Jefferson Airplane - At Golden Gate Park

Flower power on the brink of the maelstrom

At Golden Gate Park is the first official release of this much bootlegged 70-minute live recording, and captures Jefferson Airplane at a key point, not only in their own evolution, but in terms of the spectacular unravelling of late-60s counter culture.

Taped following the release of the Airplane’s fourth studio album, Crown Of Creation and official live album Bless Its Pointed Little Head, this particular show catches them trying out material which would surface six months later on Volunteers, in November 1969. Try as you might, there’s no avoiding the historical significance of the location and the dates. Here we have the Airplane live in their own backyard, co-headlining a free concert with The Grateful Dead a little over three months before Woodstock and seven months before the chaotic nightmare of Altamont. With its trippy and edgy atmosphere and performances that threaten to fall apart completely, the particular strength of At Golden Gate Park is the way it so powerfully transports the listener back to a particular moment in time, when fate was on the brink of shaking the buoyant Haight-Ashbury scene to its foundations.

Charly | SNAP 283 CD

Reviewed by Grahame Bent
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