Flashback 50 with Jefferson Airplane, Pink Floyd & The Grateful Dead
Echoes takes another Flashback 50 with three albums from 1969, The Jefferson Airplane’s Volunteers, Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma and The Grateful Dead’s Live Dead. It was the apex of Jefferson Airplane’s career, song for song one of their best albums, with rabble rousing classics like “Volunteers” and “We Could Be Together” psychedelic folk with “Good Shepard”, heavy metal with “Hey Frederick” and pastoral romance with “Wooden Ships.” Pink Floyd was marking time in this nevertheless wonderful CD, Ummagumma, one album with live performances of early Pink Floyd classics and the second album of in-studio, sometimes avant-garde, sometimes pastoral ruminations, a quarter of each side given over to the four band members. The Grateful Dead laid to tape their jam band aesthetic. These three albums revealed the dichotomy between west coast and British psychedelia. We turn on for a Flashback 50 with the Jefferson Airplane, Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead.