Plain and Fancy: Jorma Kaukonen And Jack Casady - Bear's Sonic Journals Before We Were Them (1969 us, fine blues based acid psych rock, 2018 digipak remaster)

Friday, October 25, 2024

Jorma Kaukonen And Jack Casady - Bear's Sonic Journals Before We Were Them (1969 us, fine blues based acid psych rock, 2018 digipak remaster)

From the archives of legendary sound engineer Augustus Owsley Stanley, a long-time trusted man of the Grateful Dead, 'Before We Were Them' follows the two live shows dedicated respectively to the Allman Brothers Band and Doc & Merle Watson and captures a performance held by Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady, guitarist and bassist of Jefferson Airplane, on June 28, 1969 at the Veterans Memorial Building in Santa Rosa, California.

The always impeccable audio quality of the recordings made by the legendary 'Bear', recovered from the original tapes and restored - remastered for the occasion, allows us to enjoy a concert previously unreleased and only recently resurfaced in which the two great musicians, who had not yet launched into the collateral project of Hot Tuna, are joined on stage by Jefferson Airplane drummer Joey Covington.

With him, Jorma and Jack form an impromptu power trio capable of competing in power and intensity with Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, protagonists of over 70 minutes of exciting and muscular music in which blues classics such as 'Rock Me Baby' and 'Come Back Baby' and the Airplane's 'Star Track' are joined by four rarities titled for the occasion by Kaukonen and Casady ('Turnaround', 'Through The Golden Gate', 'Through The Grove', 'Inspiration In The Hall Of Arrivals') and which will make the mouths of even the completists and the most profound connoisseurs of the duo's repertoire water.

'It's not just the youthful energy that strikes me, when I listen to these songs again; 'It's the musical dialogue that Jack and I shared in those amazing moments,' Kaukonen commented about these recordings, while Casady recalls 'the unbridled fury' of those performances that 'every day, back then, represented a new adventure for our young hearts'. 'Before We Were Them' is therefore a small, very precious treasure chest of psychedelic blues exhumed and polished to a new shine, using state-of-the-art Plangent Processes technologies (which allowed to eliminate even the smallest distortions caused by recording and playback equipment) and the mastering experience of Jeffrey Norman, a long-time collaborator of Stanley himself and the Grateful Dead.