Crown of Creation
Jefferson Airplane; "Share a Little Joke"; from my parents' collection
I’ve said it before with a slightly different formation, but I’ll say it again anyway: I don’t know anything about Jefferson Airplane. The experience I have listening to them is mediated, drifting in through a meandering pop culture fog: a swirl of psychedelic fonts, the drop of “White Rabbit” in a movie like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or some TV show trying to signify "drug trip" in under four seconds. The song, the band, the idea of them means something before the music even plays.
So when I sat on a lawn in the Midwest and watched Jefferson Starship—the reformed Jefferson Airplane—play a county fair, It felt like performance art. This was one night of a three-night fair lineup, headlining Friday, not Saturday. In previous years, it was Smash Mouth. And there I was, sitting with my in-laws, watching a pantomime of something I’d never lived through, nostalgia for someone else’s culture. But maybe that’s the only way to encounter Crown of Creation: as an echo reverberating through culture, bouncing off of the artistic production of other acts. I hadn’t even heard it yet at that point, but somehow I already knew how it would feel: heavy, hollow, and stretching to reach for something it knew it couldn’t touch.
Released in August of '68, Crown of Creation is Jefferson Airplane’s fourth studio album, and maybe their most musically cohesive. It’s also their most haunted—mostly by sound effects; you can decide for yourself whether they’re the Edgar Allen Poe kind of ghost or the Scooby Doo kind. Gone is the loose, dreamy optimism of Surrealistic Pillow—that earlier record where Grace Slick floated over the backing tracks like an oracle and rebellion still sounded like a good time. On Crown, the rebellion is scorched earth.
The songs are compact, mostly under four minutes, but dense. There’s some solid interlocking counterpoint from Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady’s guitar and bass work, something I could have aspired to when I was younger, while vocal duties rotate across the group. The effect is kaleidoscopic and tense—each voice sounds like it’s emerging from a different dark place: disaffected, paranoid, or mournful.
The lyrics make this discomfort plain. The title track, borrowing lines from John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, sneers at blind faith and social conformity. “Lather” feels like a bedtime story for the death of innocence. “House at Pooneil Corners” sounds like the last song playing before the bomb hits. This isn’t a protest album in the typical sense—it’s a report from the inside of the fallout shelter, reactive, disillusioned, and incisive. The shockwave rippled through, as it would for other cultural movements. The ideal of flower power burned up with the fallout; what’s left is critique, ambiguity, and an uneasy individualism.
Still, and perhaps despite the mushroom cloud clad cover art, the band doesn’t retreat into nihilism. Even amid sarcasm and gloom, there's a fragile hope that something meaningful might still be salvaged. Maybe that’s why the Airplane transformed into a Starship: the frontier became diffuse—it’s everywhere now, enabled by our rapidly-iterating culture.
And here’s the part that sticks with me, from those years ago, perched on my blanket on the fairgrounds: I was taking off in the opposite direction of the Airplane. They were the countercultural mavens on the far edge of the world, who eventually drifted from the promised land at the edge of the ocean toward a quieter middle. I was in the middle, staring west, looking for new horizons. They started in San Francisco and spiraled out into the plains; I stared longingly toward San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, trying to understand the historical moment and cultural cache of these places before I could ever make my way.
Verdict: Set it free
When writing this, I found myself asking “Where has he been, where is he now?“ about the younger version of me, sitting on the blanket—this is from the song “Share a Little Joke“. Do you ever ask yourself a similar question?