Friction makes sparks;sparks make fire;
Fire makes heat and the heat will endure
Till the animal comes with a ferocity
Not unlike you and me in the throes of Poetry
The new Jefferson Starship album may ultimately prove to be better than what the conservative press generally considers the band's classic - Red Octopus. Windows of Heaven is closer in spirit to Blows Against the Empire, Grace and Paul's solo period, and Dragonfly. Red Octopus, after all, was the Jefferson Starship's first step towards commercial reconciliation after an anarchic few years in a post-Airplane mode; Red Octopus was produced with commerce in mind. It was a good effort, but the space given to the band was stunted, everything kept down to a clean 31/2 to 4 minutes per tune - which is not the length of time we necessarily want a rocking improvisational unit full of conceptual splendor to be tied down to. Windows of Heaven is a glorious 60 minutes and the sound is luxurious, tempestuous, passionate.
There are negatives in this Red Octopus/Windows of Heaven comparison. Marty Balin's ballads never result in a new "Miracles," but this is somewhat overshadowed by his singing, which is warmer and more beautiful than ever (I am not exaggerating). On "Later On" and "Ways of Love," he avoids his tendency to traverse the lounge on his way to soul, and the vocal vamping is beautiful. Possibly more important are his contributions to the Starship's harmonic tapestry which remains, to this day, some of the most interesting harmony work in rock/pop music.
Secondly, everybody who is a true fan of the band is going to miss Grace Slick as far as this improbabale comparison with Red Octopus goes. The most artistically driven of all the women rock artists from the sixties, Grace is irreplaceable. Grace appears on one song on the new album, " I'm on Fire," and her presence is like a tiger sinking its teeth into your flesh. The upside? Paul Kantner is an organizational genius. How else describe the tricky job of keeping a great band together while others with more sales potential come and go. He makes the complicated mess of choosing a credible replacement seem easy. Darby Gould was an excellent choice in earlier versions of the Starship. She can be heard on the live Starship album Deep Space, Virgin Sky and she is present on "Shadowlands" on "Windows of Heaven." It's a great song about social/political/sexual commitment, with twin female voices intertwined with Kantner's:
It's like the first time you really fell in love
And you're both on the battlelines;
And it's the first time that you're really fucking too;
Alive in bed with the woman you're fuckin,
Who's fucking you.
And the world opens up:
She is essential, monumental,
Better than Jesus.
She's a guide through the chaos,
A road to the passion;
Between the earth and sky
Where love is like a drug.
And everything is different.
And we two will love each other.
And we will still remember our first kiss,
As the action takes over.
No thought of circumstance
Or consequence as
All the rules change.
And she's a specialist in darkness
In the shadowlands.
I love this "fucking" section, because it reminds us who was there in the beginning, back when rock was still being heavily censored. Back in 1966, a song had to be deleted from the first Airplane album because of the word "trips." A few years later, the band created controversy through their use of motherfucker, etc. If you are going to resort to this language, you better know what you're doing with it, and "Shadowlands" is a shining example of sexual invocation.
Diana Mangano is the main female presence on Windows of Heaven. Her voice is every bit as capable as Slick's or Gould's. My favorite peaks would include her harrowing wail on "all our lives in the whirlwind" on the title track; the descending melody on "The Light" that harkens back to the Airplane, as it spills over into the lap of Kantner's soul-catching, twelve-string arpeggios, which in turn reminds us of The Byrds. She's perfect backup for Balin's ballads, and adds total propulsion to the harmonic soundscape. Undeniably beautiful singing. (The German import has two additional songs which feature Mangano as lead vocalist - I haven't heard them.)
Which brings us to the question of why the sickly, conservative, rock press is unable to figure out a way to discuss music without being totally irrelevant with their four-sentence summations. Or why, when they are given column space, it has to be used on a band that is making ten zillion dollars a day.
Kantner is a poet. He's never been as comfortable with his voice as he is on Windows of Heaven. The usual Kantner structures - verses that are prettier than the choruses, thick musical textures, lyrical digressions and odd vocal juxtapositions, spoken bits, asides and simple chord structures meandered to death, with Jack Casady (Master of Thunder) rumbling underneath - my friends let me be the first to point out all over again that this is a classic sound. Kantner's effluence is indulged. Although Kantner isn't much of a wordsmith in the Leonard Cohen/Elvis Costello sense, he uses rarefied, stripped-down language to define his unique domain. Some of the best moments come when the music subsides and Kantner is left reciting. Like in his listing of American icons on "Let Me Fly:" "Like Columbus & Amerigo Vespucci, n Lewis and Clark & Ramsey Clark & Ellsburg," which, in a typical stroke of Kantneresque savvy, also includes Nixon, and Reagan and Bush" as it dissolves into:
Get on the bandwagon,
Get with it;
Hide in the mouth of the dragon;
The heart of the empire,
In full disguise,
In total desire.
Kantner suggests demeanor and bearing. He sees things on a very grand scale. His situation as an artist is somewhat like that of Orson Welles during the release of A Touch of Evil or Macbeth. Commerce had disappeared; critics were preoccupied. But we don't want him to go the way of Captain Beefhart or Grace Slick (two artists whose exodus from rock was equivalent to what we would have suffered if Miles Davis had quit after Sketches of Spain.)
Who else will bother to remind us to "Go out and stuff the Universe into your eyes?"
One way to begin this assault on
the universe, it to go out and stuff this record into your head.
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