First it was groups, then it was solo artists, now all of a sudden it looks like Couples. John & Yoko got us into this mess, Paul & Linda weren't about to be outdone, and Grace & Paul are shaping up as a source of composition, performance and sheer product at least as potent as the Airplane themselves. Funny thing about these couples, they all sing about themselves. Or each other reflecting back and forth. John & Yoko captured all the press and turned themselves into a pair of avantsy postures, while Paul just sings about eating at home, which, of course, beats doing it in the road but's just about as bare (musically speaking). Paul & Grace see themselves as part of something bigger, and amidst all the drugstore fire-brandishings of Blows Against the Empire they placed "A Child Is Coming," all about how the stork was due to call.

Well, the kid's here now and we can all admire her. China, nee god, is one of the easiest babies on the planet to bill and coo over right now, because the Blows lovebirds have put a big color pic of her square on the cover of their new album. The title refers to the kid, too, implying that she's a child of destiny and it's only a matter of time till she too will someday come down on you, government man. And the family album takes up just exactly where "A Child Is Coming" left off, with "And we walk in the sand my lady and me/And we watch and see the child grow." She's getting all the love and care any toddler needs despite her folks being such famous musicians and activists, and I'm glad to hear it.

But that's too easy. Everybody loves romance and everybody loves a baby, but not everybody loves Grace & Paul. Why? Well, for people of such thicklaid Revolutionary profession you don't see 'em in any active side of the Movement much, and Blows Against the Empire and the seeming outtake from it at the end of Bark were pompous as hell, and all that has irritated a lot of people across a wide range of political persuasions. Time was, Surrealistic Pillow and Baxter's days, when the Airplane were one of the most universally respected of American groups, but Volunteers started a trend that Blows Against the Empire laid the epitaph on, and people all over are discovering how fashionable it's become to dump on the Airplane, especially Grace & Paul.

It ain't fair. Music should be considered as pure music first and the morality or cogency of its message second, hard as that is sometimes, and especially should rock & roll music be so considered. The other thing is that, as heavyhanded as G&P regularly are, just about every important recording artist you can think of has gotten pretentious or at least portentous today, it's a disease of the times, and at least the ersatz and probably synthetic fury of Blows is preferable to the involuted, introverted sortings of varying strands of navel lint indulged in by several other chart-topping Heavies I'm not gonna get in trouble by naming again.

There has always been an element of sheer juggernaut rock & roll thunder in the Airplane's music, most often laid to Jorma and Jack, but with the inescapable desultoriness of Bark and the relative vigor of Blows and this album I'm beginning to wonder if the balance of energy in the band hasn't shifted. It's not so much that Sunfighter is an appreciably better album than Bark as that even in its excesses and lyrical embarrassments it seems to have more of what you originally came to the band for.

The thematic grist is as sturmund-drang topical as ever, with a two-part song about the Weather-woman Diana Oughton who died in the bomb factory blast last year as well as Paul's expected and by now more than stereotypic see-my-people - come - together quasi-anthemics, but they have a much firmer grasp of their materials than on Blows, more time has been spent on the album and the material itself is mostly far superior, real songs with sense and structure as opposed to amorphous rants, seemingly ad-libbed in the whirl of titanic rushes, like "Mau Mau Amerikon."

Try "Silver Spoon," which isn't about cocaine like you thought but about prey and consumption in the cycle of life, with a bit of cannibalism thrown in for seasoning. Structurally it's tight as an aboriginal bongo, with stark block piano chording and Grace delivering her patented modal, droning vocal style with more success than she has in some time, more even perhaps than in something as walled into history as "Two Heads." This style was always a risky proposition, at its worst like Buffy St. Marie freaked out on strychnine experimenting with a sort of vocal menstruation (the commercial the Airplane did for White Levis was the best example of that, though "White Rabbit" was nothing you'd want to play for your own little Sunfighters). Here, however, the innate fury and passion that is Grace at her best come searing through, managing as well to hold onto a rare tightness and discipline, so it builds and builds like the mighty bricks in the Sphinx and never loses the current summit with glottal excess. And the words are startling, to say the least: "Throw down all your silver spoons–eat all of the raw meat with your hands/Pick it up piece by piece ... Shove it in your mouth any way that you can."

Brother, that's primal. Primeval, too. And, with their insistence on simplistic political imperatives and imagery derived from the elements and mammals, Paul & Grace manage to get next to something very basic that penetrates easily and almost, but never quite, touches you in a strange place the Doors used to try for as well as Michael McClure in his Beast Poems–the snarling, smiling peristaltic Mammal in you. Check Paul's "When I Was a Boy I Watched the Wolves," the best song on the album and possibly Paul's best writing to date: an eerie, flashing riff that builds with perfect precision to a furiously driving floodtide, and: "When I was a boy I watched the wolves run/... till the mornin' sun/And as I grew I soon found the wolfpack grow on me/Laser bright feel the lunar light comin' down on me/... No light shines on the fang neglected/Run with the wolfpack."

That's not just weird, that's the stuff of bone and stone and blood, drawing imagistically on what remains of nature outside the fences of man while retaining the big piston drive of the city in its rhythmic guts. Which is why Grace & Paul make it and all these bucolic hippies singing about planting cannabis seeds by country roads don't. Even in the song to "Diana," the context is pre- or post-civilization: "Sing a song for Diana/Huntress of the moon and a lady of the Earth/Weather woman Diana."

Not everything is that paleo-lithically pristine, of course; the album has its relative clunkers and unmemorable bits, and Paul still ain't no Balin when it comes to vocal chops, but he's getting better and really cooks for someone who sang his first non-bathroom vocal in "Let Me In" on Jefferson Airplane Takes Off. And what compositions don't knock you up against the wall on first hearing probably mellow into viperous bloom with age and atmosphere; I snickered at "Titanic," one of those moog-and-electrosmear abysses you can't dance to, thinking if I still smoked grass it'd probably flip me out, until a friend of mine who still does told me he listened to it psychedelicized and it did. A little something for everybody. This album has been one of the pleasantest surprises of the Santa solstice, and at this point I'm anticipating the next Kantner-Slick opus with far more interest than the Jefferson Airplane album that could conceivably never arrive.

Another denizen of the Plane pack worth checking out in his solo bow is Papa John Creach, the old fiddler who added a few fills to Bark and failed to resuscitate Hot Tuna. On his own he's a spry, sly delight, and surprisingly turns up as one of the few musicians able to take on a passel of Superpassengers and still sail his ship straight and true. You wouldn't even know that Jerry Garcia and the other peripatetic palaverers were there. Papa John has a way with the fiddle distinct in this day, a facility for playing straight gospel blues and making it sound somehow classical but never strained or mawkish, and a rare and subtle sense of humor, as when he begins W.C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues" (and when was the last time you heard somebody do that?) with a riff straight out of Hungarian gypsy cum Bela Lugosi atmosphere music, or selects "Over the Rainbow" of all songs in creation and turns you around by not only making it palatable but actually, with his courtly-sweet phrases that teeter on the edge of cloying dreck but never quite lose their jive thread, a lot of fun to listen to. Which is pretty damn rare said of any record these days. (RS 103)

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