Happy Birthdays to a Rock Icon and an Overly-Famous Whiner

First and foremost, just to get it out of the way, James Taylor is sixty one today. If you’re not familiar with my opinion of James Taylor than you haven’t been paying attention… Suffice it to say he’s the SECOND person described in the title of this post.

That being said, Happy Birthday none the less. I appreciate Mr. Taylor’s musical accomplishments if for no reason other than it helps me better gauge good music when there is bad music to compare it to.

I surfed through Taylor’s ‘greatest hits’ to come up with something worth posting here, but what I actually came away with was surprise that a man synonymous with 1970’s singer/songwriters has multiple tracks on ‘HIS’ ‘greatest hits’ collection written by OTHER PEOPLE! Don’t get me wrong, I’m aware that artists share each other’s songs, record covers and standards to sell tunes, and generally do not write all or in some cases any of their own material. I was however under the impression that the man who defines singer/songwriter sensitivity would at least have only originals on a greatest hits recording…

BTW, Taylor’s biggest hit, You’ve Got a Friend? Written by Carole King…

Sorry Sweet Baby James, I’ll give you the birthday shout out, but I can’t bring myself to post a song…

Secondly, and much, much more important, today is the sixty seventh birthday of Jefferson Airplane/Jefferson Starship co-founder Paul Kantner. Kantner, only responsible for recordings under the ‘Jefferson’ moniker, wrote and performed some of the best examples of the psychedelic rock era, rocked Journey-esque epic studio rock tunes through the 1970’s and played a show in Fountain Valley’s Mile Square Park in 1991 that was likely a shade of the former greatness of Airplane, but I got to see it live, so it was by far the best show ever… At least the best one performed for free in an Orange County public park…

Kantner’s involvement and over arching history of Jefferson Whatchamacalit now spans fourty four years, seven or eight separate band break offs, roughly thirty different members and something like three hundred and fifty thousand different albums… OK, that MAY be an exaggeration, but it’s a lot of music, by a lot of people, and out of all of it there’s about two dozen really REALLY good tunes.

No, Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now isn’t one of them… It was also by STARSHIP, not JEFFERSON Starship. Happy Birthday, Paul, and congrats that you can go through life reminding people that you were NOT responsible for the theme song from Mannequin...

Rock out with your 'stache out!



... and with Jefferson AIRPLANE…