is a tribute to Tamarkin and his work. It is impossible to read GOT A REVOLUTION! without going to the record collection and pulling out records with titles like Surrealistic Pillow, Crown of a Creation, Volunteers, and After Bathing at Baxters, and listening to them over and over again. If they are not a soundtrack to a life, they are at least the theme of it. And GOT A REVOLUTION! is the story of it. Highly recommended.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good history lesson for those who weren't there, August 14, 2003

By 

eclectictastes "eclectictastes" (Columbus, OH USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Got a Revolution! : The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane (Hardcover)

Because I was too young to be aware of them during the 60s, my first memory of this group was thru the songs Miracles and Runaway during the 70s and it's Starship period. Although I have certain fondness for these songs, many older fans view this era as lacking compared to their Airplane material. Even more fans find their 80s stuff less appealing...a sentiment with which I happen to agree. (We Built This City has to be one of the more excruciating songs of the 80s.)

Learning about the Airplane thru articles and Behind the Music episodes, I was not impressed. All the members struck me as extremely self involved, childish, drama prone and spoiled. There seemed to be a lingering bitterness especially in regards to Marty Balin's feelings toward Grace Slick. But since the 60s are a continuing source of fascination for me, I picked up this book.

Reading the book, I'm still not impressed with the individuals in the band as people. (No one comes off as particularly pleasant) But I did come away with an appreciation for their desire to push the envelope with their music. Even Grace Slick who has often appeared to take a blase attitude toward her music and life in general is shown as a relatively strong composer and musician.

Tamarkin is effective at capturing the environment and atmosphere of San Francisco in the 60s and 70s. He also gives a fuller if not complete picture of peripheral band members such as Papa John Creach, Signe Anderson (the original female singer of Airplane) and others. We also learn of the band's failed business dealings and contract disputes. Overall it's a good history of the culture of the 60s and all it's craziness.

I'd recommend that one read Joel Selvin's Summer of Love as a companion to this book. Those not familiar with the history will receive a fuller picture as a result.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE AIRPLANE HISTORY THAT FANS HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR!, September 27, 2005

By 

s.ferber (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Got a Revolution! : The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane (Hardcover)

I had waited impatiently for many years for someone to tackle a complete history of one of my favorite bands, Jefferson Airplane, and when I finally saw the book in my local store, and then the author's name on the book itself, I knew right away that all would be well. I had enjoyed Jeff Tamarkin's wonderfully well-written, impeccably researched, enthusiastic and informative liner notes for various Airplane and Hot Tuna CDs for quite a while, and sensed that he was the perfect man to handle this job. Happily, that indeed turns out to be the case, and his Airplane history, "Got a Revolution: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane," featuring all those qualities that made his liner notes such a joy, is the volume that I and many others had been waiting for. Tamarkin not only gives us a thorough history of this seminal San Francisco group--starting in 1965, when Marty Balin (nee Martyn Buchwald) decided to put a new kind of band together--but also follows it through its dissolution in 1972 and on to its various offshoots (Jefferson Starship, Hot Tuna, KBC Band, etc.). Covering the pre-hippy days of the mid-'60s, through the Nixonian years and right on to J.A.'s reunion in 1989, Tamarkin also gives us a concise primer of a fascinating period of recent history. The book is replete with details of the band's principals but not exhaustingly so; that is, it never gets bogged down with excess back story, but rather gives us all the info we need to understand all the band members as fully fleshed-out people, limiting their back biographies to quick 10-page chapters. I have been a fan of Marty Balin, Paul Kantner, Grace Slick, Spencer Dryden and especially Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady for almost 40 years now, and still found an incredible amount of unknown information about them in this fast-moving history. (Spencer Dryden was Charlie Chaplin's nephew?!?! Who knew?) With chapters arranged in cliffhanger fashion, with a fascinating cast of characters and with many astounding stories, this book really does pull a reader in. And yet, Tamarkin does not yield to the temptation to sensationalize his tale. Indeed, to his credit, he admits right up front that there remain many "Airplane mysteries," and lets it go at that. Yes, there are many juicy stories (I love the one about Jack sitting in the mud puddle on DMT, and Grace's escapades in Germany...not to mention that Reality D. Blipcrotch episode!), but many readers, I suspect, will be surprised that this book remains fairly levelheaded, with a minimum of wild sex and drug anecdotes. The anecdotes ARE there, but only enough to give us a feel for the time, place and characters. (One gets the feeling that Tamarkin could regale us with even juicier tidbits over a few drinks one evening.) The author has been given access to virtually every principal character in the Jefferson Airplane story, and the hundreds of hours of insider interviews have helped make this history practically definitive.
On another note, I myself work as a copy editor and proofreader, and thus am happy to report that the book has also been put together virtually faultlessly. I only counted four typos in its entire 400+-page length, and all those were of the punctuational variety. The rare photographs on display are truly special (I just love the one of Jorma in his Cub Scout uniform!), and the book's index is perfectly composed and quite handy when keeping track of the history's large cast of characters. If there is one complaint that I would lodge--and it is a very minor one--it is that in the book's final third, more space has been given over to the exploits of Jefferson Starship than Hot Tuna. As a fan who has seen Tuna some hundred times in concert at this point, but who has never had much use for post-"Dragonfly" Starship, I would have wished for a little more parity here, but I suppose it could be argued that Starship was composed of more JA members than was Tuna, so I'm willing to let the point slide. Besides, this is a mere personal quibble. The fact remains, Jeff Tamarkin has done all fans of Jefferson Airplane a tremendous service with his wonderful book. I have read it twice already, and will surely refer to it often in the years to come. Thanks, Jeff!