Blows Against the Empire

In 1970 the San Fransisco band the Jefferson Airplane transformed themselves into the Jefferson Starship and in doing so created a new concept Album; Blows Against the Empire. Which earned a Hugo Award, the highest award in American Sci-Fi fandom. The first Hugo ever awarded a rock album.


By Kantner's admission, the underlying premise of the narrative was derived in part from the works of science fiction author Robert Heinlein, particularly the novel Methuselah's Children. Kantner went so far as to write to Heinlein to obtain permission to use his ideas. Heinlein wrote back that over the years, many people had used his ideas but Paul was the first one to ask for permission, which he granted.

BLOWS AGAINST THE EMPIRE (1970)

released by Paul Kantner

(reviewed by Samuel Fassbinder)

I have no idea where Nick Karn is going to put this release on his webpage -- on the Airplane page, on the Starship page, or on a separate page just for Paul Kantner releases, if anyone ever finds it there. There's a case to be made for each choice -- Blows Against The Empire comes at a time when the Airplane was still alive, and would have been put out as an Airplane album except for the fact that Jorma and Jack were skiing in Scandinavia at the time (and Marty Balin, as I recall, quit the band). The album itself has "Paul Kantner/ Jefferson Starship" written on its front cover, although this album sounds like nothing in the Jefferson Starship repertoire -- there's certainly no Craig Chaquico guitar or *cringe* John Barbata drumming on this album. The remastered release credits the album to "Paul Kantner." Paul did run the show on this one.

Paul has certainly done plenty of stuff since he shut down the old Jefferson Starship. What I remember reading was, that sometime way back in the 1980s, the old Jefferson Starship had voted at a band meeting to go on tour as a backup band for Journey, and at that point Kantner decided he couldn't sell out any further, so he quit the band and had his lawyer send them a letter telling the rest of the band that the name "Jefferson Starship" was his property. Or something like that. At any rate, sometime after that, the new version of "Jefferson Starship," which Paul calls "Jefferson Starship/ The Next Generation," is better as a cover band for old Airplane stuff than for anything new they write today. Basically it's Kantner, Balin, Casady, and some session guys, with Diana Mangano replacing Grace Slick on the female lead vocals.

At any rate, this 1970 release is a unique album -- Paul got Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, and David Crosby (among a star-studded cast of thousands) to contribute to this one, and it was nominated for a Hugo award (that's right, a Hugo) for Best Science-Fiction Album. The science-fiction theme of this one is powerful, but it develops slowly. The other main theme is the try-harder-to-celebrate earnestness developed through the demand for "Free minds/ Free bodies/ Free dope/ Free music" that permeated the hippie consciousness of 1970. It's in books such as James Michener's "Kent State" and (I think) Sara Davidson's "Loose Change." I suppose Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book" counts as a memory of that period of history, though it's more like a manual for anarchists.

After the killings at Kent State and at Jackson State, apparently, all of America shifted into reverse. The counter-culture went into full retreat, setting up communes in the backwoods. Protest, and indeed radical thought, on many of the Nation's college campuses was essentially over by the beginning of the 1970-1971 school year. Nixon invaded Cambodia while lying to the public about it (in fact, the carpet-bombing of Cambodia started in '69, but that only surfaced as one of Nixon's crimes during the Watergate hearings). Troops were brought back from Vietnam, then, without being replaced. Blows Against The Empire was released in October of '70, its lyrics and tune imprinting a last-stand defiance and a blown-mind consciousness. Try to find the vinyl version of this one, esp. if you have a vinyl player but even if you don't -- Kantner released this album along with a book full of stuff from his and Grace Slick's notebooks, drawings and poetry.

The first song, "Mau Mau/ Amerikon," is a shouted song apparently intended to be played at a demonstration or a free concert in Golden Gate Park. It's lyrics are hippie-political -- "Sign me up as a diplomat/ My only office is the park". Some of the lyrics were intended to mess with the head of then-President Richard M. Nixon. Paul shouts, "Hey Dick/ Whatever you think of us is totally irrelevant/ Both to us, now, and to you"....

After than, there's a weird song called "The Baby Tree," courtesy of the pen of folkie Rosalie Sorrells. The hippie theme resurfaces on "Let's Go Together," which puts out the main theme of the whole album, "Wave goodbye to Amerika/ Say hello to the garden." (Comments, Kevin?) "Let's Go Together" re-echoes and updates "Wooden Ships" as another piece of escapism. "A Child is Coming" is about Gracie's pregnancy, and Paul/ Grace's intention to hide the identity of their child from the "files in their numbers game" of the US Government. I love it when rock stars have the ganas to put out stuff like that. It ends with a prayer to hippie optimism -- "It's getting better/ brighter," over and over again...

"Sunrise" starts the science fiction part of this album by signaling the entry of some trippy distorted guitar, and Gracie's complaint about "civilized man" and "two thousand years of your God-damned glory." "Hijack" continues in symphonic vein, overviewing the hippie movement, and the disasters of the '60s, and laying out the main plot: some hippies are going to hijack a starship, and spread their lifestyles across the universe. No, not the "Across The Universe" on the Let It Be album, rather, across the real universe. Great pounding piano chords by Grace Slick, winding down the tune to a spacey backdrop with special effects. Between this and "Wooden Ships" Kantner could have commissioned the writing of some real science fiction, it's too bad he didn't. From there we glide softly into "Have You Seen The Stars Tonite," one of the high points of David Crosby's career as a composer, very pretty and inspiring, more of Gracie's great piano chords in the foreground.

At the end of that song, Kantner inserts the sound of rockets roaring, although maybe it's just a vacuum cleaner, the one Jeff Tamarkin mentions in the liner notes to the CD version. We blast off into "Starship," an attempt to push the adventure into the Other Realm, the one experienced after death. Great jamming by Jerry Garcia, vocals by Kantner and Slick. "Spilling out of the steel glass/ Gravity gone from the cage/ A million pounds gone from your heavy mass/ All the years gone from your age." A vision of the ultimate trip, one where you don't come back because you've become something else.

Apparently Kantner's band still plays this stuff now and then. There was a sequel to Blows Against The Empire, titled Paul Kantner Planet Earth Rock And Roll Orchestra, put out in 1982, but Paul couldn't get anyone from the Dead or CSN to participate so he had Jefferson Starship perform his tunes under that name. The result was underwhelming, though I'll admit that the Kantner album was at least as good as anything Jefferson Starship ever put out. That isn't saying anything, though. On the other hand, I heard this album, the original, and moved into a forest with a garden, definitely one of the high points of my existence. I don't know where to deduct points from this one. You could pick on "Mau Mau/ Amerikon," saying (like Rolling Stone said I think) that it sounded like a rehearsal session, I suppose, or you could pick on something else, the hillbilly elements in Kantner's sound or Kantner's earnest blathering or something. It's just that I wouldn't. The mood sways from anthemic to pretty to earnest to spacy and back again, throughout.

The title and ideas behind the Album are all the more poignant today in this age of American Empire.

But this Jefferson Starship album had everything I could ever want as the odd kid I was - a science fiction opera based on stories I had known and loved for years by Robert Heinlein, a theme about a bunch of drugged out hippies stealing a starship and taking off for Eden - echoes of many sci-fi books of my youth and indeed a couple of Star Trek episodes from the period - raucous, cutting lyrics all about the betrayal by Amerikkka and all that stuff, and the driving, irreplaceable electric guitars of Jerry Garcia. As I read the reviews and commentary today, I understand the cultural and political history that I didn't understand then - the hippie feeling of utter betrayal by bourgeois America, the escapism, the anger over the collapse of the Haight and flower power social project, the desire to cut and run as the hippie thing didn't seem, by 1970, to be working out as desired. When I discovered it a couple of years later, once I reached high school, it just seemed angry and edgy, and suited my mood.