![]() ![]() Meanwhile, “Ballad of the Chrome Nun” features Chaquico on lead guitar, and our boy Craig wails and wails, while Slick and Kantner collaborate on vocals and Garcia plays some sweet, sweet steel guitar. The handclaps towards the end are nice too. I don’t have the guts to check out Robert Hunter’s lyrics, but they don’t matter this one would still be a winner if they were singing excerpts from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. As for “Fat,” Slick’s vocals are inexplicably muddy, but the melody is serviceable, the shared vocals have an almost gospel feel, and Garcia plays some crisp guitar. ![]() “Harp Tree Lament” is a lovely tune, and sounds like CS&N would sound if they weren’t unbearable, what with its nice ensemble vocals and loping melody. When it came to the death of the counterculture, there’s one thing I know-the Jefferson Airplane were the last to get the memo. As for the song, it’s a heavy hippie bromide about time travel and your riders of the rainbow and tiny Day-Glo unicorns for all I know, taking big horsey bites out of the cotton candy of your mind, and would have sounded dated in 1968, much less 1973. But it’s Garcia who steals the show, both with his guitar and a banjo, just as it’s Kaukonen’s electric guitar that saves the mid-tempo Kantner vehicle, “Your Mind Has Left Your Body.” Ah, but he gets a nice assist from Garcia on steel guitar, as well as from Slick’s surprisingly tolerable wailing in the background. ![]() “Walkin’” is the hit, what with Garcia throwing down on steel guitar and Creach playing some great electric violin, and Kantner and Slick swapping vocals one moment and singing in tandem the next. And this despite the fact that the detritus of the Haight’s head scene were more likely, thanks to the proliferation of hard drugs that had replaced acid and pot, to walk into walls than through them. The album is as atavistically “psychedelic” as a paperback copy of Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan, as Kantner’s tune “Your Mind Has Left Your Body” and Slick’s lyrics to the unfortunately titled “Fat” (“So we all went through the wall/No one uses doors anymore/We all want to be that small/We can’t fit if we’re fat and that’s all”) make clear. Released in 1973 at the same time as the Jefferson Airplane’s Thirty Seconds Over Winterland, Baron von Tollbooth & The Chrome Nun gave Paul Kantner, Grace Slick, and David Freiberg (originally of Quicksilver Messenger Service) the opportunity to lasso up the cream of San Francisco’s moribund psychedelic scene, in addition to such outliers as Papa John Creach, David (Grrr!) Crosby, and Chris Ethridge of the Flying Burrito Brothers. Not to mention a heap of songs with likable melodies, likable enough even to allow you to forget the words, which in keeping with the Jefferson Airplane’s obsession with space age bullhockey sound like they just time-traveled in from 1967’s Summer of Love. That said, the album’s participants (including all of the members of the Jefferson Airplane) do sorta kinda pull 1973’s wonderfully titled Baron von Tollbooth & The Chrome Nun out of their asses, not by means of lysergic lyricism but mostly by way of the guitar wank of one Jerry Garcia, one Craig Chaquico, and one Jorma Kaukonen. In which a band of hippies well past their sell-by date grokk themselves into a state of universal bliss, which unfortunately does not always extend to the listener. Paul Kantner, Grace Slick & David Freiberg, Baron von Tollbooth & The Chrome Nun (1973) ![]()
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