The Gonzo Daily: LINK: Here’s the song Jefferson Airplane wrote about Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren’s wife

Tuesday 26 February 2013

LINK: Here’s the song Jefferson Airplane wrote about Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren’s wife

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg recently profiled Sally Oren, today best known as the dinner-hosting wife of Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, but decades ago known as a fixture of the San Francisco psychedelic scene. She was such a fixture, it turns out, that Jefferson Airplane recorded an entire song “to, for, and about” her, called “Young Girl Sunday Blues.”

The song is embedded above. Here’s the relevant excerpt from Goldberg’s profile, which is worth reading in full:

Sally Oren, right, with Sara Netanyahu, who is married to the Israeli prime minister. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

By the Summer of Love, in 1967, Oren, then 16, was seeing every band worth seeing—Cream, the Doors, the Who. “I didn’t meet Jimi Hendrix, but he was fantastic.” She had only a nodding acquaintance with other artists. “With Jim Morrison it was sort of a ‘Hi, hi, how are you?’ sort of thing,” she said. She knew and loved Jefferson Airplane best. After the first Human Be-In, in January 1967, Jorma Kaukonen, the Airplane’s lead guitarist—“a Finnish Jew,” Oren noted—drove her home, where she served him milk and cookies. And she had a schoolgirl crush on Marty Balin, one of the group’s main songwriters.

“I always wanted to position myself so that I would run into Marty. So one day I see him, and he says, ‘Hey, Sally, we just wrote two songs about you.’ I probably turned purple from embarrassment.” The first song, “Sally, Sally,” was never recorded. The second, “Young Girl Sunday Blues,” would appear on the group’s third album, After Bathing at Baxter’s.

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