Volunteers (1969)

Volunteers is the fifth studio album by American psychedelic rock band Jefferson Airplane, released in 1969 on RCA Records. The album was controversial because of its revolutionary and anti-war lyrics, along with the use of profanity.

This was the last album with the group for both founder Marty Balin and drummer Spencer Dryden (although they did both appear on the June 1970 single "Mexico" and its B-side "Have You Seen the Saucers?"), signifying the end of the "classic" lineup. It also turned out to be the group's last all-new LP for two years as Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen devoted more of their energy to their embryonic blues group Hot Tuna, while Paul Kantner and Grace Slick released Blows Against the Empire and Sunfighter with various guest musicians and celebrated the birth of their daughter China in January 1971.

Background

Jefferson Airplane took a break from all touring and recording activity in the first three months of 1969, to allow Grace Slick to have surgery to remove nodes in her throat. It was at this time that she began to break up with boyfriend Spencer Dryden in favor of the group's rhythm guitarist Paul Kantner; meanwhile, Casady and Kaukonen began performing as an unnamed duo in various clubs, a project which would eventually evolve into Hot Tuna. The live album Bless Its Pointed Little Head was released in February and performed moderately well, charting at No. 17 on Billboard. After over a month of intensive rehearsals at the group's home studio at 2400 Fulton (known as "the big house"), they resumed recording at the end of March with live shows following at the end of April, including several new songs in the set list they had just laid down in the studio.

Songs and recording

Volunteers was the group's first album recorded entirely in San Francisco, at Wally Heider's newly opened state-of-the-art 16-track studio. The album was among the earliest 16-track recordings, with the back cover displaying a picture of the Ampex MM-1000 professional tape recorder used to record the album. Guest musicians included Jerry Garcia on pedal steel guitar, veteran session pianist Nicky Hopkins, future Airplane drummer Joey Covington on percussion, David Crosby and Stephen Stills. Sessions commenced on March 28 with backing tracks for Kantner's "We Can Be Together" and Slick's "Hey Fredrick" and continued until June 30 with the taping of Kaukonen's "Turn My Life Down", which featured Balin on lead and The Ace of Cups on backing vocals. The sessions were held late at night, with Heider's assistant Ginger Muse noting that "they'd start drifting in around six in the evening when I was leaving, and they'd still be there when I came in at nine the next morning", with the janitor often having to vacuum around Grace sleeping on the studio couch.

The album was marked by strong anti-war and pro-anarchism messages, particularly in the opening "We Can Be Together" (with provocative lines like "we are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent...and young") and the joint Crosby/Kantner/Stills composition "Wooden Ships" which describes the struggle for survival in the aftermath of a nuclear war. The title track was inspired by a Volunteers of America (a religious charity similar to the Salvation Army) truck that woke singer Marty Balin one morning, which he and Kantner repurposed into a revolutionary anthem using the same strident riff as "We Can Be Together". Gentler hippie themes of nature, communities and ecology are explored in Kantner's "The Farm" and Slick's "Eskimo Blue Day", while "Hey Fredrick" mixes blatantly sexual imagery with what Grace called an admission that "I'm flying so high that I know I'm going to burn my wings on the sun if I don't slow down". Meanwhile, Dryden's "A Song for All Seasons" mocked contentious relations within the group, including a swipe at original manager Matthew Katz who it describes "skipped town with all your pay."

The album provoked controversy with record label RCA over the use of profanity in lyrics such as "Up against the wall, motherfucker," which appears in "We Can Be Together". RCA Records had initially refused to allow the word "fuck" on the album until confronted with the fact that the label had already set a precedent by using it in the Hair cast recording album. The offending word was mixed lower on the 45 RPM release to partially obscure it, but was censored on the album lyric sheet as "fred". "Eskimo Blue Day" was also a point of contention with RCA, with its chorus line "the human name doesn't mean shit to a tree" repeated throughout, but the offending profanity (like that in "We Can Be Together") was kept in the album intact.