In the distance, a strange, gentle and spooky ode plays, wafting out of my speakers like majestic smoke from Alice in Wonderland. It’s Jefferson Airplane’s “Triad”; an acoustic Grace Slick number with no drums on which she croons nicely, but with guttural emphasis, nonetheless, about her two lovers, the three of them in total encompassing the title’s reference. This sort of thing has been hinted at in songs like “Wild Thyme”; which found her proclaiming “I’m doing things that haven’t got a name yet”. In total, as a band of seven or so members, they created a sound that’s kind of like a reduction, or vapor, of the total “scene,” pretty much guaranteed to be “cool” by virtue of all the sex and drugs aplenty at 2400 Fulton Street, the house in San Francisco they all shared together as a collective. “Triad”; however, seems almost painful, by comparison, perhaps mirroring the sexual experience for a woman, on a general level. Slick sounds like she’s discovered dark, immovable and permanent truths, about love, about her own body, about human emotion and about the proper way to live this life. She truly sounds like a woman following nobody’s rubric but her own and it’s scary to think how hard you’ll fall for her when you hear the hilarious and cathartic selfishness and countercultural subversion a la “I’d rather have my country die for me” in “Rejoyce”; from After Bathing at Baxter’s, the band’s best album of their career. She is cruel, in “Triad”; and life is cruel, and you will obviously be at her beck and call at these matters, elevating her, certainly, to demigod status within late-’60s rock and roll, and the overall canon, as well. And sure, it hurts a little bit, like a Stevie Wonder song, like the work of somebody blind to convention, blind to danger and wielding of a preternatural sort of power that’s new, dangerous and, more than anything, just what our nation needed for killing off Elvis.
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