Oh, that Airplane. On a good day they were unbeatable; on a bad day, they couldn’t play. It was a shock to discover (from an expensively-imported bootleg in 1971 or so, confirmed by the quadrophonic Volunteers whenever that happened) the second truth. Thankfully more evidence has surfaced since then of the first one.
I never saw them as such, since they played only a handful of dates in the UK, and even those were curtailed by various circumstances — dust at the Isle of Wight, rain at Bath, it being the Doors’ turn to headline at the Roundhouse — and the parts that made their way over here later (a Hot Tuna, some Starships) proved to be less than the whole. Not bad, you understand, just — well, they didn’t take us back there, to where you were in the flesh, where logic and proportion had fallen sloppy dead. We had finally to answer for ourselves, “Is it true that I’m no longer young?”
