Fact #146698
When:
Short story:
Jefferson Airplane play at Harmon Gymnasium, University Of California, Berkeley, California, USA.Full article:
Paul De Barros : In the fall of 1965, when the music scene in the Haight Ashbury was heating up and the campus of the University of California was boiling over with rebellion, I had the privilege of reviewing the Jefferson Airplane’s first concert on campus for the Daily Cal, UC Berkeley’s student newspaper. I was 18 years old, a veteran of the Free Speech Movement and, like so many of my contemporaries, convinced that our activism and its soundtrack were going to change the world.
Backstage, I met Paul Kantner, who proudly showed me his red Rickenbacker 12-string guitar, which produced such a wonderfully jangly sound, and he explained how he and the band, following Bob Dylan’s example, had made the transition from coffeehouse folk music to what in those days we called rock ‘n’ roll — not rock. Ralph J. Gleason, the jazz critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, was there, and he whispered a facetious aside about some gossip that had recently circulated about Dylan, making me feel like I was part of a world I had only witnessed from a distance before, growing up in Palo Alto and religiously reading Gleason’s columns every week.
part of the excitement about the Airplane was that their musicianship was so advanced. Jack Casady, the group’s bassist, plucked the strings of his electric bass guitar with his fingers, not his thumb, clearly showing he had a jazz background. And lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen obviously had listened to guitar players other than Chuck Berry and Scotty Moore.
But for randy young college boys, it was Toly (vocalist Signe Toly Anderson) who riveted our attention. She had that winsome, earnest folk female presence that drew us in like moths to a flame - Maria Muldaur, with the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, had a similar, if earthier allure - and when she sang Miriam Makeba’s Love Tastes Like Strawberries, or chimed in on Tobacco Road, The Airplane’s first live concert hit, we melted.
(Source : Seattle Times feature by Paul De Barros, February 3, 2016)
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Backstage, I met Paul Kantner, who proudly showed me his red Rickenbacker 12-string guitar, which produced such a wonderfully jangly sound, and he explained how he and the band, following Bob Dylan’s example, had made the transition from coffeehouse folk music to what in those days we called rock ‘n’ roll — not rock. Ralph J. Gleason, the jazz critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, was there, and he whispered a facetious aside about some gossip that had recently circulated about Dylan, making me feel like I was part of a world I had only witnessed from a distance before, growing up in Palo Alto and religiously reading Gleason’s columns every week.
part of the excitement about the Airplane was that their musicianship was so advanced. Jack Casady, the group’s bassist, plucked the strings of his electric bass guitar with his fingers, not his thumb, clearly showing he had a jazz background. And lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen obviously had listened to guitar players other than Chuck Berry and Scotty Moore.
But for randy young college boys, it was Toly (vocalist Signe Toly Anderson) who riveted our attention. She had that winsome, earnest folk female presence that drew us in like moths to a flame - Maria Muldaur, with the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, had a similar, if earthier allure - and when she sang Miriam Makeba’s Love Tastes Like Strawberries, or chimed in on Tobacco Road, The Airplane’s first live concert hit, we melted.
(Source : Seattle Times feature by Paul De Barros, February 3, 2016)