After Bathing At Baxter’s

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‘No man is an island, he’s a peninsula.’

(Jefferson Airplane)

It’s possible the psychedelic, late ’60s Baxter has come back into fashion, has been revived, if the coffer of the 1992 paperback edition of Frank McKay’s biography of Baxter is anything to go by. The OUP coffer-design features two Warhol-like multiple images of the young Baxter bathed in fluorescent light,

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with unnatural greens and yellows. It’s strongly reminiscent of the film of the 1967 Monterey Rock Festival. It looks as though James K. Baxter has accidentally found his way on stage during Jefferson Airplane’s set, his face bathed in hallucinogenic, saturated colour. The dried ice has just parted, like a Red Sea, and the light show is just beginning.

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