Jefferson Airplane co-founder and lead singer
Marty Balin, a founder, lead singer and songwriter of the groundbreaking San Francisco psychedelic band Jefferson Airplane and a key member of that band’s 1970s successor, Jefferson Starship, died Thursday in Tampa, Fla., where he lived. He was 76.
His death was announced by his wife, Susan Joy Balin. A representative, Ryan Romanesco, said Balin had died en route to a hospital. No cause of death was immediately available.
Balin was a prime mover in the flowering of psychedelic rock in mid-1960s San Francisco, not only as a founding member of Jefferson Airplane in 1965 but also as an original owner of the Matrix, a club that opened that year and also nurtured bands and artists like the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Santana and Steppenwolf.
Balin’s voice could offer the intimate solace of ballads like Jefferson Airplane’s “Today,” the siren wails of a frantic acid-rocker like the group’s “Plastic Fantastic Lover,” or the soul-pop entreaties of Jefferson Starship’s “Miracles.”
Jefferson Airplane would earn its place in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with music that was the epitome of 1960s psychedelia: a molten, improvisatory mixture of folk, rock, blues, jazz, R&B, ragas and more, sometimes adopting pop-song structures and sometimes exploding them. The songs were about love, freedom, altered perception, rebellion and possibilities that could be transcendent or apocalyptic.
In Jefferson Airplane’s prime, Balin was one of four lead singers, alongside Grace Slick, Paul Kantner and the band’s lead guitarist, Jorma Kaukonen. That lineup could generate fervent harmonies and incendiary vocal duels in songs like “Volunteers” or “3/5 of a Mile in 10 Seconds.”
But it also led to increasing friction within the band; Slick was often singled out for attention, and she sang lead on “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love,” the 1967 hits that made the band national headliners. “I always let everybody else take the credit,” Balin told High Times magazine in 2000. “Grace was the most beautiful girl in rock at the time, so they gave her credit for everything.”
Yet he never entirely left behind his Jefferson Airplane bandmates. Jefferson Starship, a band formed by Kantner with Slick, featured Balin as a guest in 1974 and reached its commercial peak when he became a full member in 1975.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by two daughters, Jennifer Edwards and Delaney Balin, and two stepdaughters, Rebekah Geier and Moriah Geier.