Last week, while travelling by train and bothered by the surrounding chatter, I turned to my laptop and ended up finding music that I didn’t even know I had. Technically challenged, I have a strange disconnect with my own laptop—many underutilized features there. Desperate for good sounds, I came across Jefferson Airplane’s 2400 Fulton Street: An Anthology. My obssessive self has been listening to it every day since. Most of the songs I know, but haven’t heard in a very long time, and I’d forgotten how good they are. I’m particularly fond of a few of the more haunting tunes such as Today, Pretty as You Feel and Comin’ Back to Me.
It just happens that before I left for my trip, W unearthed a handful of my old ticket stubs—tickets from almost every movie theater in the Alexandria area (that you’ll no doubt see in future posts…ahhh, livin’ in the past), as well as a few concert tickets from the old Capital Centre in Largo, Maryland. A Jefferson Starship stub was among them.
Mistakenly thinking I had seen Jefferson Airplane, I did a little investigation to see just how the change to Starship came about. It seems that when Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady of the Jefferson Airplane spin-off group, Hot Tuna, showed no interest in coming together again, rhythm guitarist and singer, Paul Kantner, decided to form a band without them and named the altered unit Jefferson Starship. Consisting of the remaining members of Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship started rehearsals in January 1974 and kicked off their first tour in Chicago in March of the same year. By the time I saw them in October, they had just released their album Dragon Fly. Read more on Jefferson Starship here.
If you’re interested, have a listen at my playlist—I couldn’t find all my favorites, but found most, though I really wish Pretty as You Feel were among them…
