"When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy, the joy within you dies…Don't you want somebody to love, wouldn't you love somebody to love, don't you need somebody to love…" Jefferson Airplane; "Somebody to Love" 1967

I was only six in the "Summer of Love." It was 1967, the year when the Monterey Pop Festival was held, so I can't really say the music of groups like The Who, Jimi Hendrix, The Animals, or Jefferson Airplane was contemporary. But even though I came to them almost ten years after the fact in the mid seventies, they still seemed like a breath of fresh air compared to anything I was listening to.

It was a couple of years before Punk made itself felt in Toronto, Ontario and the only music you could hear on the FM stations was either disco or over inflated progressive rock. So stumbling across an RCA double album release celebrating Jefferson Airplane/Jefferson Starship was something of a revelation.

I'm sure I'd heard the seminal "White Rabbit" already, Grace Slick's strange take on the Alice In Wonderland story, but aside from that I knew almost nothing about this band from San Francesco. The songs on this album, "Wooden Ships", "Volunteers", and "Somebody To Love" to name a few, were only the tip of the psychedelic iceberg I began to discover.

Albums like Crown Of Creation and After Bathing At Baxter's revealed an exploration of sound and music that made the Beatles experiments on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band seem tame in comparison. Guitar notes were being bent and fed back in harmony with the vocals of Grace Slick and Marty Balin and creating a sound that both challenged the mind and haunted the soul.

Although there had been the occasional live track on albums released before, somehow I've managed to miss out on hearing almost any of their live recordings. They were left out of the original cut of the movie Woodstock so it was only last year when I borrowed the new Director's cut version that I saw and heard two tracks from their appearance there. I've never been able to sit through an entire showing of Altamont so I've yet to see Marty Balin get cold conked by the Hells Angel or their performance.

So it's a great treat to discover that the Airplane's complete set from the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival was preserved. High Flying Bird: Live At The Monterey Festival is a digital re-mastering of the original eight track recording that's been released by the Belgian label Music Avenue. It marks the first time in over twenty years that you've been able to buy a recording of this music, and probably its first time on CD.