Jefferson Airplane - Frozen Noses - Non-Album Tracks (1970)

Nearly all of that albums I post here are ones I created for myself a long time ago. That's how I'm able to post a lot of them in a short time. But today I made a new one. I was listening to some Jefferson Airplane and it occurred to me that it was odd how the group never released an album in 1970, even though they released at least one album a year for every other year of their existence. So I decided to try to see if I could come up with one.

I'm glad I did. At first, all I had was the one single they released that year ("Mexico" backed with "Have You Seen the Saucers"). But it turns out they had a lot more material, and that's not even including any of the songs on the "Blows Against the Empire" album released by an offshoot of the group that year.

They actually did a lot of work on an album in 1970.  But the band had split into three camps (Grace Slick and Paul Kantner in one, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Cassady in another, and Marty Balin in the third), and tensions got so bad that the band was barely functional. Balin effectively quit the band by the end of the year, even though it wasn't official until midway through 1971.

As a result, the planned album, "Bark," didn't come out until 1971, and when it did come out it was very different than how it would have been if it had come out in 1970. Most notably, all of Balin's contributions were dropped. He had four good songs, yet he wouldn't release any new music until 1973, and by then only one of those songs would be included.

I made sure to include songs by all three factions of the group at the time. However, there was a fourth songwriting effort I avoided, that of band drummer Joey Covington. He wrote and sang a number of songs that the band played live at the time, such as "Whatever the Old Man Does Is Always Right," "Bludgeon of a Bluecoat" and "I Can Tell," but I found all of them not good enough to include. It seems the rest of the band felt the same way, since they were never released then or on any later archival releases. (Yet the next year he would be a key participant in coming up with and singing the excellent song "Pretty as You Feel," which would be the last hit by the group.)

The biggest surprise for me was the song "Frozen Noses," which I didn't know about until stumbling on it today. It's a nice song written by Grace Slick and recorded by the band, by it has never been officially released in any form. I liked it so much that I decided to name the album after it. It's a fitting title, because most or all of the band members were said to be heavily into cocaine by 1970.

For the last song on this album, I broke my usual rule of not including the exact versions of songs on official albums released around the same time. The song, "New Song (For the Morning)," technically isn't even a Jefferson Airplane song at all, since it was released on the 1970 album "Hot Tuna," the first album by the Kaukonen-Cassady spinoff group of the same name. But I've always felt that song didn't belong on the album it wound up on and should have been on a Jefferson Airplane album instead. The first Hot Tuna album is basically all covers of old blues songs except for that original song by Kaukonen, which is done in a very different songwriting style. It also is one of my favorite songs written by Kaukonen, yet it's overlooked because he's only rarely played it in concert in all the years since. So I indulged myself by sticking it on this album instead, where it would make an ideal last song.

("True Religion" did come out on a 1972 Hot Tuna album, but this is a version done in a Jefferson Airplane concert, with significantly different instrumentation.)

01 Mexico (Jefferson Airplane)
02 You Wear Your Dresses Too Short (Jefferson Airplane)
03 Uncle Sam Blues (Jefferson Airplane)
04 Emergency (Jefferson Airplane)
05 Have You Seen the Saucers (Jefferson Airplane)
06 Up or Down (Jefferson Airplane)
07 True Religion (Jefferson Airplane)
08 Frozen Noses (Jefferson Airplane)
09 Drifting (Jefferson Airplane)
10 New Song [For the Morning] (Jefferson Airplane)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15906150/JeffersonA_1969-1970_FrozenNses_atse.zip.html

I had a hard time coming up with a good cover for this album. Frankly, I'm not sure where this cover image I chose comes from. I think it's fan art, but I could be wrong. In any case, I think it looks great. I just cropped it some the avoid some text and then added new text at the bottom.