COME UP THE YEARS
1941-2016
Jefferson Airplane catalyst Paul Kantner died on January 28.
As the Summer of Love’s peak moment approached, in June 1967, Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner was hunched studiously over his Rickenbacker on-stage at the Monterey Pop Festival. In dark-rimmed specs, and with a blond bob, he looked more like Peter & Gordon’s Peter Asher with a Brian Jones barnet than a rock revolutionary in the making.
By the end of the decade, the guitarist had emerged as the band’s unifying figure and chief ideologue, writer of inflammatory war cries like We Can Be Together and Volunteers, with their eulogies to the “forces of chaos and anarchy”. He’d taken on the Hell’s Angels at Altamont with a satirical “thanks” for knocking out Airplane singer Marty Balin, became one half of a hippy John and Yoko with partner and band co-vocalist Grace Slick, and started writing about the need to escape the world’s ills and establish a freaks-only utopia on another planet. When I spoke to him in 2005, Kantner was unrepentant in his commitment to his old ideals. “It’s adolescent and impractical,” he conceded, “but pointing a way to the star and not being able to get there does not decimate the value of the star. Some of humanity’s best work is generated by a longing for the impossible.” Kantner’s near evangelical zeal had its likely origins in his Catholic schooling, telling band biographer Jeff Tamarkin that he’d been abandoned to “nuns and guns”. He found refuge in sci-fi and then, in 1959, folk music. By March 1965, and inspired by The Beatles, acid and electricity, he accepted local scene-maker Balin’s invitation to form a group. The pair struck up a writing partnership, rarely bettered than on the aching bliss-ballad Today on 1967’s Surrealistic Pillow, the Airplane’s second, and breakthrough, album. On the follow-up, the super-psych After Bathing At Baxter’s, Kantner emerged as the key force, contributing six originals. One, Won’t You Try/Saturday Afternoon, was the first of many to document the changing fortunes of the counterculture that reverberated from Kantner’s native San Francisco to turn on the world. By 1970, and with both Jefferson Airplane and hippy idealism wobbling, Kantner released Blows Against The Empire, co-credited as Jefferson Starship. Picking up from where Wooden Ships (a co-write with David Crosby and Stephen Stills) left off, this all-star Bay Area set marked the high-point of Kantner’s “naïve children hoping for a better world” philosophy. After Jefferson Airplane split down the middle during 1972, Kantner (with Slick and a returning Balin) revived the Jefferson Starship name, changed direction and hit US Number 1 with 1975’s AOR-friendly Red Octopus. Keeping a flicker of rebellion alive on songs like St Charles (Spitfire, 1976) and Stairway To Cleveland (Modern Times, 1981), Kantner eventually quit in 1984. A lawsuit over rights to the band name followed, but Kantner – still the outlaw, headband’n’all, until the end – spent much of the past two decades performing as Jefferson Starship. He was, quite simply, “the catalyst that made the alchemy happen”, wrote original Airplane lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen upon news of his colleague’s death from a heart attack.