“Saturday afternoon | Yellow clouds rising in the noon
Acid incense and ballons | Saturday afternoon
People dancing everywhere | Loudly shouting I don’t care”
August 17th, 1969. Picture waking up in (or somewhere near) your tent at Woodstock. In my experience, most live tracks don’t convey much about their setting: you might get the echo of a music hall or the vastness of an outdoor stage. With Jefferson Airplane’s “Won’t You Try / Saturday Afternoon,” you get the whole shebang — you can hear people wiping the sleep out of their eyes, you can hear the high wearing off from the previous night (courtesy of The Who). Forget Real Estate as your alarm clock, Jefferson Airplane was the alarm clock to over three-hundred thousand scantily clad concertgoers.
I mean no offense to the hard-of-hearing when I say: if you don’t get shivers around 3:50, you should consider getting your ears checked. Grace Slick’s voice must be tuned to the resonant frequency of my spine. Remind yourself that this is a live recording — she woke up the masses with that voice. When most people think of Grace Slick, they picture a beautiful woman dressed in hippie garb belting into a microphone; I picture my ninth grade art teacher. The two bear no physical resemblance — Mr. Rob Montgomery often sported a grey mustasche — but then again, I haven’t seen Grace Slick in the news lately. Mr. Montgomery did, however, enjoy retelling a story from his earlier days involving the singer. While working as a security guard at a Jefferson concert in Toronto, Mrs. Slick took a seat next to Rob prior to the performance. Having nothing particularly stimulating to offer in conversation, he proceeded to ask the singer if she cared for a bite of the sandwich his mother had prepared for him. She thanked him and took a bite… and to this day, Mr. Montgomery remembers the exact contents of the sandwich. I digress.
Is there any truth to “jefferson airplane” referring to a makeshift roach-clip made from a paper match?
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