A beautiful, barely played 1966 pressing of Jefferson Airplane Takes Off,  with the original uncensored versions of ‘Let Me In’ and ‘Run Around.’

As detailed below, just before this essential album’s release, RCA Records got cold feet about some of the lyrics, and made the band remove one track, ‘Runnin’ Round This World’ and modify the lyrics of ‘Let Me In’ and ‘Run Around.’

This rare and hastily withdrawn ‘second’ pressing, features the original uncensored versions ‘Let Me In’ and ‘Run Around.’  It’s in exceptional condition: the cover is virtually Mint, with full shrink wrap, and just a ding to the bottom right corner.  The deep groove disc looks unplayed, and grades Mint/Near Mint with no spindle marks and just some inaudible scuffs to the ‘Blues From an Airplane.’  By far the cleanest example we’ve seen.

Matrix Numbers: Side 1 – TPRS-0173-12 S/Side 2 – TPRS-0174-4 S

From Wikipedia: Shortly before the album’s release, RCA demanded that the band return to the studio and change the lyrics of “Let Me In” and “Run Around”. The label’s executives had become concerned that certain lines in the songs would cause controversy due to them being sexually suggestive or making supposed references to drugs. The original rendition of “Let Me In”, a song about sexual frustration, included the line “Oh, let me in, I wanna be there / I gotta get in, you know where”, which was then substituted with “Oh, let me in, I wanna be there / You shut your door, now it ain’t fair”. In the same song, the line “Don’t tell me you want money”, possibly alluding to prostitution, was changed to “Don’t tell me it’s so funny”. Similarly, the original version of “Run Around” contained the phrase “Blinded by colors come flashing from flowers that sway as you lay below me”, the latter part of which was changed to “that sway as you stay here by me”.

They’d find all this meaning and give it a great deal of importance, but “trips” was just a slang word to us, part of the language. They’d sit us down with their censors and talk to us and we’d say, “You guys are crazy.” – Marty Balin

Along with these lyrical changes, the label also decided that “Runnin’ ‘Round This World”, which included the line “The nights I’ve spent with you have been fantastic trips”, was to be removed from the album entirely, despite having already been released months earlier as the B-Side of “It’s No Secret”. The band attempted to rectify this by replacing the word “trips” with a guitar arpeggio, but ultimately the song was cut from the final version of the record.
These last-minute changes led to complications with the album’s pressing. Originally, one stereo version and one mono version of the record was to be released, as was the standard at the time. Instead, different variants of the album were manufactured: the first pressings contained the unaltered, original 12 tracks; the second pressings had 11 tracks, omitting “Runnin’ ‘Round This World”, and were manufactured only in mono; the third pressings, containing the altered lyrics, were the most common copies issued and sold from 1966 onward.