Got a Revolution!: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane Paperback – July 19, 2005

What a great read this book is! It is hard to put down as the author keeps you hooked on the next installment so that you just motor on smoothly to the end.Sitting on my shelves is the first book I ever read on Jefferson Airplane, a 1969 book by Ralph Gleason, sandwiched between Hank Harrison's book on the Grateful Dead and the inevitable Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. Tamarkin's excellent tome now joins it and will probably become the definitive word on the subject. It certainly fills the void that has existed for some years since the Gleason book was published and the Airplane metamorphosed into Starship. Coming relatively soon after Dennis McNally's biography of the Dead, these books between them shine a spotlight on the musical and social revolution that was spawned in the 1960's and for which San Francisco assumed the mantle of world leader.Jeff Tamarkin, as others have alluded too, bases his book on his prior research and knowledge of the central characters involved. He has done a tremendous job in being fair to everyone which is to be lauded. He does not skip over the relationships between the band members and the cast of others who flit throught the story, he does not glorify nor condemn the use and abuse of chemicals nor does he try to do anyone down. His writing displays his skill with words which he has honed over the years in his other job and the end result is an excellent read, informative with an insider's view and an outsider's perception.To me the most telling part of the tale is the story of Matthew Katz whom the author notes would not be interviewed but answered e-mails. That must be an extraordinary tale in of itself. Personally I find thet the author has a gift of bringing the characters alive so that we feel that we know them. Indeed there are many diehard fans who follow the band as it is presently constituted almost everywhere and are long past being considered starstruck.This book is the story of a community. It places the band in the context of the times and yet at the same time portrays them as human beings as well as star musicians. It is a story of fame and closeness, of rivalry and emnity, of individuality and shared companionship. I am sure that some who read this will be shocked, perhaps awed, by some of the events contained within the book and that many will be fascinated by the twists and turns described therein.Jeff Tamarkin has certainly succeeded with this labour of love in bringing the inside story of Jefferson Airplane to the world. His story deserves every success and it is a story that anyone interested in the era or the music should read. At least twice.

When Paul Kantner died recently (RIP Paul!), I went looking for a book about Jefferson Airplane and was surprised I had not previously come across this masterpiece.I've at least a hundred rock bios, so feel I have a good basis for comparing and rating them. Got a Revolution is one of the best! The enormous amount of detail may not make it the perfect book for casual fans, but it is the requisite bible for aficionados of not only Jefferson Airplane, but the entire sixties San Francisco psychedelic movement. Like Johnny Rogan's classic book about The Byrds, it is an impeccably researched, minutely detailed history of one of the most original and culturally influential bands of all time.I get bored with rock bios that are simply one debauched drug or sex tale after another. Certainly some of those stories are interesting and also important to understanding the arc of a band (usually why the band or the quality of the music, or both, disintegrated). Tamarkin includes many such tales, but keeps his focus mostly on the music itself, album by album, track by track, from the band's early days at the Matrix on Fillmore Street in Cow Hollow up through Jefferson Starship and finally just Starship.As someone else mentioned, one does not come away from this book with an extremely positive view of any of the individuals in Jefferson Airplane as people. They all had their faults, but you gotta love 'em. They were unique cats and the tensions and competition between them helped drive the band for a long time. I once ran into Paul Kantner at Café Trieste, a coffee shop in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. I shook his hand and said, "Paul, you're one of my heroes!" He said, "That's pretty scary man," but he was as nice as could be.

I was a fan of the Jefferson Airplane in the late 1960s, thinking at its best the band had an edge and made the most incisive, creative rock of the era. Crown of Creation, the live album Bless It's Pointed Little Head, and the really unprecedented studio work After Bathing at Baxter's were my faves of their productions. I saw them perform live twice, but my impressions of those concerts are less vivid than the instant recall I can summon of their recordings. The music came flooding back to me again and again as I read Jeff Tamarkin's satisfyingly clear and reasonably comprehensive history of this band, which experienced a rather meteoric rise and long tailing-off, almost from the first in the foreground of America's culture wars.Tamarkin is an accomplished, veteran music journalist, who conducted well over a 100 interviews with the Airplane and (later) Starship's principal performers -- Marty Balin, Paul Kantner, Jorma Kaukonen, Jack Casady, Grace Slick, drummers Spencer Dryden and Skip Spence -- as well as later recruits and supporting staffers. He gets the facts straight, recognizes and delivers telling quotations, advances the chronology clearly, has affection for the band and it's music, but also adopts the distance of a cool observer, not a rabid fan. The pleasures these musicians experienced in creating their unique, brilliantly hard and provocatively colored sound are made palpable, as are the excesses and conflicts that inevitably arose from their egos, acclamation, commercial successes and uses of substances legal and otherwise. Certain passages of Airplane high points are rendered precisely -- not only the path to glory of "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit," but the opening guitar screech of "The House at Pooneil Corner," and Balin's all-too-unremarked abilities as a writer of modern love songs ("It's No Secret," "Today," "Miracles").The author himself gets out of the way of the tale, showing the emergence of the individual talents and their commingling on the emergent San Francisco psychedelic scene in 1966-'67. His focus might be found to be somewhat too narrow, as these were richly turbulent times lived through by very flamboyant people, and in the reading I often wanted more context, more anecdotes, more detailed musical description, more more more. But that was because what I was getting was so evocative as to suggest the larger world (one I lived through at a distance, from a younger age than these players). Got a Revolution! is some 400 pages as is, assiduously documented and though the Airplane/Starship (and don't forget Hot Tuna or individual releases by Balin, Slick, Kantner or other bands Kaukonen and Casidy were involved with) might support a broader perspective, this picture is plenty rich enough. Of course it makes those of us who embraced this music upon its release return for further listening. And music lovers of today's youth who come on this book or the albums/singles themselves will be pressed to wonder at the freshness, complexity and renegade spirit that once graced popular music, but today seems not to.Very good book. If you're at all tempted, do buy and read it.

Very informative. It opened my eyes about what the members of one of my favourite groups were like. My son told me a saying: "Never meet your heros". Applies here.

A must for anyone who is an Airplane fan. Full of detail, fu8nny and interesting.

Complet, on peut difficilement faire mieux.C'est écrit en Anglais, mais quand il n'y a pas d'autre choix ... De toute façon les fans de Jefferson Airplane ont nécessairement un niveau acceptable dans cette langue, pour comprendre les paroles.

Brilliant!

one for me and one for me mate's 70th. He likes it, too.