This was the last album with the group for both founder Marty Balin and drummer Spencer Dryden (although they did both appear on the June 1970 single "Mexico" and its B-side "Have You Seen the Saucers?"), signifying the end of the "classic" lineup. It also turned out to be the group's last all-new LP for two years as Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen devoted more of their energy to their embryonic blues group Hot Tuna, while Paul Kantner and Grace Slick released Blows Against the Empire and Sunfighter with various guest musicians and celebrated the birth of their daughter China in January 1971.
Background
Jefferson Airplane took a break from all touring and recording activity in the first three months of 1969, to allow Grace Slick to have surgery to remove nodes in her throat.[3] It was at this time that she began to break up with boyfriend Spencer Dryden in favor of the group's rhythm guitarist Paul Kantner; meanwhile, Casady and Kaukonen began performing as an unnamed duo in various clubs, a project which would eventually evolve into Hot Tuna.[3] The live album Bless Its Pointed Little Head was released in February and performed moderately well, charting at No. 17 on Billboard. After over a month of intensive rehearsals at the group's home studio at 2400 Fulton (known as "the big house"), they resumed recording at the end of March with live shows following at the end of April, including several new songs in the set list they had just laid down in the studio.[4]
Songs and recording
Volunteers was the group's first album recorded entirely in San Francisco, at Wally Heider's newly opened state-of-the-art 16-track studio.[3] The album was among the earliest 16-track recordings, with the back cover displaying a picture of the Ampex MM-1000 professional tape recorder used to record the album. Guest musicians included Jerry Garcia on pedal steel guitar, veteran session pianist Nicky Hopkins, future Airplane drummer Joey Covington on percussion, David Crosby and Stephen Stills. Sessions commenced on March 28 with backing tracks for Kantner's "We Can Be Together" and Slick's "Hey Fredrick" and continued until June 30 with the taping of Kaukonen's "Turn My Life Down", which featured Balin on lead and The Ace of Cups on backing vocals.[5] The sessions were held late at night, with Heider's assistant Ginger Muse noting that "they'd start drifting in around six in the evening when I was leaving, and they'd still be there when I came in at nine the next morning", with the janitor often having to vacuum around Grace sleeping on the studio couch.[6]
The album was marked by strong anti-war and pro-anarchism messages, particularly in the opening "We Can Be Together" (with provocative lines like "we are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent...and young") and the joint Crosby/Kantner/Stills composition "Wooden Ships" which describes the struggle for survival in the aftermath of a nuclear war.[7] The title track was inspired by a Volunteers of America (a religious charity similar to the Salvation Army) truck that woke singer Marty Balin one morning, which he and Kantner repurposed into a revolutionary anthem using the same strident riff as "We Can Be Together".[3] The song's original title was Volunteers of Amerika; spelling "America" as "Amerika" was a common practice used by leftists at the time to emphasize their dissatisfaction with the American government, as it references both German fascism and the Kafka novel Amerika. Gentler hippie themes of nature, communities and ecology are explored in Kantner's "The Farm" and Slick's "Eskimo Blue Day", while "Hey Fredrick" mixes blatantly sexual imagery with what Grace called an admission that "I'm flying so high that I know I'm going to burn my wings on the sun if I don't slow down".[6] Meanwhile, Dryden's "A Song for All Seasons" mocked contentious relations within the group, including a swipe at original manager Matthew Katz who it describes "skipped town with all your pay."[3]
Musically, the album is characterized by Jorma Kaukonen's expansive lead guitar parts on "Wooden Ships", his dueling solos on the lengthy jam section of "Hey Fredrick", and use of feedback on his cover of the traditional gospel-blues song "Good Shepherd". Tracks like "We Can Be Together", "Hey Fredrick" and "Eskimo Blue Day" are lengthy, multi-sectional compositions approaching the style of progressive rock, while others including "A Song for All Seasons", "Turn My Life Down" and "Volunteers" are shorter and more direct. Session player Nicky Hopkins provided his distinctive piano style to a number of tracks, as he did on albums by Quicksilver Messenger Service and Steve Miller Band that same year, and guested at the Airplane's set at Woodstock. Volunteers also featured the band experimenting with a country rock sound, particularly on "The Farm" and "Song for All Seasons". The brief avant-garde organ piece "Meadowlands" is credited to Lev Knipper, a Russian composer and member of the Soviet secret police.
The album provoked controversy with record label RCA over the use of profanity in lyrics such as "Up against the wall, motherfucker," which appears in "We Can Be Together". RCA Records had initially refused to allow the word "fuck" on the album until confronted with the fact that the label had already set a precedent by using it in the Haircast recording album. The offending word was mixed lower on the 45 RPM release to partially obscure it, but was censored on the album lyric sheet as "fred".[8] "Eskimo Blue Day" was also a point of contention, with its chorus line "the human name doesn't mean shit to a tree" repeated throughout.
Title and artwork
The original album title was Volunteers of Amerika but was shortened after objections from Volunteers of America, the religious charity who had inspired the name.[3] The front cover art featured a shot of the band in costume for the filming of a promotional video for "Martha" in October 1967, which was aired on the Perry Como Holiday Special later that year. The gatefold displayed two halves of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, while original copies also included an 11"x22" folded paper insert with lyrics, credits, and info on one side and a mock newspaper titled "Paz Progress" on the other side.[9]
Release
The album was set for an August 1969 release but delayed until November over fights with RCA regarding the lyrics and album artwork. Despite these controversies, the album was a commercial success. It peaked at No. 13 (becoming the band's fifth Top 20 record) on the Billboard album chart and received an RIAA gold certification within two months of its release.[10] It also became the band's first album to chart in the UK, peaking at No. 34.[11]
In addition to the usual two channel stereo version, a specially remixed four channel quadraphonic version of the album appeared in 1973. This was released on LP using the Quadradisc system. It was also released in quad reel-to-reel and 8-track tape tape formats. The quad mixes are different from stereo: "Hey Fredrick" features a different lead vocal along with different guitar lines and coda, "Volunteers" is a totally different recording, Kaukonen's guitar lines are different on "We Can Be Together", "Wooden Ships" lacks the opening sailboat sound effects and the backing vocals by Ace of Cups on "The Farm" are more prominent. A few tracks from the quad version were included in the three CD box set Jefferson Airplane Loves You, though on this release the four channel recordings are reduced to two channels due to the technical limitations of CD.
The 2004 CD re-release features five additional bonus tracks from the group's annual Thanksgiving concert at the Fillmore East, New York in 1969. The album was released again in 2009, along with the entirety of the group's live performance at the Woodstock Festival in 1969, as Jefferson Airplane Woodstock Experience.
Upon release, Ed Ward at Rolling Stone praised every track and concluded the members of the group were musical pioneers who "may raise the musical sophistication and complexity of rock and roll to new heights".[14] Robert Christgau at Village Voice was more guarded, stating "Everybody else seems to dig it a lot, and of course it's far from bad, but everybody may be wrong".[13]
Retrospective reviews have been favorable, with Jim Newsom at AllMusic calling it "a powerful release that neatly closed out and wrapped up the '60s", concluding that "listening to Volunteers is like opening a time capsule on the end of an era, a time when young people still believed music had the power to change the world".[12] David Bowling at The Daily Vault similarly enthused that "Volunteers remains a powerful anti-war statement cloaked in some of the best rock ‘n’ roll of the era",[16] while the original edition of The Rolling Stone Record Guide gave it five stars.
^"Jefferson Airplane--Volunteers". Discogs. Retrieved 2018-08-27. Recording dates for each track are given in liner notes of CD release--see 14th image.
^Considine, J.D.; Coleman, Mark; Evans, Paul; McGee, David (1992). "Jefferson Airplane". In DeCurtis, Anthony; Henke, James; George-Warren, Holly (eds.). Rolling Stone Album Guide. New York: Random House. p. 148.
^Doggett, Peter (2009). There's a Riot Going on: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars, and the Rise and Fall of the '60s. Canongate U.S. p. 362. ISBN978-1847671936.
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