Jefferson Airplane – "We Can Be Together" (1969)

Up against the wall!

Up against the wall, motherf*ckers!

High school teachers fall into one of two basic categories: cool and uncool.

When I was a high school student, most of our teachers were uncool – only a few were cool or semi-cool.

All the cool teachers at my school were male.  I don’t think that was unusual back in the day (i.e., the sixties), when male teachers were few and far between.

Female teachers generally went by the book.  They were usually fairly strict and a little standoffish.

Cool student, uncool teacher

We had some extremely uncool male teachers, but the cool ones were pretty approachable.  They were among the younger teachers, and you could kid around with them and talk about sports and TV shows and music.  

If you ever saw one of them outside of school, it might have been at a pizza joint or a bowling alley, and he might have been smoking or drinking a beer.

I don’t remember ever seeing a female teacher wearing anything but a dress – even outside of school.

*     *     *     *     *

The coolest teacher at my high school was the journalism teacher, who also oversaw the school newspaper and yearbook.  

Surprisingly, the music teacher who conducted the orchestra was semi-cool – even though the kids who played in the orchestra were about as uncool as it got.  (A cool bassoonist or French horn player?  No way.) 

Uncool students, uncool teacher

Of course, even a cool teacher’s coolness only went so far.  Cool teachers were teachers first, after all.

For example, I was one of a group of students responsible for printing and selling “spirit ribbons” every Friday when we had a football game.  Spirit ribbons were six-inch-long ribbons in our school colors that had messages like “Beat the [rival school mascot name]!” printed on them.  

Before the game against our crosstown rivals my senior year – we were the Bears, they were the Eagles – we decided to print up a few X-rated ribbons and give them to our friends.  “Pluck the Eagles” was printed on most of the ribbons, but on the rest of them “pluck” was changed to . . . well, you can probably guess.

One of my co-conspirators showed one of the X-rated ribbons to the semi-cool music teacher, who promptly ratted us out to the principal.  That was not cool, but you can hardly expect a teacher with a family to risk his career by concealing the existence of contraband.    

*     *     *     *     *

The journalism teacher was cooler than the music teacher.  He tolerated quite a bit of nonsense, but you couldn’t expect him to turn a blind eye to everything.

Our school’s newspaper and yearbook staffs were housed in a classroom that was adjacent to the offices of the school’s principal and dean of students.

There was a record player in that classroom, and we played LPs by the Beatles, the Doors, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, and others of their ilk while we worked.

One day, someone brought in the Jefferson Airplane’s brand-new Volunteers album, which had been released in November of our senior year.  

Was that someone me?  I owned the album, so it might have been – but I honestly don’t remember.  (That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.)

In any event, “We Can Be Together” is the first track on that album, and it has plenty of lyrics that would have raised the eyebrows of the powers-that-be of my high school – if they had been paying attention, that is.

To wit:

We are all outlaws in the eyes of America

In order to survive we steal, cheat, lie, forge, hide, and deal

We are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent, and young

Here’s another excerpt from the lyrics:

We are forces of chaos and anarchy

Everything they say we are, we are

And we are very proud of ourselves

But adults in the sixties tended not to pay attention to the lyrics of the rock songs to unless those lyrics just absolutely hit them over the head.

A sober Grace Slick

“Up against the wall, motherf*cker!” did just that.  When Grace Slick crooned that line about three and a half minutes into the song, the journalism teacher – who was a big guy – jumped up from his desk, got to our record player in no time flat, and swatted the tone arm clean off Volunteers.

No one ever tried to play the album again.  As irresponsible and clueless as we were, we knew a line that shouldn’t be crossed when we saw one.

*     *     *     *     *

Click here to listen to “We Could Be Together.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: