Jefferson Airplane – Live At San Francisco Mime Troupe Appeal Party – 1965 – Nights At The Roundtable: Mini-Concert Edition

Jefferson Airplane: Folk-Rock ensemble available for your next dance, prom or Birthday Party.  Reasonable rates. Call now.

Click on the link here for Audio Player: Jefferson Airplane – Live at The Calliope Warehouse – San Francisco Mime Troupe Appeal Party – November 6, 1965 – KSAN-FM

A bit of  Rock history tonight. In what was billed as the first Bill Graham production, a fund raiser for the San Francisco Mime Troupe on November 6, 1965 featuring, among others, The Jefferson Airplane.

As you will most likely notice by the picture above, the band looks mostly familiar, except for the lead singer. Signe Anderson was, for all intents and purposes, the original “face that launched a thousand trips” before Grace Slick entered the picture. Grace was otherwise occupied with another band, The Great Society, co-founded by then-husband Darby Slick. Signe was deeply influenced by the Folk scene and was a well-known singer around the local folk and Jazz clubs in the Bay Area. She departed the band in 1966, officially because of her pregnancy and expecting her first child. But the inside news was intense in-fighting between her and the band and the band’s complete dislike for Signe’s husband, who was a member of The Merry Pranksters. It’s all well-documented and makes for good reading, if you are remotely interested in that period in music history.

In any event, here is one of those early performances by the fledgling Jefferson Airplane before they rocketed to stardom. Sadly, only an eleven minute clip exists from what was most likely a much longer set and broadcast of the party.

The sound is so-so. Stereo, but it shows it’s age not too well. But as I always say with history – you have to take what you can get if it means not getting anything at all.

Enjoy anyway.

PFM – Live in Osaka – 1975 – Past Daily Backstage Weekend

Put a head on the shoulders of the 70s.

Click on the link here for Audio Player – PFM In Concert from Osaka – November 25, 1975

PFM were one of those bands who came to epitomize the true eclectic nature of the 70s. The changes that began in the mid 1960s matured and took off by the early 70s and Rock was no longer about just one thing – it became a testing ground for lots of things.

One of the first of the Italian Progressive bands to achieve worldwide popularity (thanks to a few forward thinking folks and the efforts of Keith Emerson whose vanity label Manticore helped put them on the map in the U.S.), PFM opened up a whole new avenue of musical expression – that blending of Jazz, electronica, and technical virtuosity into one unit. It wasn’t music to dance to (although some people tried) and it had no top 40 appeal, but it had huge appeal for people who wanted more from their experience than catchy hooks and hummable tunes. It was, for all intents and purposes, an extension of the musical promise of Frank Zappa, where music demanded to be listened to and not at and it was designed to motivate the brain and not so much the feet.

The end result was a hugely influential movement in music which found its way into a lot of genres as a result. When you consider that PFM was heavily listened to and enjoyed by such a diverse range of bands as Aerosmith and Metallica to Radiohead, you realize they were on to something.

Going through a series of breakups and reformations over the years, PFM have occasionally surfaced, often with personnel changes. They went through a direction change in the 1980s which took them to more commercial acceptance, but they gradually regained their roots and went back to what they were best known for doing; trudging new roads. 

This weekend it’s a concert performed in Osaka Japan on November 25, 1975. The band had just released Chocolate Kings and were touring for the first time with their new lead singer, Bernardo Lanzetti who was not only fluent in English, but also spent his college years in Texas.

Chocolate Kings, incidentally was a slang term used by Italians to describe the huge influx of American troops in Italy after the war. They all came armed with buckets of Hershey’s Bars and subsequently were the magnets of every kid on every street in Rome.

So a jump into some Prog this weekend, compliments of one of the legendary early Italian practitioners – and the reason why Rock Without Borders became just that –  no borders.

If In Concert – 1972 – Nights At The Roundtable: Mini-Concert Edition

If – a band you probably wouldn’t know about unless a: you were around at the time or, b: You got hold of a huge record collection.

Click on the link here for Audio Player: If – Recorded live in concert at The Paris Theater – 1972

An undeservedly obscure band tonight. If got started in 1969. They were considered to be one of the first Jazz-Rock-Progressive groups on the scene. They had 8 albums out, all which sold reasonably well. Were regularly praised in the Press, toured extensively and managed to make virtually no dent in the U.S., despite most all of their albums simultaneously released here and in the UK. I remember when the two labels they were on, Capitol and United Artists, did a lot of promotion and heavy publicity. But it didn’t click.

If lasted until 1975 when they broke up and went off in different directions – landing in bands as diverse as Procol Harum and Ted Nugent. What might have happened if they got the attention they deserved, or even the airplay they were seeking, things no doubt would have gone differently. If were, for all intents and purposes, ahead of their time. And sometimes being ahead of the curve means you have to wait an awfully long time for it to come around to you.

Lately, they’ve achieved underground “must hear” status with a lot of collectors and have been “discovered” by a number of people who missed them the first time around, or who were distracted by the flood of other groups all vying for the same attention in the early 70s.

As testimony that the band weren’t your average bunch of disgruntled musicians looking for a new sound, here is one of the rare recordings of a concert they performed at The Paris Theater in London in 1972. This was part of the BBC In Concert series that made its way to the fabled BBC Transcription Service (a destination that saved a lot of otherwise lost recordings), and from all accounts, appears to be the only one preserved.

1972 was an interesting year – if you discount an election, Vietnam, the dawn of Watergate and a lot of people discovering Cocaine for the first time.

There were flourishes of brilliance to be had among the mayhem. If was one of them.