William Gibson and Mondo 2000 weren't the first to fuse sex, psychedelics, and high tech. On Tuesday, RCA released a trilogy of hippie-era recordings on CD by members of the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash that were deemed sufficiently visionary that one of them - Blows Against the Empire - became the first album ever nominated for the prestigious Hugo Award for science fiction, in 1971.
A tale of acid-fueled insurgents who hijack a starship to flee Earth, Blows - along with Sunfighter and Baron Von Tollbooth and the Chrome Nun - was the heady product of an experiment in collaborative creation informally called the Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra. Several of the band members had lived in a commune modeled after the clan of "water brothers" in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, and producer Stephen Barncard recalls that the musicians often paid each other with bags of marijuana.
"I read Heinlein when I was in my teens, and I always thought that would be our future - spaceships and computers and faster-than-light drives," David Crosby told Wired News. "I imagined we would get computers to the point where we would use them to talk to each other." Crosby, a prolific poster on The Well and America Online since 1993, calls "uncensored data" online "a pearl beyond price."
"It could be a 300-pound lady with a wart for a nose who lives in Duluth," he says, "but when she's on the Net, she's a mind and a keyboard, and she's not afraid of you."
RCA also released CD pressings of The Worst of Jefferson Airplane and Early Flight.
