Plain and Fancy: 12/13/22

Tuesday, December 13, 2022

Jefferson Airplane - Thirty Seconds Over Winterland (1973 us, superb live recording, 2013 Audiophile remaster and 2009 expanded)

Thirty Seconds Over Winterland, originally released in 1973, was the final original album release from rock icons Jefferson Airplane. Captured live in concert, the album finds the early ’70s edition of the Airplane (with longtime members Grace Slick, Paul Kantner, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady joined by jazz and blues violinist Papa John Creach, former Quicksilver Messenger Service vocalist David Freiberg and ex-Turtles drummer Johnny Barbata) at its hardest rocking.

The unique set focuses on their then-current material while acknowledging Kaukonen and Casady’s Hot Tuna splinter group and glancing backward to Jefferson Airplane’s groundbreaking ’60s work. Although their contemporary studio albums (1971’s Bark, Long John Silver from ’72) were somewhat disjointed and the group would disband after the release of Thirty Seconds Over Winterland, Jefferson Airplane was still a unified force onstage and many fans regard this period as the Airplane’s live peak.

That statement is borne out by the music captured on this CD, recorded during Jefferson Airplane’s final shows at San Francisco’s Winterland on September 21-22, 1972 and a month earlier in Chicago. As dynamic and forward-propelled as any music they’d created during the previous seven years, the tracks released in 1973 as Thirty Seconds Over Winterland reflect a band that had both come a long way and was ready to move on.