Dave Zimmer – “Jefferson Starship: Return of the Band That Will Not Die” (1981)
Written for BAM magazine, November 1981…
You can’t last any longer than the Jefferson Starship, a band that’s been at the top of the charts with regularity since, unbelievably, 1966.
Back then, they were the Jefferson Airplane, but years later – with the departure of Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady, who formed Hot Tuna – they became the Starship and flew into a decent share of hits. With the acquisition of vocalist Mickey Thomas, the return of Grace Slick and Modern Times, their latest bestseller, the Starship continue their stay at the top of the charts.
It sounded like machine gun fire. While Grace Slick, Paul Kantner and the rest of the Jefferson Starship charged into ‘Ride the Tiger’, crackling reports pierced the cool night air at Berkeley’s outdoor Greek Theatre. Ten thousand people in the audience scanned the stage while the Starship stole quick glances at each other. Then more blasts came, this time louder and sharper. The music didn’t stop. The band screamed the lyrics, “Red wants the country back and white wants out of this world…” All the while, crew members in black satin Starship jackets scurried about with small flashlights. What was happening? No one knew until…click, the noise stopped. The music went on. And a relieved stage hand, signaling with his arms, communicated to all who saw him that a faulty connecting cord had been found and replaced. It had only been electrical pops! Kantner smiled. The audience cheered. Then the Starship exploded.
The scene, several hours later, is at “The Airplane House,” located on the northern edge of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. With thick, ridged columns framing the doorway, this black, three-story, 1903 Victorian is an imposing sight. It survived the 1906 earthquake. And, since the late ’60s, it has survived the Jefferson Airplane/Starship. High ceilings; broad, elegant staircases; wood etchings; antique sofas and easy chairs; a pool table; thick Persian rugs; old Airplane posters from the Fillmore; new Starship photographs from the Modern Times sessions and, yes, a milling crowd of Starship family, along with invited guests – including your faithful reporter and a beautiful woman named Lucie – fill the Airplane House’s interior at 1:00 a.m. The atmosphere is celebratory. Champagne and beer froth and flow freely. Playing the perfect host, Paul Kantner roams about, joint in hand, greeting people and accepting congratulations. The Starship is flying high following a triumphant national tour in support of Modem Times, the band’s latest album that has yielded three singles, ‘Find Your Way Back’, ‘Stranger’, and ‘Save Your Love’. Not bad, considering the first incarnation of the Jefferson Airplane came together back in 1965.
Of course, much has changed since then. No less than 17 different musicians have broken into the Airplane/Starship starting line-up. For ‘81, the flight squad features:
Paul Kantner – reluctant but steady leader who co-founded the group with Marty Balin in ‘65. Kantner’s pen and voice can still slash into politics, swoon about love and take on critics.
Craig Chaquico – entered Starship clan ten years ago at age 16. His wild lead guitar breaks and pyrotechnics produce a heavy metal edge.
Aynsley Dunbar – former drummer for Frank Zappa and Journey. Joined Starship in ‘78, replacing Johnny Barbata. Pounds the skins like a human steam hammer.
Pete Sears – English bassist/keyboardist who shifted to S.F. Bay area after recording several albums with Rod Stewart. Sessions with Grace Slick led to Starship spot in ‘74. Plays like he has 15 fingers.
Mickey Thomas – swept into national spotlight as vocalist on Elvin Bishop’s hit single, ‘Fooled Around and Fell in Love’. Filled lead singer spot vacated by Marty Balin in ‘79. Thomas can sing higher than the human ear can hear.
David Freiberg – ace harmony singer and bassist for S.F. hippie band, Quicksilver Messenger Service. Adopted by Airplane/Starship family in ‘72. He and Sears play musical chairs with bass/keyboard roles.
Grace Slick – original First Lady of Rock. Back with the Starship after 2 1/2 year solo career yielded Dreams and Welcome to the Wrecking Ball. Off the bottle, but still crazy and singing her heart out after all these years.
“I had to come back,” Slick says, perched on the edge of an antique desk. “After I heard this song of Paul’s ‘Stairway to Cleveland’, with the line, ‘Fuck you, we do what we want,’ I got interested. Love songs are OK, but heavy attitudes with humor, that’s what rock ‘n’ roll is all about. That’s the kind of rock ‘n’ roll I like to sing!”
But while Slick was talking about easing back into the Starship as a “background vocalist” during Modern Times sessions last fall, everything ground to a halt. Paul Kantner, after a particularly lengthy recording session, returned to his hotel room with what he thought was just a splitting headache. But as the night wore on, the pain didn’t subside.
“I don’t really go for a lot of this telepathic stuff,” says Craig Chaquico, thinking back to that night in October. “But at 3:00 am, I wake up and see my girlfriend (Monica Clemans, the wet-suited woman with the green eyes on the cover of Modern Times), she’s walking around going, ‘Something weird’s happening, something fuckin’ weird.’ An hour later, I get a call from Cynthia (Bowman, Starship publicist) and she tells me Paul’d had a brain hemorrhage…at the exact moment Monica was getting these strange feelings.”
It was two days before anyone in the Starship knew if Kantner was going to survive. Chaquico was the first to actually get through to his hospital room and was stunned when all Kantner said over the phone was, “Aaauuuzzzmmaauuaahh.” But when Paul then started laughing, Craig knew he’d been had…the recipient of some classic “Kantner Humor.” “He can be pretty cruel sometimes,” Chaquico chuckles. “Even later, when we got back into the studio. Paul looked at me and said, ‘Where’s Jorma (Kaukonen, original Airplane lead guitarist)?’”
Miraculously, though, Kantner did not suffer any brain damage. Of the whole experience, he now says, “When it happened, I thought I’d better call an ambulance, but I was never aware of the seriousness of what it possibly could have been. I smash my head up regularly, to let out the evil humor and things. When I was about 21, I cracked myself up pretty serious in a motorcycle crash, a famous ‘Bob Dylan– Duane Allman Experience.’ Ever since then I’ve been a little off, they tell me.”
David Crosby, a close friend of Kantner’s, says, “That hole in Paul’s head saved his life. When the hemorrhage occurred, there was a window for the pressure to escape through.”
Regardless of the medical reasons, Kantner eventually recuperated back to full strength as Modern Times evolved into a pounding, aggressive Starship album. The band had never rocked harder.
“We’ve kept all the parts simple,” says Aynsley Dunbar. “Forget hot licks and all that. The less you play, the more you project. It makes for a stronger, harder sound.”
Pete Sears adds, “On the early Starship albums, there was so much going on…sometimes six things at once. It was fun to get loose, but now our records are better, more structured.”
“I’d never heard the band do what they were told before,” says Grace Slick, recalling her entry into the Modern Times sessions. “When the producer (Ron Nevison) made suggestions, they listened, and performed…like soldiers.”
This almost militaristic attitude seems to be an outgrowth of the Starship’s continuing longevity. Just as critics start to write the band off, the members pull together en masse. Around the time Rolling Stone ran an insulting, negative record review of ’79’s Freedom at Point Zero, Kantner and the rest of the Starship were attending a club show in Los Angeles featuring Paul Warren & the Explorers. Mid-way through the set, Warren, in a furious frenzy, screamed, “We don’t care what you think. Fuck you, we do what we want!” This gave Kantner an idea that expanded into a letter to Rolling Stone, then the song, ‘Stairway to Cleveland’, built around this “fuck you” sentiment. Paul Warren is given a “conceptual” writing credit, but the phrase has clearly become a Jefferson Starship motto. At the Greek Theater show, 10,000 voices chanted, in unison with the group, “Fuck you, we do what we want!”
“It’s pretty amazing,” Kantner says. “The audiences all along the tour really responded to that song. And no, we didn’t play Cleveland, but we played Akron (home of Devo).”
Even though the Starship is, by virtue of their history, considered “old wave,” Kantner doesn’t have any negative feelings toward punk or new wave groups. In fact, he says, “That’s where a lot of the vitality that excites me in the music industry is happening right now. The music business has been getting boring. It’s being run by lawyers, accountants…all of these non-musicians. The punk bands don’t fool with ‘em. They just play what they feel and play hard. That’s what the Starship’s been trying to do.”
Back in the mid-’70s, though, an atmospheric, swirling ballad style represented the heart of the band’s sound. Slick’s drug raps and Kantner’s revolutionary rants eased up as Marty Balin’s ‘Miracles’ headed for the top of the charts. The Starship turned platinum with love.
“‘Miracles’ was great,” Kantner says, “a lovely song and unique for the time period (1975). But from then on, we sort of got typecast…’wimp rock.’ The next album (Spitfire, released in ‘76), RCA wanted more songs like ‘Miracles’. But it was time to do something a little more rock ‘n’ roll. So, after Earth (released on ‘78), the music self-destructed, which was probably as it should have been. It was in keeping with our founder, Thomas Jefferson, who said, ‘There should be a revolution every five years’.”
This Starship “revolution” came to a catastrophic head in June of 1978. Minutes before a scheduled show in Lorelei, Germany, Grace Slick decided she was too sick to perform. The concert was canceled and the angry German fans began a riot that destroyed $1,000,000 worth of Starship equipment. Slick, frustrated by the group’s lack of direction and battling an alcohol problem, left the Starship shortly thereafter.
“Everything looked fucked up,” remembers Craig Chaquico. “I’d lost my best guitars, Grace was gone…I didn’t know what was going to happen next. But in retrospect, I’m glad the Germany thing occurred. It was a real turning point, it made the Starship turn in the direction we’re going. It made us get back to rock ‘n’ roll. It made me believe that even the darkest clouds have a silver lining.”
As the Starship rose from its own ashes in 1979, Marty Balin parted company with the group. And while he went on to write/direct a rock opera called Rock Justice, a new lead singer, Mickey Thomas, joined the Starship.
“I tried not to let the shadows of Grace and Marty bother me,” Thomas now says. “You don’t ever replace people like them. I didn’t even try. The band let me open up and, with my gospel roots, I was forced to develop my own style.”
“Right away,” says Chaquico, “Mickey fit in. He has this solid, high range that can cut above the drums. When he started singing, it was true love.”
The public agreed as the Starship’s subsequent album Freedom at Point Zero, rose up the charts behind ‘Jane’, a high flying rocker that featured Thomas’ sonic tenor lead vocals. The Starship had beefed up their rock ‘n’ roll. A metallic urgency leapt from track to track.
“It was like being in a brand new band,” says Chaquico. “And for the first time, we’d used an outside producer (Ron Nevison, known for his work with Led Zeppelin and Bad Company).”
“We went with Nevison,” adds Kantner, “because he had a great reputation for engineering together heavy metal-style electric guitar and drums with harmonized voices and acoustic instruments. A lot of the edge we got in the studio was his, and a lot was ours. The combination is the best recording experience I’ve had.”
Not surprisingly, Nevison was again on hand when the Starship’s building momentum carried into the studio last fall. Modern Times would reflect the band’s drive. Even Kantner’s brain hemorrhage didn’t alter the Starship’s re-energized musical profile. And when Grace Slick returned, well…
“We had to find out if she was real serious about sticking around,” says Chaquico. “The new members in the group had heard all of these rumors and stories and wondered, ‘Is she a flake? Will she get drunk and fucked up all of the time?’ But the more time Grace spent in the studio with us, the more it became obvious she’d really chenged her act. No more drinking. And when she started singing out, harmonizing with Mickey, it was natural she should be there. Grace is family.”
“I’d kept in touch with everyone,” Slick says, “albeit on a non-musical basis. It was never a relationship that was totally cut off. So when I went into the studio last fall, it was like walking into my own living room. What startled me the most was how together the group was, playing just for the music, rather than ‘me, me, me, me.’
“When I think about the Starship of the late ’70s,” she continues, “I just remember what a mess it was. We had four platinum albums in a row, but there’s nothing fulfilling about selling records that bore you to play. Music is very emotional, so how you feel really affects how you perform. If an accountant has problems, he can still come into work, add two and two, and it still comes out four. Musicians can’t do that. Confusion, feeling down…it’ll come out in the music. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll play badly, ’cause after a certain number of years, you can play anything. But the feeling – that you can’t get if it isn’t there. An audience can tell if a band feels good together and right now, the Starship feels great!“
Dave Zimmer
Jefferson Airplane – “Crown of Creation” (TV – 1968)
Jefferson Airplane on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
Michael Lydon – “Airplane’s New Album: ‘Bathing at Baxter’s’” (1967)
This article about the recording of Jefferson Airplane’s late-1967 psychedelic classic, After Bathing at Baxter’s, comes from the 2nd (ever) issue of Rolling Stone (Nov. 23, 1967)…
Jefferson Airplane finally finished their third LP Halloween week after two months of off-and-on recording in Los Angeles. It’s called After Bathing at Baxter’s, has a fold-out cover designed by cartoonist Ron Cobb, and, says lead singer Marty Balin, is “a whole new and different thing for the group.”
Recorded while the San Francisco band lived in luxury at a Beverly Hills mansion that the Beatles rented on one American tour, the album’s very tentative release date is November 15.
As of November 1, seven tracks, besides “Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil” and “Two Heads” previously released as a single, were finished.
Three are Paul Kantner compositions: “Watch Her Ride,” “Martha,” and “Wild Time.” The other members except for Jack Casady, have contributed one track each.
Grace Slick’s song is “Rejoyce,” orginally called “Ulysses,” whose lyric is snatches of James Joyce’s novel. An oboe plays behind her voice. “It’s too powerful for Top-40,” says Balin, “it has the line, ‘I’d rather my country died for me,’ and there’s a character in it named Blazes Crotch.”
Spencer Dryden did his cut, “A Package of Value,” all by himself, piling three drum tracks, a marimba track, and one on harpsichord into a “song sandwich” that is the joke of the album.
Jorma Kaukonen’s number, “Last Wall of the Castle,” is “a mind-blower” according to the Airplane’s personal manager, Bill Thompson. “Young Girl Sunday Blues,” Balin’s contribution, is over five minutes long, the album’s longest cut.
Answering criticism that the album is way behind schedule, Balin said the group had never set a date for the album’s completion. “We’ve just done it when we could.”
As the Airplane left the Fillmore a week ago Sunday for their last planned session in RCA’s Los Angeles studios (the same ones used by the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead), they had no idea of what songs would complete After Bathing.
“We have a few more done,” Balin said, “but we don’t like them. There’ll probably be two more and they’ll be things we come up with right at the last minute. We always do that.
“Man, we’re the worst people ever in a recording studio. We create our music in the ballrooms. Compared to them a recording studio is so sterile, like a hospital, that it takes us three weeks just to get used to walking through the door.”
This time, with complete artistic control and without the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia as “spiritual and musical advisor,” the Airplane has been on its own.
“No one helps us,” said Balin, “I think everyone there is afraid of us. We try crazy things and no one tells us they can’t be done. Our producers is like a school teacher with a real creative class, letting the kids do what they want and just making sure they don’t smash all the erasers.”
Bill Thompson says the album cover is as strange as the sounds inside. Cobb’s cartoon is a monster airplane which carries, in tiny detail, symbols of plastic American culture: beer cans, billboards, ticky-tack houses and buildings, some of which are recognizable San Francisco landmarks. The plane trails a banner inscribed with the album’s title, a name suggested by an “underground – underground group called the Night Owls,” says Balin. It refers to no one place or event.
Inside the fold are six pictures of the Airplane taken by photographer Allan Frappe. Thompson says they are indescribably far out, with strange color and form distortions. Balin is so impressed that he would like to do a whole book with Frappe’s photographs.
If hard times in the studio have held up the works, la dolce vita back at the mansion hasn’t helped any either.
The mansion, with a giant pool, sauna bath, rifle range, electronically-controlled gate, and a Japanese houseboy (all for $5000 a month), has been “a giant toy” says Balin for the group who haven’t always had it so good.
“Every night something was happening,” Balin said with a fond smile, “there were parties, strange parties, and then weird parties. We just sat there and watched the world go by right inside that house.”
Michael Lydon
Paul Kantner / Grace Slick – “Sunfighter” (1972)
Lester Bangs’ interesting review of this 1972 album by the Jefferson Airplane pair. Taken from the March 2, 1972 issue of Rolling Stone (#103)…
First it was groups, then it was solo artists, now all of a sudden it looks like Couples. John & Yoko got us into this mess, Paul & Linda weren’t about to be outdone, and Grace & Paul are shaping up as a source of composition, performance and sheer product at least as potent as the Airplane themselves. Funny thing about these couples, they all sing about themselves. Or each other reflecting back and forth. John & Yoko captured all the press and turned themselves into a pair of avantsy postures, while Paul just sings about eating at home, which, of course, beats doing it in the road but’s just about as bare (musically speaking). Paul & Grace see themselves as part of something bigger, and amidst all the drugstore fire-brandishings of Blows Against the Empire they placed “A Child Is Coming,” all about how the stork was due to call.
Well, the kid’s here now and we can all admire her. China, nee god, is one of the easiest babies on the planet to bill and coo over right now, because the Blows lovebirds have put a big color pic of her square on the cover of their new album. The title refers to the kid, too, implying that she’s a child of destiny and it’s only a matter of time till she too will someday come down on you, government man. And the family album takes up just exactly where “A Child Is Coming” left off, with “And we walk in the sand my lady and me/And we watch and see the child grow.” She’s getting all the love and care any toddler needs despite her folks being such famous musicians and activists, and I’m glad to hear it.
But that’s too easy. Everybody loves romance and everybody loves a baby, but not everybody loves Grace & Paul. Why? Well, for people of such thicklaid Revolutionary profession you don’t see ‘em in any active side of the Movement much, and Blows Against the Empire and the seeming outtake from it at the end of Bark were pompous as hell, and all that has irritated a lot of people across a wide range of political persuasions. Time was, Surrealistic Pillow and Baxter’s days, when the Airplane were one of the most universally respected of American groups, but Volunteers started a trend that Blows Against the Empire laid the epitaph on, and people all over are discovering how fashionable it’s become to dump on the Airplane, especially Grace & Paul.
It ain’t fair. Music should be considered as pure music first and the morality or cogency of its message second, hard as that is sometimes, and especially should rock & roll music be so considered. The other thing is that, as heavyhanded as G&P regularly are, just about every important recording artist you can think of has gotten pretentious or at least portentous today, it’s a disease of the times, and at least the ersatz and probably synthetic fury of Blows is preferable to the involuted, introverted sortings of varying strands of navel lint indulged in by several other chart-topping Heavies I’m not gonna get in trouble by naming again.
There has always been an element of sheer juggernaut rock & roll thunder in the Airplane’s music, most often laid to Jorma and Jack, but with the inescapable desultoriness of Bark and the relative vigor of Blows and this album I’m beginning to wonder if the balance of energy in the band hasn’t shifted. It’s not so much that Sunfighter is an appreciably better album than Bark as that even in its excesses and lyrical embarrassments it seems to have more of what you originally came to the band for.
The thematic grist is as sturmund-drang topical as ever, with a two-part song about the Weather-woman Diana Oughton who died in the bomb factory blast last year as well as Paul’s expected and by now more than stereotypic see-my-people – come – together quasi-anthemics, but they have a much firmer grasp of their materials than on Blows, more time has been spent on the album and the material itself is mostly far superior, real songs with sense and structure as opposed to amorphous rants, seemingly ad-libbed in the whirl of titanic rushes, like “Mau Mau Amerikon.”
Try “Silver Spoon,” which isn’t about cocaine like you thought but about prey and consumption in the cycle of life, with a bit of cannibalism thrown in for seasoning. Structurally it’s tight as an aboriginal bongo, with stark block piano chording and Grace delivering her patented modal, droning vocal style with more success than she has in some time, more even perhaps than in something as walled into history as “Two Heads.” This style was always a risky proposition, at its worst like Buffy St. Marie freaked out on strychnine experimenting with a sort of vocal menstruation (the commercial the Airplane did for White Levis was the best example of that, though “White Rabbit” was nothing you’d want to play for your own little Sunfighters). Here, however, the innate fury and passion that is Grace at her best come searing through, managing as well to hold onto a rare tightness and discipline, so it builds and builds like the mighty bricks in the Sphinx and never loses the current summit with glottal excess. And the words are startling, to say the least: “Throw down all your silver spoons–eat all of the raw meat with your hands/Pick it up piece by piece … Shove it in your mouth any way that you can.”
Brother, that’s primal. Primeval, too. And, with their insistence on simplistic political imperatives and imagery derived from the elements and mammals, Paul & Grace manage to get next to something very basic that penetrates easily and almost, but never quite, touches you in a strange place the Doors used to try for as well as Michael McClure in his Beast Poems–the snarling, smiling peristaltic Mammal in you. Check Paul’s “When I Was a Boy I Watched the Wolves,” the best song on the album and possibly Paul’s best writing to date: an eerie, flashing riff that builds with perfect precision to a furiously driving floodtide, and: “When I was a boy I watched the wolves run/… till the mornin’ sun/And as I grew I soon found the wolfpack grow on me/Laser bright feel the lunar light comin’ down on me/… No light shines on the fang neglected/Run with the wolfpack.”
That’s not just weird, that’s the stuff of bone and stone and blood, drawing imagistically on what remains of nature outside the fences of man while retaining the big piston drive of the city in its rhythmic guts. Which is why Grace & Paul make it and all these bucolic hippies singing about planting cannabis seeds by country roads don’t. Even in the song to “Diana,” the context is pre- or post-civilization: “Sing a song for Diana/Huntress of the moon and a lady of the Earth/Weather woman Diana.”
Not everything is that paleo-lithically pristine, of course; the album has its relative clunkers and unmemorable bits, and Paul still ain’t no Balin when it comes to vocal chops, but he’s getting better and really cooks for someone who sang his first non-bathroom vocal in “Let Me In” on Jefferson Airplane Takes Off. And what compositions don’t knock you up against the wall on first hearing probably mellow into viperous bloom with age and atmosphere; I snickered at “Titanic,” one of those moog-and-electrosmear abysses you can’t dance to, thinking if I still smoked grass it’d probably flip me out, until a friend of mine who still does told me he listened to it psychedelicized and it did. A little something for everybody. This album has been one of the pleasantest surprises of the Santa solstice, and at this point I’m anticipating the next Kantner-Slick opus with far more interest than the Jefferson Airplane album that could conceivably never arrive.
Another denizen of the Plane pack worth checking out in his solo bow is Papa John Creach, the old fiddler who added a few fills to Bark and failed to resuscitate Hot Tuna. On his own he’s a spry, sly delight, and surprisingly turns up as one of the few musicians able to take on a passel of Superpassengers and still sail his ship straight and true. You wouldn’t even know that Jerry Garcia and the other peripatetic palaverers were there. Papa John has a way with the fiddle distinct in this day, a facility for playing straight gospel blues and making it sound somehow classical but never strained or mawkish, and a rare and subtle sense of humor, as when he begins W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” (and when was the last time you heard somebody do that?) with a riff straight out of Hungarian gypsy cum Bela Lugosi atmosphere music, or selects “Over the Rainbow” of all songs in creation and turns you around by not only making it palatable but actually, with his courtly-sweet phrases that teeter on the edge of cloying dreck but never quite lose their jive thread, a lot of fun to listen to. Which is pretty damn rare said of any record these days.
Lester Bangs
Grace Slick – “Let It Go” (1980)
Another track off the Dreams album, which has been out of print for many years. Grace is definitely one of the more underrated singers in history. Once the queen of rock n roll, she’s now somewhat forgotten. It would be nice to see a box set come out on her, to restore her name.
Grace Slick – “All the Machines” (Video – 1984)
Taken from her 1984 Software album. Not sure what to make of this. Strange song (though catchy on the chorus) and strange video. Typical 80s.
Grace Slick – “Wrecking Ball” (1981)
Taken from her solo album Welcome to the Wrecking Ball, now out of print. Much harder-edged than we are used to usually hearing from Gracie.
Jefferson Airplane – “Two Heads” (1967)
Taken from their experimental album After Bathing at Baxter’s, Grace Slick sings the lead on this. This is part of a larger suite called “Schizoforest Love Suite.”
Jefferson Airplane – “Crown of Creation” (Live – 1989)
Live @ Radio City Music Hall Aug. 29, 1989 from thier short-lived reunion tour. The picture quality here is just average but they sound good.
Jefferson Starship – “White Rabbit” (Live)
Grace Slick & Jefferson Starship from the early 80s performing “White Rabbit” from their Airplane days. Interesting to hear Starship doing this song in their harder rocking style.
