And from 1968, and the (in retrospect, far more uneven than I remembered) Crown of Creation album, here's Jefferson Airplane's better-known version, featuring the irrepressible Grace Slick.
My Jefferson Airplane wanna-be college band used to do a really nice cover of the JA arrangement (those guitar parts were really fun to play live) but to be honest I never really thought much about the song's thematic content back in the day, and until I discovered the Byrds' original in '87 I had pretty much forgotten the whole thing.
Upon encountering it again with the wisdom of years, however, I distinctly recall thinking that it sounded like the kind of song that Dan Aykroyd's SNL character E. Buzz Miller would have really, really dug. Seriously -- you could practically smell the corned-beef sandwich stains on his polyester shirt.
Okay, that's a little unfair to Crosby, and given that the most avant-garde sexual fantasy I've ever had involved two women (in the same year), I may be the wrong person to weigh in on this sort of thing. On the other hand, I do think that, despite my current uneasiness with "Triad," it was always going to be more palatable coming from somebody who looks like this...
...rather than like this.
