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fossilcat's Collection

Jefferson Airplane   01/??/2005

Hal's Death by Jefferson Airplane Bootlegs Comp., Various, Various
Source Various
Media 5 cdr   5 discs
J-Card Comment HAL'S DEATH BY JEFFERSON AIRPLANE BOOTLEGS COMPILATION

5 CDs of Jefferson Airplane and related music compiled by Hal Broome, December 2004 - January 2005

To understand the nature of this compilation I have to bore you with a little background first. In the late 1980s to mid-90s I was living in the San Francisco Bay area where I took the opportunity to hear as many of my favorite old bands of my childhood from the 60s as I could. Happenstance decreed that one day I wound up backstage with Bill Graham, Grace Slick, Paul Kantner, John Cipollina, Carlos Santana, Country Joe McDonald, J.G., and the usual suspects of a free concert in Golden Gate Park. Loving to write, I posted a review (that, sadly, I didn't keep) that sparked enough interest to keep me writing about the concerts I attended. It rather snowballed into a fulltime hobby of posting to the only outlet for Jefferson Airplane fans at the time (rec.music.gdead), and led to my eventually meeting my musical heroes and even interviewing them backstage.

Along the way I had a lot of support from people who liked reading my reviews, and who treated me very kindly to copies of their personal favorite bootlegs, or, in some instances, soundboards of the shows I reviewed. This compilation is dedicated to them: its audience, however, is the novice JA fan who wants to hear more about what makes this rather irregular band such a devotion to others.

The main reason I put this together was that after 3 years in Central America, I had returned to the States and found my old
collection of analog tapes sadly neglected under the bed along with the dust bunnies. Enough time had elapsed for me to
realize the value of some of it -- after all, I had transcribed some of the interviews, but had never released them, and then
there was all that great music. So, with a copy of JAbase, I went through the steep learning curve of how to digitize, and
then wet my feet in a bootleg trading hub, gathering some more JA I did not have. There I received an email from a person in
Holland who very much wanted an "introduction" to JA, and would be glad to send me five CDs of rare Sandy Denny if I complied.

Sure! So I made this compilation specifically for him, knowing his other tastes: Fairport Convention, and CSN & Y. The latter was easy enough to fit in; as for the former, well, you'll see 8').

So CDs 1 - 4 are an aural history of the Jefferson Airplane, starting in a period where Spencer Dryden had joined the band and Signe was preparing to leave. I have put in, as chronologically as possible (just read JAbase to know how problematic that is!), what I think are the classic songs of each JA period, showing the good along with -- and fans will admit this -- the bad. Along the way I picked a few favorite tunes ("Good Shepherd," for instance) and deliberately chose variations to show how it developed live in concert (from Grace as the main singer to Jorma and then to a duo of them both). Some choices are just me being quirky. Others are because it is the first live appearance of the song. Then others are due to my trading friend's tastes: he asked for me to put in "Eskimo Blue Day," so ok, two different versions coming up! After doing the CD 1 - 4 chronology, I then took a different tack for 5: here I slip in some snippets of my interviews and show some of the later stages of what, to me, is one of the most puzzling, maddening, irritatingly brilliant bands to have come out of San Francisco.

Having mailed off the compilation to Holland, I later took a listen to what I had done. I was surprised how well it flowed; perhaps due to the analog sources, it was fairly well normalized without treatment (these are all lossless sources, btw; my only treatment is dc-offset correction). I then tweaked it a bit; added a song here, took one away there, and then, for its release here, cut out a Hot Tuna number (but was able to leave in my interview with that band as the mods/admins at EZT have given their nod to my sole rights on the interviews; thank you!).

So, for the novice, with a tidbit or two for the serious collector,I pay tribute to my favorite band and the idiosyncratic fans that follow them. -- Hal Broome, January 28, 2005.
Trades Allowed Yes
Ratings Sound: B-A
Owned by fossilcat · Last Updated May 23, 2023