Customer Reviews

Volunteers

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

Great-sounding restoration of the classic LP with 6 alternate takes of the album's best tracks that, if anything, are better than the released versions. Booklet includes original LP artwork but no notes.

This to me is the last "real" JA album. Marty Balin left the following year, and the band's subsequent output (BARK, LONG JOHN SILVER and a poor live album) were just precursors to the inferior Jefferson Starship phase. This album is warm (Marty's beautiful vocal on Jorma's "Turn My Life Down" is one of his best), chilling (every time Grace opens her mouth, especially on the masterpieces "Eskimo Blue Day" and "Hey Frederick"), majestic (Paul's "We Can Be Together", the best of his leftist anthems; "Good Shepherd" with Jorma's regal wah wah; and especially "Wooden Ships", which is to me seven of the most amazing minutes of music ever), funny (Spencer Dryden's parody of pop stardom, "Song For All Seasons", and "The Farm" a sendup of the back-to-the-land movement that was big with the hippies in '69) and bizarre (the aforementioned Slick tunes and the weird little organ version of the Russian folk tune "Meadowlands", complete with goofy background talking). Overall an eclectic, dense, challenging work, the only trouble I have with VOLUNTEERS is the deep backseat taken by Marty Balin. His one songwriting credit are the lyrics to the title track, which was pretty pedestrian compared to the MC5's "Kick Out the Jams" or even Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth". Marty would return, front and center, to the Starship in a few years' time, but on this album--except for his beautiful singing on "Turn My Life Down" and "Wooden Ships"--he's sorely missed.

Although at the time this was originally issued, I had a couple of reservations, now I realize how great this album is. It captures the ambiance of a certain time and place in musical and cultural history like no other, except, perhaps, Quicksilver's first album. A glorious evocation of the hard musical edge of the hippy era.

Volunteers is the last really great Jefferson Airplane album. There is a good variety of types of music, from heavy/acid rock to light country satire on themselves, to the famous title track. I still enjoy listening to it.

I remember that Volunteers came out on LP, and a short time later a new version came out in Quadraphonic - a surround format that never caught on. For one reason or another, to make a Quad version of the album, they decided to re-record these tracks. Perhaps they were able to render the other four tracks from the original takes.

The point is, these are entirely different takes by the same band members a short time later. They don't play or sing them exactly the same: it is similar, but with some obvious differences. Volunteers starts off with a bit of a jam before Marty starts singing, and the lyrics include "one generation gone ahead, one generation went to bed, c'mon now, we can do it, we can do ANYTHING" and this is not in the original take. Wooden Ships starts right in on the music, with no boat sound effects of fading into the music. Hey Frederick has Grace experimenting with a different phrasing of some of the lyrics. The sound seems a bit brighter than the 2004 remaster.

Though the tracks were recorded for quad, they are presented in stereo for this release. It certainly would be interesting to have quad recordings by the Airplane and others published today in DTS or Dolby Digital.

If you love the Volunteers album, I do recommend you check out these alternate takes.

Also, if you have not heard Paul Kantner's "Blows Against The Empire", you might want to check it out. It could have been the last great Airplane album (it came out after Volunteers) except that it has a different lineup: only four members of the Airplane, and a variety of guests (including Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, David Crosby, and others). It also introduced the name Jefferson Starship, though the real band of that name came four years later.