After Bathing at Baxter's appeared ten months after their album, and it doesn't take the same kind of leap forward that
Baxter's did from
Surrealistic Pillow. Indeed, in many ways
Crown of Creation is a more stylistically conservative album. It opens with "Lather," a
Grace Slick original that was one of the group's very last forays (and certainly their last prominent one) into a folk idiom. Much of what follows is a lot more based in electric rock, as well as steeped in elements of science fiction (specifically author John Wyndham's book The Chrysalids) in several places, but
Crown of Creation was still deliberately more musically accessible than its predecessor, even as the playing became more bold and daring within more traditional song structures.
Jack Casady by this time had developed one of the most prominent and distinctive bass sounds in American rock, as identifiable (if not quite as bracing) as
John Entwistle's was with
the Who, as demonstrated on "In Time," "Star Track," "Share a Little Joke," "If You Feel," (where he's practically a second lead instrument), and the title song.
Jorma Kaukonen's slashing, angular guitar attack was continually surprising as his snaking lead guitar parts wended their way through "Star Track" and "Share a Little Joke." The album also reflected the shifting landscape of West Coast music with its inclusion of "Triad," a
David Crosby song that
Crosby's own group,
the Byrds, had refused to release. Its presence (the only extant version of the song for a number of years) was a forerunner of the sound that would later be heard on
Crosby's own debut solo album
If I Could Only Remember My Name (on which
Slick,
Paul Kantner, and
Casady would appear). The overall album captured the group's rapidly evolving, very heavy live sound within the confines of some fairly traditional song structures, and left ample room for
Slick and
Marty Balin to express themselves vocally, with
Balin turning in one of his most heartfelt and moving performances on "If You Feel." "Ice Cream Phoenix" pulses with energy and "Greasy Heart" became a concert standard for the group -- the studio original of the latter is notable for
Slick's most powerful vocal performance since "Somebody to Love." And the album's big finish, "The House at Pooneil Corners," seemed to fire on all cylinders, their amps cranked up to ten (maybe 11 for
Casady), and
Balin,
Slick, and
Kantner stretching out on the disjointed yet oddly compelling tune and lyrics. It didn't work 100-percent, but it made for a shattering finish to the album. [
Crown of Creation has been reissued on CD several times, including a Mobile Fidelity audiophile edition at the start of the '90s, but in 2003, RCA released a remastered edition with four bonus tracks from the same sessions including the mono single mix of "Share a Little Joke," the previously unreleased eight-minute "The Saga of Sydney Spacepig,"
Spencer Dryden's co-authored "Ribump Ba Bap Dum Dum" (a spaced-out assembly of noises, effects, and pop culture catchphrases), and the more accessible "Would You Like a Snack?," an atonal piece of musical scatology co-authored by
Slick and
Frank Zappa.] ~ Bruce Eder & Al Campbell