Fantastic Trip
Co-vocalist and songwriter with Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship, and solo artist, Marty Balin died on September 27.
IN MONTEREY POP, D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary of the pivotal 1967 California festival, Marty Balin can be heard singing Today, the ballad he co-wrote with bandmate Paul Kantner for Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow. But he is never seen. Instead, the camera focuses on his covocalist, Grace Slick, miming the words. “I was really hurt,” Balin told me years later. “I was young and I was like, Awwww.” Balin, who has died aged 76, in Tampa, Florida, was equally adept at exuding buttery smoothness as growling urgency, while his songs embraced sensitivity, lysergic openness and anthemic power. Yet he quickly became accustomed to ceding the spotlight to the woman with whom he shared the front of the stage. On-stage, it was said, Balin and Slick made love, but in private, theirs was a relationship fraught with tension. It didn’t start that way. Balin, born Martyn Jerel Buchwald in Cincinnati in 1942, had come to rock from pop and theatre, then folk. He cut four Gene Pitney-like sides for the Los Angeles label Challenge in 1962, then drifted into the Town Criers folk group. He formed the Airplane in San Francisco in 1965, with guitarists/ singers Kantner and Jorma Kaukonen and a quickly jettisoned female singer and rhythm section. Their 1966 debut LP, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, made noise locally, but it was ’67’s Surrealistic Pillow, the first to feature the classic line-up (by then including bassist Jack Casady, drummer Spencer Dryden and Slick plus the three co-founders), that turned them into stars. Two tunes brought to the band and sung by Slick, Somebody To Love and White Rabbit, became hit singles, and Balin soon found himself in her shadow. For the next album, After Bathing At Baxter’s (also 1967), he co-wrote only one song. By 1970, Balin was fed up and bolted his own creation. The abundance of cocaine use by the band and the death of his close friend Janis Joplin, as well as the ugliness of the ill-fated December 1969 Altamont festival, soured him. He retreated to the sidelines until 1974, when Kantner asked him to collaborate and sing on a new song, Caroline, meant for Kantner and Slick’s new spinoff group, Jefferson Starship. The following year, Balin joined them, contributing the high-riding chart ballad Miracles and singing lead on subsequent hits With Your Love, Count On Me and Runaway. But by 1978 that familiar feeling of ennui came over him once again and he left for a solo career that gave him one final Top 10 hit, Hearts, in 1981. Balin spent the rest of his years alternating between solo work and semi-reunions with reconstituted variations on Jefferson Starship, as well as one full-blown Airplane outing and album in ’89. Sadly, his last couple of years were marked with physical distress caused by botched heart surgery in New York. He died before the lawsuit against the hospital he blamed even went to court.
“By 1970, he was fed up and bolted his own creation.”