I have been a fan of the Jefferson Airplane ever since hearing their hit singles in 1967. I even bought their first album on my first visit to Toronto, at Sam the Recond Man's Yonge Street store, naturally. I did not know that that first album might have been produced by Phil Spector, who died yesterday at the age of 81, if things had turned out a bit differently.
Marty Balin, one of Jefferson Airplane’s lead singers and the band’s co-founder, had arranged—without the knowledge of the Airplane’s’s then-manager, Matthew Katz—for the band to audition for Phil Spector in Los Angeles. Spector’s sister had heard the commotion about the group up in San Francisco and had called Balin to see if they might be interested in playing for Phil. Being a brand-new band, of course they were!
The call had taken place in the late summer of 1965, barely a month after the group’s first public performance, and just a week after Ralph J. Gleason’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle raving about the new band. A number of record executives were already looking at the group as a possible signing, but none were as high-profile in the industry as Phil Spector. The New York native was still considered the finest pop record producer in America, maybe the world, and had been for a few years. His string of successful records with the Ronettes, the Crystals and, more recently, the Righteous Brothers, was lauded as monumental, and his trademark “Wall of Sound” technique was emulated by dozens of competitors, among them the massively successful Beach Boys and Four Seasons. To be taken under Spector’s wing could be a major coup for the band.
The band and Spector did not hit it off, which is probably just as well, but I've spent the last hour trying to imagine what a Spector-produced Airplane album might have sounded like. The mind boggles.
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