Got a Revolution!
Jeff Tamarkin
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2003 Atria Books
ISBN: 0671034030

The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane.

Formed in San Francisco in 1965, Jefferson Airplane helped pave rock's psychedelic road of the 1960s & 1970s.

Jeff Tamarkin wrote the liner notes for RCA's 10th anniversary CD collection of Airplane songs. Now, drawing on years of interviews with the musicians & many others who wandered through Airplane on its way to the heights of musical history, he has chronicled the flight of this band as it soared to success, coasted through monumental in-fights & the drug use of the time, to its inevitable crash & burn.

Jeff Tamarkin records the ways band members' egos & their creative differences both molded Airplane & brought about its demise. He tells of the early glory days when its founding members Marty Balin, Paul Kantner & Jorma Kaukonen played folk rock clubs in the Bay area & then, joined by Grace Slick in 1966, took off into new directions, changing rock music forever along with bands like Quicksilver Messenger Service & the Grateful Dead.

This adoring fan also weaves his interpretations of each song into his narrative of the band's history, demonstrating that Airplane's music often reflected the days of their lives.

The Epilogue brings readers up-to-date on the band members together with a complete discography. Through his friendship, the author has drawn a definitive portrait of a group whose inspiration became part of a time filled with astonishing music.

Jefferson Airplane's smash hits Somebody to Love & White Rabbit provided the soundtrack to the Summer of Love, virtually inventing the era's signature pulsating psychedelic music, & came to personify the decade's radical counterculture. Their appearances at the landmark Monterey Pop, Woodstock, & 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.

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 each other -- brilliant, individualistic artists who became the living embodiment of the sex, drugs, & rock'n'roll lifestyle.

Got a Revolution! tells it all, the experimentation, the shifting of personnel, the squabbles & the egos, & Jeff Tamarkin has faithfully recorded all the trials & tribulations of this group of original rock'n'rollers. I prefer to remember their music as a part of the soundtrack to an amazing era of personal innovation & public transformation.

Got a Revolution! is for Airplane aficionadoes who want to remember the players' lives as well as their music.
(03/28/04)

Rebecca