Jefferson Airplane After Bathing At Baxter's CD

Originally released in 1967 (same year but 10 months after Surrealistic Pillow), this RCA/BMG Heritage remastered reissue adds 4 bonus tracks 'The Ballad Of You Me and Pooneil' (live-long version previously unreleased), 'Martha' (single version-mono), 'Two Heads' (alternate version-previously unreleased) & 'Things Are Better In The East' (demo version-previously unreleased). Includes 12-page booklet with extensive liner notes, detailed track listing & rare photos. 2003.

Jefferson Airplane: Paul Kantner, Jorma Kaukonen (vocals, guitar); Grace Slick (vocals, recorder, piano); Marty Balin (vocals); Jack Casady (bass); Spencer Dryden (drums).
Recorded at RCA, Hollywood, California. Originally released on RCA (4545). Includes liner notes by Jeff Tamarkin.
This newly remastered 2003 deluxe edition contains bonus tracks.
Jefferson Airplane: Paul Kantner, Jorma Kaukonen (vocals, guitar); Grace Slick (vocals, recorder, piano); Marty Balin (vocals); Jack Casady (bass); Spencer Dryden (drums).
Recorded at RCA, Hollywood, California. Originally released on RCA (4545). Includes liner notes by Bill Thompson and Jeff Tamarkin.
Liner Note Authors: Jeff Tamarkin; Jefferson Airplane; Bill Thompson.
Recording information: RCA, Hollywood, CA (06/14/1967-10/31/1967).
Photographers: Alan Pappé; Don Paulsen.
Arranger: Jefferson Airplane.
The Jefferson Airplane opened 1967 with Surrealistic Pillow and closed it with After Bathing at Baxter's, and what a difference ten months made. Bookending the year that psychedelia emerged in full bloom as a freestanding musical form, After Bathing at Baxter's was among the purest of rock's psychedelic albums, offering few concessions to popular taste and none to the needs of AM radio, which made it nowhere remotely as successful as its predecessor, but it was also a lot more daring. The album also showed a band in a state of ferment, as singer/guitarist Marty Balin largely surrendered much of his creative input in the band he'd founded, and let Paul Kantner and Grace Slick dominate the songwriting and singing on all but one cut ("Young Girl Sunday Blues"). The group had found the preceding album a little too perfect, and not fully representative of the musicians or what they were about, and they were determined to do the music their way on Baxter's; additionally, they'd begun to see how far they could take music (and music could take them) in concert, in terms of capturing variant states of consciousness.
Essentially, After Bathing at Baxter's was the group's attempt to create music that captured what the psychedelic experience sounded and felt like to them from the inside; on a psychic level, it was an introverted exercise in music-making and a complete reversal of the extroverted experience in putting together Surrealistic Pillow. Toward that end, they were working "without a net," for although Al Schmitt was the nominal producer, he gave the group the freedom to indulge in any experimentation they chose to attempt, effectively letting them produce themselves. They'd earned the privilege, after two huge hit singles and the Top Five success of the prior album, all of which had constituted RCA's first serious new rock success (and the label's first venture to the music's cutting edge) since Elvis Presley left the Army. The resulting record was startlingly different from their two prior LPs; there were still folk and blues elements present in the music, but these were mostly transmuted into something very far from what any folksinger or bluesman might recognize. Kantner, Jorma Kaukonen, and Jack Casady cranked up their instruments; Spencer Dryden hauled out an array of percussive devices that was at least twice as broad as anything used on the previous album; and everybody ignored the length of what they were writing and recording, or how well they sang, or how cleanly their voices meshed. The group emerged four months later with one of the rawest, most in-your-face records toRolling Stone (9/18/03, p.77) - 5 stars out of 5 - "...An acid symphony full of extended pieces conjoined into suites, with highflying hymns to liberated times delivered forcefully by the Airplane's vocal troika..."