Jefferson Airplane – After Bathing At Baxter's

After Bathing at Baxters’ was the second Jefferson Airplane album to be released in 1967 (the other was the much better ‘Surrealistic Pillow’). No doubt Airplane fans will come after me but this one doesn’t impress. If it’s true that the title is coded language for ‘after taking LSD’ all I can say is maybe don’t try making music after taking LSD. None of the song ideas seem really fully formed and the noodling around on songs like ‘Spare Chaynge’ sound like teenagers learning what sounds they can get out of their newly purchased instruments (in other words, they were better than this). The collage of noises on ‘A Small Package of Value Will Come To You Shortly’ is pretentious and uninteresting. Okay, these are the weaker songs and there are certainly better ones. ‘Young Girl Sunday Blues’ and ‘Martha’ aren’t without their merits and there’s a trippy ‘White Rabbit’ vibe to ‘Two Heads’ that has some interest. I know there’s a school of thought that this album captures an important moment and represents a high water mark in ‘free rock’ improvisation, but yeah, sorry, not feelin’ it. 2 stars.

My copy comes in a mono cover and plays in mono but has stereo labels. I can't find any pressing that matches mine but this one. The runouts are the same as this listing.

some of this approaches and sounds like what the Mothers of invention were doing around this time. i would like to know who was playing the piano on track one side one.

Amazing psychedelic masterpiece. You can feel the personalities of the singers shine through. Certified enjoyment.

The best sounding original press is the Japanese (stereo) with the striking cover art. Compared to the US original stereo, this press is louder, richer and more upfront. Avoid the flat sounding US mono (original), then the US stereo is much more preferable with all the psychedelics going on, and also the stereo has slightly more low end.

There’s nowhere to begin with After Bathing At Baxter’s than with the cover art, where for a sixteen year old in 1967, I was completely captivated by a tri-winged San Francisco style flying house, complete with marijuana bushes peaking out of the windows, that in full colour was aimlessly winging its way over piles of black and white trash, a sea of pollution and debris, where balloons and coloured confetti (though I was informed that this was blotter acid at the time) were being dispensed over just about any anonymous city in Amerika during the middle of the psychedelic 60’s. Of course over the years I’ve come to learn that this flying house represented the 2400 Fulton Street pad that The Jefferson Airplane called home, and oddly enough wasn’t painted in day-glow paints, but rather totally in black and white, at least from the outside.

While the Surrealistic Pillow album brought The Airplane to center stage, it was After Bathing At Baxter’s that defined this band and the journey into the hearts and minds of the counterculture generation, flagging these high flying minstrels as a group of revolutionaries out to subvert the youth of Amerika. With that in mind, the album is much more psychedelic than people give it credit for being, with pondering lyrics that ask question that could only be asked from seeing the world through psychedeliczed eyes, such as “Will the moon still hang in the sky / when I’m high / when I die?” or “Does the sky look green today?” not to mention the dadaesque feedback that opens the album and a mixture of words such as “armadillo,” injected for no reason at all, other than for the sake of embracing weirdness … and truth be told, that was enough of a reason, especially with Grace wailing away singing “It’s a wild time / I’m doing things that haven’t got a name yet!”.

After Bathing At Baxter’s isn’t an album to be listened to, it’s an album to be assaulted by, as The Airplane attack everything from middle Amerika, to womanhood and everything in-between, and it’s all done as a celebration of freedom and self liberation. There is nothing commercial about this record, it was designed for the hip, those who got the joke before it was spoken, those willing to be a force to be reckoned with. Of course “Somebody To Love” was the soundtrack of the day, yet Surrealistic Pillow, the album the single rose from, stood in stark contrast to what The Airplane were doing live, which was much darker, and plays out here in all of its psychedelic glory. This is not to say by any means that the album does not have its flaws, these flaws are easily heard and have not aged well, but for the time, these aspects (such as overindulgent jams) were pure experimentation that broke new ground, giving The Airplane a surefooted platform from which to take flight on their more controlled and pointed future releases.

With the album composed of songs strung together into mini-suites of sorts to create a bizarre aural collage of lengthy jams, screaming guitars, some extremely beautiful moments, and a great deal of raucous ones, all was mixed with the alchemy of intellectualism, where The Jefferson Airplane manage to embrace the weird and the disconnected, yet at the same time intertwined it all as a freaky acid trip … though surely one I won’t wish to have taken. While nearly contextually unlistenable with today’s ears by those who weren’t there then, I embrace this gem with my total being.

*** The Fun Facts: Baxter’s was’t a real place, and it certainly was a bath, though in a sense it was. “Baxter” was the band’s code for LSD, or bathing in acid, so the coded album title would translated to After Tripping On Acid.

Review by Jenell Kesler

I have very mixed feelings about this album. It contains some fine material along with some of the worst. Let's cut to the chase: 'Spare Chaynge' sounds like rambling garbage to me. 'The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil' retains some psychedelic charm, but it's at times sloppy and hard to listen to. The real joys of the album are two fine Grace Slick compositions ('Rejoyce', 'Two Heads'). 'Young Girl Sunday Blues' and 'Martha' are superior to much of the material from 'Surrealistic Pillow', and 'Watch Her Ride' is a mini-psychedelic classic. 'Wild Tyme' and 'Last Wall of the Castle' may not be exceptional songs, but they rock well in between the slower material. 'Won't You Try?'/ 'Saturday Afternoon' seemed much more clever so many years ago. It hasn't dated well.

I said it once and I'll say it again....without Grace Slick and the voice of Marty Balin, the Airplane might have made some interesting music, but most of the classics involved Slick. She wrote one of the group's biggest and most famous hits 'White Rabbit'. Her powerful voice is easily the most striking element of the band's signature song 'Somebody to Love'. She seemed to possess the conviction of your typical Manson member (I mean that as a compliment, believe it or not). The truth is, she composed most of the best music the band performed. And the strange jazz of 'Rejoyce' haunts me to this day.

Well this is clearly an essential listen for anyone interested in music of that era. Their début "Surrealistic Pillow" had emerged near the start of the year, and on the other side of the Summer of Love, this much looser concept album was released. I have no idea what the concept of this album is, but "After Bathing At Baxter's" means "After Taking LSD", this album has that trippy feel to it, and I do quite like it. "Surrealistic Pillow" is produced much better and is probably more palatable for contemporary tastes with it's more memorable anthemic songs, "After Bathing At Baxter's" appeal is all about the trip. However, although this is my sort of thing and I recommend listening to it, I don't think this is their best work, ultimately it's just let down by a lot of the material.

Wonderful commentary! Also of note: Cobb did a lot of production design for film, including "Star Wars" and "Alien."

It's huge shock to compare this album, to Surrealistic Pillow released some nine months before. I have never heard another band that took a more drastic creative jump all in the same year. Of course, the release of Sgt. Pepper between albums had a lot to do with it. Surrealistic Pillow, as you know, consisted of simple, largely straightforward, but enjoyable songs that spawned two major hits with "White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love". We all know those songs. After Bathing at Baxter's features much more complex vocal harmonies and arrangements, and a harder-edge approach. I'm certain the group was getting tired of being called "lightweights" (even rock critic Robert Christgau thought of them as an "amplified Peter, Paul and Mary"). "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil" shows some really complex vocal arrangements, and great tremolo guitar from Jorma Kaukonen. Grace Slick and Paul Kantner handle the vocals here. "A Small Package of Value Will Come to You Shortly" is a rather experimental piece inspired by the more experimental moments of Zappa's Mother's of Invention. "Young Girl Sunday Blues" is Marty Balin's song, and is a rather straigh-ahead rocker. I really love the acoustic "Martha". Grace Slick also plays some recorder, as she does here, it goes quite well with the music in general. Slick's "rejoyce" is, strangely, a much more symphonic piece, actually venturing into genuine prog rock territory! Those piano passages are classically influenced, and there's some great jazzy passages too. If the band Renaissance didn't get some of their ideas from this song, I'd be really surprised. "Spare Chanynge" is a like or hate it jam, because it starts off slowly with Jack Casady's bass playing, before the entire band kicks in. I love the last piece, "Won't You Try/Saturday Afternoon". Yes, no doubt, the lyrics are all hippy/dippy, but I can't get over those vocal arrangements.

The cover artwork is by Ron Cobb, then an L.A. based cartoonist (later an expat living in Australia after 1972). His artwork was heavily sociopolitical, and you frequently seen his artwork in the Mother Earth News, the Whole Earth Catalog, and various publications who agreed to carry his cartoons. Unsurprisingly, there's plenty of sociopolitical overtones to the artwork of After Bathing at Baxter's. I also dig the San Francisco-style Victorian home in psychedelic paint as an airplane flying with plants growing (and no surprise what kind of plants, given this was Jefferson Airplane).

It's also no surprise that After Bathing at Baxter's did not do as well as Surrealistic Pillow. Mainstream listeners were obviously put off by the more elaborate approach or the lack of a hit song in the vein of "Somebody to Love" or "White Rabbit". If you dislike the Airplane, this album won't change your mind, but if you're a fan, make sure you have this one, it's by far their most artistically accomplished album as far as I'm concerned.