Blows Against the Empire

Jefferson Starship, Paul Kantner

Product Details

• Audio CD (July 29, 1997)
• Original Release Date: 1970
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: RCA
• ASIN: B000002X2B
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Audio Cassette  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #116,958 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sciencie fiction master piece!, September 25, 1999

By A Customer

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.

37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Possibly the best thing by Jefferson Airplane/Starship, June 3, 2000

By	kireviewer (Sunnyvale, Ca United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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.

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars SF SF, March 24, 2002

By	John S. Ryan "Scott Ryan" (Silver Lake, OH) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.