Jefferson Airplane co-founder was hurt in violent chaos of the Altamont Festival
It was emblematic of the turbulent path San Francisco’s Jefferson Airplane navigated in the 1960s and 70s that, when the group showed up to play a 1969 festival that was supposed to be the West Coast version of Woodstock, founding member Marty Balin, who has died aged 76, got knocked out cold.
The event was the Altamont Festival, cooked up and headlined by the Rolling Stones. Held four months after Woodstock, and staged outside San Francisco, it failed to replicate that event’s touted ‘‘three days of peace and music’’ and turned tragic when a concert-goer was stabbed to death by a member of the
Hells Angels motorcycle club, which had been hired by the Stones to provide security.
‘‘I didn’t think anything of the Hells Angels doing security, because I didn’t know that’s what they were there for,’’ singer, songwriter and guitarist Balin said in 1994. ‘‘But when we were playing, I saw these guys hitting people with pool cues right in front of the stage. I thought somebody should be doing something, so I jumped down and tried to break things up. The Angels were a little surprised. One of them said, ‘Marty, what are you doing down here? You’re gonna get hurt.’ ’’
While Balin was trying to break up one fight, someone hit him from behind and knocked him unconscious. Word of the incident prompted the Grateful Dead, who were also due to play, to pack up and leave, and the event further descended into chaos that eventually left four concert-goers dead.
The Altamont incident was reflective of the wild state of rock music in the late 1960s, and for a time, Balin and his cohorts in the Airplane – singer Grace Slick, Paul Kantner, guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and bassist Jack Casady – were considered key players.
Balin, whose real name was Martyn Jerel Buchwald, was born in Cincinnati, and moved with his family as a boy to San Francisco.
He had been caught up in the folk music revival of the late 50s and early 60s, and in 1962 changed his name to Marty Balin. He recorded a couple of singles on his own before joining a folk quartet called the Town Criers.
It was on the folk scene that he met guitarist Kantner and, in 1965, along with Casady, Kaukonen, drummer Skip Spence and singer Signe Toly Anderson, formed the first iteration of Jefferson Airplane. Their 1966 debut album Jefferson Airplane Takes Off
quickly found a national audience, and sold more than 500,000 copies.
Balin’s importance to the group was evident in the fact that one of his songs, It’s No Secret, was selected to be the first single from the album. ‘‘Back in those days Marty was quite the businessman,’’ Kantner said after Balin’s death. ‘‘He was the leader of the band on that level. He was the one who pushed us to do all the business stuff, orchestrating, thinking ahead, looking for managers and club opportunities. He was very good at it.’’
In an early sign of what was to become a hallmark of the ever-evolving group, Spence left shortly after the album was recorded; a few months later, after giving birth to her first child that year, Anderson also quit the band, setting the stage for the classic lineup in which Grace Slick shared lead singing duties with Balin and Kantner.
The new lineup recorded Surrealistic Pillow, a 1967 album considered a quintessential work of the emerging psychedelic music scene that flowered out of San Francisco and yielded the hit singles White Rabbit and Somebody to Love, along with Balin’s Plastic Fantastic Lover, 3⁄5 of a Mile in 10 Seconds and the ballad he wrote with Kantner often cited as one of the group’s finest, Today.
White Rabbit was widely considered an anthem to LSD, and caused many pop radio programmers to steer clear of subsequent Airplane singles. The group also took on political issues, which made them too hot for controversy-shy radio outlets to handle.
They were chosen to headline the first major rock festival, the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, which also served as a springboard for Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Otis Redding.
Jefferson Airplane were a marquee name two years later at Woodstock, and subsequently at Altamont. Yet as Slick’s commanding voice and onstage presence helped lift the band’s profile, it simultaneously reduced Balin’s.
Kantner and Slick, who later became romantically involved, slowly took over the reins of the band, and moved it in a heavier direction that appealed less to Balin’s more folk and pop-leaning taste.
He began to distance himself from the group in 1970 and officially quit in 1971. He decided, after Joplin’s death that year, to adopt a healthier lifestyle: he began yoga and gave up drinking and drugs.
But by the mid-1970s, he had patched things up with Kantner to rejoin the fold as the group became Jefferson Starship, with Casady and Kaukonen having departed.
Only three years later, however, he had soured on touring and Slick’s battles with alcohol, and left for a solo career.
He is survived by wife Susan, two daughters and two stepdaughters. – Los Angeles Times