16. The Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil

Jefferson Airplane: After Bathing At Baxter’s (RCA Victor, 1967);
composed by Paul Kantner

LSD is an abbreviation of the original German Lysergsäure-diethylamid, an organic compound with hallucinogenic properties. This is a wonderfully silly song about IT, leading off an album with a title allusively referencing IT, following up this band‘s only top-10 singles, released just a few months before the government declared IT a verboten Schedule 1 substance. This was a single, too, notwithstanding that it had to be edited by at least two thirds from an original version containing that much more raw guitar feedback and extended bass solo. What remained was an edited blare of feedback resolving into the song’s tonic, cuing a tom-heavy four with Paul, Grace, and Marty harmonizing on quotes from A.A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young, willful shifts of meter, foreshortened bass solo, and à propos of nothing the spoken word “armadillo.“ This wholly self-indulgent album should have been a mess, and a lot of it is, but that first side comprises a suite of remarkable tunes by everyone in this band who wrote, and never quite cohered their energies so well again, and not just because that is what happens to bands with enough egos to make themselves happen the unlikely way this one did.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).