Books

[babson]

C & C are easy. According to Tommy Chong, about C & C comedy, you either get it, or you don't I had 2 of their albums (1 & 2) and I have a couple of their dvds. They were really big at my son's high school too.

[Jerald]

Kantner borrowed some lines from Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers." Heinlein later mentioned Jefferson Starship in one of his novels.

[Susan Butcher]

I discovered Heinlein in my early teens. I loved the visionary aspect of his stories, and ignored the gung-ho stuff.

"Storming Heaven; LSD and the American Dream" by Jay Stevens. I've had this for years, but I keep dipping into it every so often. It's written with sympathy and understanding, but doesn't gloss over the nasty bits.

[Susan Butcher]

I'll leap in here and reply to myself so I can mention "The Butterfly Kid" by Chester Anderson, which is easily the best novel about hippies, space monsters, and alien drugs I've read. Which means it's, well, OK, with a few good laughs here and there. Written in 1967, it's set in the future world of 1976, where everyone has videophones, but no-one seems to have heard of contraceptive pills!

[okeedoe]

I wouldn't know anything about Chester Anderson and his''The Butterfly Kid''but I know about Alice Echols and her''Scars of sweet paradise:The life and Times of Janis Joplin'' which I read a two months ago.A decent and comprehensive good structured biography with authenticity that is needed but bereft of a pertinent style. Alice Echols goes further away from borders of depicting JJ as a legendary hot mama of her own ''inventions'',away from the family portrait of fucked up rock star or a victim of the time which she symbolized.Alice introspects the very roots of Pearl's music and researches the experiment of living dangerously at the time.Jefferson Airplane is all over the book as well as the members particularly.

p.s.

Am I full of a sorry crap or what?

[Susan Butcher]

Are you asking us to say you're full of sorry crap? I absolutely refuse! You'd make a good blurb writer, anyway.

[plasticfantastic]

True, Susan.

I'll look for that book. I have the book, "Love, Janis", which is a collection of letters that Janis' sister released. I've heard that it is a must-read for big fans. I haven't gotten a chance to read it, but I'm planning on it.

[PrayForPlagues]

currently reading "Perilous Times" for my AP Government class, it's about restrictions on speech during wartime. I thought it was really interesting at the beginning about the Sedition Acts of 1798, but past that it has been really uninteresting.

Also reading "Take Me to a Circus Tent", which I find a bit disappointing. It has a really interesting section about JA shows and little blurbs about songs, but the interviews are more about Jefferson Starship, which if I wanted to read about JS I would have gotten the book about them by the same author...

[oldblue]

nd - just a thought from someone's post somewhere's else. The Yippies, were formed by Abbie Hoffman after Woodstock. So there were no Yippies around in 1968. Yippies were created based on Abbie's complaint that all the Hippies wanted to do was get stoned.


the youth international party (yippies) was around for the democratic convention in 68 so they had to have been created some time before that. they ran a pig for president.

hoffman was a media whore. anyone who followd him got what they deserved.

[usedtobebabson]

I know, confuses me also. I think he "officially" formed the Yippie party after woodstock. Not sure at all though. Chicago was a whole year earlier than woodstock (Aug '68 vs Aug '69). Or maybe that's when he published the Yippie book. Sometimes I put stuff up here and don't do the homework - just thinking out loud. I'm not interested in the subject enough to do any homework on it.

[oldblue]

I know, confuses me also. I think he "officially" formed the Yippie party after woodstock. Not sure at all though. Chicago was a whole year earlier than woodstock (Aug '68 vs Aug '69). Or maybe that's when he published the Yippie book. Sometimes I put stuff up here and don't do the homework - just thinking out loud. I'm not interested in the subject enough to do any homework on it.

bad facts make for bad arguments

[usedtobebabson]

Let me know who won

[Susan Butcher]

I heard that there were never many Yippies. The YIP was "street theatre" for the mass media. It wasn't "international", although there were similar outrages in Europe at the time.

According to Rubin, the YIP was formed in October 1967 at the Pentagon demo. However, bullshit was their stock in trade. They were certainly active in 1968 just before Chicago.

[starfire II]

I'm surprised that no one has yet mentioned A Long Strange Trip - Dennis McNally's rather wonderful boigraphy of the Grateful Dead. As you'd expect, there are numerous references to the Airplane in there, including probably the best account I've ever read of the whole mid 60's/San Francisco/Summer Of Love scene. He really captures the spirit of those times so vividly.
There's also a fascinating and quite detailed account of the whole Altamont debacle, which takes up most of a chapter, and is much more comprehensive than the paltry three pages devoted to the subject in Jeff Tamarkin's Airplane biog.
Finally, Susan, on a slightly different note, I completely agree about Kirby's Thor comics. I also loved Ditko's Dr. Strange - arguably some of the weirdest stuff ever printed in mainstream comics.
My particular favourite, though, remains Will Eisner's Spirit. It's stood the test of time remarkably well in many respects, and in terms of pure storytelling, it remains a benchmark.

[Susan Butcher]

The Spirit was an outstandingly good-looking strip, and quite funny too. It could be violent, but he seemed to like getting beaten up, didn't he?