Blows Against the Empire
Subtitled ‘the soundtrack from the novel of the same name’, Blows Against The Empire was an excursion into science fiction by Paul Kantner and Grace Slick, credited to Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship. It is an album I own and have done for a while, but have mixed feelings about. It is, as they say, something of a curate’s egg.
The suite of songs is a rock opera of sorts, and certainly a concept album. The album blurb says the plot is that:
Young people hijack a starship and establish a brave new world in a distant galaxy, light-years away from the earthbound reality of Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War.
Far out.
It was recorded at Wally Heider’s in San Francisco at a time when all the hip Bay-area musicians were in semi-permanent residence–Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Santana and CSNY amongst many others. They crop up on each other’s albums, shared each other’s substances and swapped ideas around. I have no doubt that substances had been shared during the making of this album: David Crosby recently said that Kantner and Slick effectively invented micro-dosing on Owsley Stanley’s acid during this period.
I have friends who think this album is brilliant; I don’t, but bits of it are, although you have to struggle through the rest to find them. I’m not going to knock it too much, hippy-shit notwithstanding, despite having no problem knocking better albums. This is because, faults and all, I have a certain affection for it. To be sure, the Brit equivalent from the period–Hawkwind–has held up better, and too much of Blows Against the Empire is stoned plodding. But I still like Kantner’s banjo-driven take on Rosalie Sorrells’s The Baby Tree, and I like every track where Garcia and Kreutzmann/Hart appear to provide a solid musical underpinning, and I don’t just say that as a Deadhead: the musical quality is quantitatively better every single time. I like what Grace Slick does on this, which is not something I can always say.
And there’s Have You Seen The Stars Tonight? a Kantner/Crosby co-write, that goes on my 1970 playlist, even if the rest of the album doesn’t.
I listened on cd, but you can find it on Spotify. I couldn’t find the full album on YouTube.
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