The band was called It's a Beautiful Day.

This suited California in general, where the members lived, it suited the hippie summer of love of 1967 in particular when the formation formed.

Also to the fact that standardized band names - The Platters, The Everly Brothers - have now been replaced by surreally enigmatic inventions.

Jefferson Airplane (translated as an imperative, then it makes sense: Take off!) enjoyed great authority at the time, so here it was: Nice day on the West Coast today, relax.

Therein lay a promise, just as the year '67 gave an endless promise.

But it didn't last, the group became one of the few really unlucky people of those years.

Lorenz Jaeger

Freelance writer in the feuilleton.

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Paradoxically, the great (and almost only) success of the beautiful day was a song bordering on depression, which describes a sad winter time in the sweetest, most beautiful, most tender melodies: that of a captive white bird in a golden cage.

Gold and white are the noble, festive colors in themselves, popular in liturgical contexts.

Here they separate, white innocence is characteristic of the bird, the cage is the golden one of the prosperity of the sixties.

And above all: It's raining outside, the bird is alone.

Fallen leaves are blown along the long black road, a dark sky is angry.

Meanwhile, the white bird – now addressed with the pronoun “she” – continues to sit in the cage, unknown.

She must fly or she will die.

"Fly" rhymes with "die": take off or die,

this is the echo on Jefferson Airplane.

The bird dreams of the aspens (also called aspen trees, "trembling like an aspen leaf" is a common expression) whose dying leaves are turning golden to match the color of the cage.

The bird grows old in the cage.

Sunsets come and go, clouds pass, the earth itself ages.

The young bird's eyes never stop glowing.

Again, she must fly or she will die.

Expectation and disappointment around 1967

The song, composed in late 1967, was released in 1969.

It brought a soft, Californian sound, in which a sweet melancholy could not be overheard, a depression appropriated through artistic work.

The promises made two years ago have not been fulfilled and the band's story actually traces the short journey from expectation to disappointment.

The group was managed by Matthew Kaatz, who also had Jefferson Airplane under contract and is now not only notorious for his bad management, but for downright immoral practices that ran directly counter to the interests of the bands;

into the 2000s there were bitter legal battles between Kaatz and the groups he had mentored.

"It's a beautiful day" he kept from performing in San Francisco - the band is not yet mature,

he said.

Instead, he convinced her to try her luck first in far northwest Seattle, coincidentally at a club he owned.

The band now lived in poor conditions up north.

You were depressed, hungry, cold - that's when the song was born.