Back in the day, the Jefferson Airplane was the first band that I became a serious fan of. Eventually, I saw them (and their successor group, the Jefferson Starship), six times. So I was excited to see that what I thought was a new soundboard recording of the Jefferson Airplane has appeared on YouTube. As it turns out, it was from a recording called "At the Family Dog", and I already had a copy, but it's such a good recording and performance that I thought it deserved to be highlighted here.
Jefferson Airplane - September 6, 1969, - Family Dog on the Great Highway, San Francisco, CA
Setlist:
Ballad of You, Me and Pooneil > Jam > Starship
Good Shepherd
We Can Be Together
Somebody to Love
The Farm
Crown of Creation
Come Back Baby
Wooden Ships
Volunteers
Drum Solo
Space Jam (with Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart)
This is one of the best recordings of an Airplane live show that I've heard (and AFAIK I have downloaded every recording of them available on the Internet). The sound quality is excellent and the band is in fine form, both instrumentally and vocally. I saw them a couple of months later in Detroit, and that concert remains in my memory as the best rock concert I ever attended. This recording is about as close to what I remember them sounding like as anything I've heard.
If you're just a casual Airplane fan, you may want to start with Good Shepherd (about 20 minutes into the show) and come back to the opening Ballad of You, Me and Pooneil > Jam > Starship at the end.
The spirit of the Jefferson Airplane lives on in the current incarnation of the Jefferson Starshp. They have a new album, Mother of the Sun, available for streaming and purchase on most online music sites.
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