Listen: 1st post - It's No Secret, Marty Balin

 

Listen: It’s No Secret, Marty Balin

At age 18 I was unprepared for the sheer passion of Marty Balin singing “It’s No Secret”.  With Jefferson Airplane backing him at full-blast in a dim, worn-out psychedelic ballroom, this performance whacked me upside my head. 

Sure, I knew that people could get worked up and express emotion, but this was incomparably more intense and overwhelming than any previous artistic proclamation of emotionality I had ever experienced.   It was the pure expression of distilled, undiluted LOVE that I heard in his song and  voice. It fairly turned me around and shook my whole rocking world. I remember thinking something like, “Holy Smokes, now I GET this song!”

I believed Marty: he absolutely cut through the murk¹ and communicated real feeling.  Friends, this is a rare thing when a person can summon strong emotion and then communicate it effectively to another person. It’s even rarer when the hearer can feel that emotion 53 years later.  The lyrics are pretty simple, “It’s no secret that I love you, yeah I love you”, but I could internalize it whole and feel it.

I can still feel it.

Beyond the fact that in the original recording of “It’s No Secret” (from 1966’s Jefferson Airplane Takes Off) that Marty fairly leaps off the turntable, grabbing your collar and proclaiming his love and the necessity and primacy of love.  One can hear the so-called Summer of Love straining to jump off the vinyl, but not quite reaching an adequate pinnacle. Still, this initial blast of unfiltered love is astonishing to hear.  My “live” hearing of Airplane’s jumped-up 1969 live version is an after-echo of the feeling the hippies were trying and mainly failing to get at.  Love. I could vibe it there at the Aragon Ballroom.

There are live versions of the Airplane and Marty unchaining his heart on this song, notably on the volcanic 1969 live recording, Bless It’s Pointed Little Head.  There, Marty and Grace Slick are off to the races, duetting madly. It’s a fairly Olympian speed-acid rendition. Though this recording is better than good, it pales to what I heard when as a college freshman, I hitchhiked home to see Jefferson Airplane in Chicago. Many things stand out about this experience (such as being absolutely transfixed by Grace Slick) but the intense emotion delivered by Marty Balin and the wild range and dynamism of his tenor took the melting icing off the cake.

Marty Balin is something of a dis-remembered hero of the rock sixties. His songs perfectly captured the ideal of love writ large. On the Airplane’s breakthrough album, Surrealistic Pillow, his two ballads, “Comin’ Back to Me” and “Today” were its most powerful expressions, even in a setting featuring the hippie warhorses “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love” (featuring Grace, not Marty).  Marty’s was the voice of real and complete romanticism.

One can add in the Summer of Love echoes Marty later recorded, like his solo record, “Hearts” and the gigantic Jefferson Starship hit, “Miracles” as evidence of his continued emotional effectiveness.

Jefferson Airplane was originally Marty’s band and helped establish the sixties folk-rock, psychedelic and counterculture scene as they recorded hit albums and played the Monterrey, Woodstock and Altamont festivals where Grace, not Marty consistently got the spotlight.

It’s somewhat difficult to remember what things were like way back when “It’s No Secret” was recorded, but the romantic sound of Marty Balin’s voice points the way. Marty Balin was talented, extreme and authentic. He captured, sang and probably inspired the dream of the Summer of Love.

1.  There was a lot of murk in 1969 psychedelic ballrooms