There are performing artists of older vintage I could treat of today, but none of them get me as jazzed as Grace Slick (b. 1939), nor are any of them as witchy. I love that she was born on Hallowe’en E’en, the Eve of All Hallows Eve. I’ve always found her as spooky-scary as she is gorgeous, a kind of proto-Goth pioneer. When you look at the girls in the Manson family (pre-head shaving) they seem to be mimicking Slick and her pony-tailed predecessor in the Jefferson Airplane Signe Toly Anderson (1941-2016) stylistically. Child-like, but apt to channel Satan in midnight ceremonies. I don’t claim it’s literally true; it’s just what I’m fantasizing about on Halloween.
I am making the girls the touchstone for my piece on the Jefferson Airplane because (as with Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company) they are the unique element, and frankly the element that inspired most people to even give them the time of the day. There was no shortage of hairy rock combos crawling around America in the ’60s. The Airplane might even have been prominent among them, but the female element takes it over the top. In addition to Slick (who replaced Anderson following their first album) the classic line-up of the band included the other lead singer and songwriter Marty Balin (1942-2018), who founded the band as well as the club The Matrix where they initially played; rhythm guitarist and songwriter Paul Kantner (1941-2016), lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen (b. 1940), bassist Jack Cassady (b. 1944, no relation to the Merry Prankster Neal Cassady), and drummer Spencer Dryden, 1938-2005, who happened to be Charlie Chaplin’s nephew, though few knew it at the time).
San Francisco, like New York City and Newport, Rhode Island, is a seaport, and that’s where you always get thriving folk scenes. It’s less true nowadays but still applies to an extent. Ports have bars around the docks which are frequented by guys who learned how to entertain themselves with harmonicas and concertinas and stringed instruments, and that goes all the way back to the origins of western nautical culture in places like the British Isles and Scandinavia. Like the Greenwich Village scene, San Francisco was also enriched by a lively poetry community, spearheaded by the Beat Movement. In the late ’50s and early ’60s, folk music was exploding, and the members of the Jefferson Airplane were active participants in the ferment. When the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and The Byrds devised folk-rock, the entire scene began to amplify and add a backbeat to their sound. The traditional instruments in the photo above, from the Surrealistic Pillow album cover however, supplies clues to what they were originally exploring.
Interest in the blues was also a major element, however. The Airplane’s name was an homage to Blind Lemon Jefferson. And why an airplane? I hate being literal, but forgive me, it was in the air. The cover art of their first album also has clues, the group standing in front of one those old wooden-propeller contraptions, a couple of them wearing scarfs and flying goggles. There was a vogue for the theme at the time. There was the movie Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965), and the novelty hit “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron”. Another San Francisco band named themselves Sopwith Camel. If the Jefferson Airplane beat them all, they were just reading the zeitgeist.
From the beginning, the Jefferson Airplane were characterized by a loud, hard rock sound, which made for a stark contrast with often pretty multipart vocal harmonies. Their debut album Jefferson Airplane Takes Off (1966) feels prototypical in retrospect, not quite there yet. It features selections like a cover of Memphis Minnie’s “Chauffeur Blues”, and the Nashville Teen hit “Tobacco Road”, as well as a very clunky, Byrds-sounding version of “Let’s Get Together”, later a massive hit for The Youngbloods.
Following a change in personnel, their second effort, Surrealistic Pillow (1967) would be the record that put The Jefferson Airplane on the map, making them the standard bearers of what was called The San Francisco Sound (its other notable exponents being The Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Moby Grape, Country Joe and the Fish, and Quicksilver Messenger Service.) Anderson had left the band to marry one of the Merry Pranksters, so Slick was lured away from another band called The Great Society, whose members included her husband Darby Slick and his brother Jerry. In addition to those belting pipes, and those huge baby blue eyes, she brought two hit tunes, both of which are among those that have come to define the era: the menacing, Spanish-sounding “White Rabbit”, inspired by Alice in Wonderland, and every bit as much a celebration of the hallucinatory drug experience as John Lennon’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”; and the angry pop-diatribe “Somebody to Love”, which was singable, danceable, and yet seemed inspired by Dylan rants like “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Positively 4th Street”. Slick herself wrote the former song; her husband Darby wrote the latter one. They both became top ten singles. (Interestingly, this iteration of the band never had any others. How or why they didn’t follow this up is an interesting question).
Surrealistic Pillow is the Airplane record I have sent the most time with by far, and that’s because (as is all too rare anytime, anyhow, anywhere) every track on the record is pretty amazing. Also particularly strong is Balin’s “3/5 of a Mile in Ten Seconds”, which could have easily been released as a single in its own right, Kaukonen’s tuneful fingerpicking solo “Embryonic Journey” and the moody “Today”, which Balin claimed was originally written for Tony Bennett. “My Best Friend” (which anticipates the later country sound of The Byrds) was penned by outgoung drummer Skip Spence, who by then had gone on to found Moby Grape. Produced by Rick Jarrard, the entire album has a haunting, faraway sound that sort of gets its claws in you.
Surrealistic Pillow went to #3 on the charts and put the Jefferson Airplane on top. They may be the only band that played ALL the legendary festivals of the era: Monterey Pop (1967), Isle of Wight (1968), Woodstock (1969) and Altamont (1969). Going forward, they would have no more chart topping singles however, though their albums were all best sellers. The remaining ones were After Bathing at Breakfast (1967, #17), Crown of Creation (1968, #6, the amazing title song of which should have been a much bigger hit), the politically charged Volunteers (1969, #13), et al.
With the change of the decade there were changes in the band. Balin dropped out for a time, and Kaukonen and Casady split off to form Hot Tuna. The remnants of the group (Slick and Kantner, et al with Balin returned), reformed as Jefferson Starship in 1974. Despite the spacey, sc-fi gimmick of the band’s name, the music was far less psychedelic, containing much more pop-oriented, relationship themed subject matter. This incarnation of the band had many more hit singles than the Airplane, including “Miracles” (1975, #3), “With Your Love” (1976, #12), “Count on Me” (1978, #8), “Runaway” (1978, #12), and the metal-sounding “Jane” (1979, #14), performed by Mickey Thomas (who’d also sung lead on Elvin Thomas’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love”). Balin and Slick actually dropped out around this time, though the band continued on.
After a legal brouhaha, yet another incarnation of the band was formed in 1985 called Starship. Hilariously, this band’s singles charted even higher than those of the earlier groups. “We Built This City” (1985), “Sara” (1985), and “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” (1987) all went to #1. Quite naturally, as they went increasingly mainstream, I liked their music less and less, this bogus eighties crap least of all. (Probably not coincidentally, The Grateful Dead had their only hit single “Touch of Grey” during this same period).
Slick retired in 1990. I am interested to note that she is older than most of the musicians of her generation — she’s even older than any of the Beatles. Free spirits know no age! Anyway, I’m very much looking forward, in the spirit of the Beckettesque simplification trend that has governed the evoltion of their bands names, to the next one: Ship! Followed, I guess, by Sh! And finally: “”!