Important work highlighted in color.
1966: Jefferson Airplane Takes Off. 1967: Surrealistic Pillow * After Bathing At Baxter's. 1968: Crown of Creation. 1969: Bless Its Pointed Little Head * Volunteers. 1970: The Worst of the Jefferson Airplane (Collection). 1971: Bark. 1972: Long John Silver. 1973: Thirty Seconds Over Winterland. 1974: Early Flight. 1976: Flight Log (Collection). 1987: 2400 Fulton St. (Collection). 1989: Jefferson Airplane (reunion album). 1992: Jefferson Airplane Loves You (Box Set). 1999: Jefferson Airplane Live at the Fillmore East.
1970: A Fresh Wind Blows Against the Empire. 1983: Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra.
1971: Sunfighter. 1973: Baron Von Tollbooth and the Chrome Nun.
1973: Manhole. 1980: Dreams. 1981: Welcome to the Wrecking Ball. 1983: Software. 1999: The Best of Grace Slick.
1974: Dragonfly. 1975: Red Octopus. 1976: Spitfire. 1978: Earth. 1979: Gold
(Collection) * Freedom at Point Zero. 1981: Modern Times. 1982:
Winds of Change. 1984: Nuclear Furniture. 1985: Knee Deep in the
Hoopla. 1987: No Protection. 1989: Love Among the Cannibals.
1991: Greatest Hits (Ten Years and Change, 1979-1991). 1995: Deep
Space-Virgin Sky (new band featuring Kantner, Balin and Casady).
1999: Windows of Heaven.
THE
GREAT SOCIETY (featuring Grace Slick):
1968: Conspicuous
Only In Its Absence (live album from a 1966 performance).
MARTY
BALIN
1981: Balin. 1990:
Balince: A Collection.
KBC
(Kantner, Balin, Casady):
1986: KBC
The San Francisco
sound wasn't so much a sound as it was an approach - an approach
quite different from the song-oriented tunefulness of L.A. (the
Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Turtles, Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson,
the Mamas and the Papas, the Beach Boys) and the tuneful studio
trickery of many English bands (the Beatles, early Pink Floyd,
the Moody Blues, the Move). Although some of the San Francisco
bands would eventually be influenced by Cream and the Jimi
Hendrix Experience, it was in 1966, before the release of
Hendrix's debut Are You Experienced, that the stirring
of a community-wide improvisational base was beginning to
out-distance the tentative experiments of other
quasi-improvisational rock/blues bands (i.e. The Blues Project
and The Paul Butterfield Blues Band were early influences in the
U.S.A.). A certain amount of blues purism shaped and narrowly
focused the work of some of these influential bands, but the San
Francisco musical environment encouraged adding just about
everything to the mix. This partially explains why San
Francisco's major contribution to rock and roll isn't easily
defined as a regional style. What resulted was expansive and hard
to categorize. The sounds of San Francisco weren't easily
emulated because improvisation takes musicians to places which
are unreplicable except in a self-conscious, obviously imitative,
manner. The amazing Grateful Dead phenomenon, the equally amazing
Santana, Quicksilver Messenger Service with their pre-Allman
Brother harmony guitar playing and big rock and roll sound, Big
Brother and the Holding Company's buzzy, electric, psychedelic
hugeness, Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks' lite-jazz inflections,
Moby Grape's crack professionalism and lean-to-the-bone attack,
even bands as diverse as the New Riders of the Purple Sage,
Mother Earth, Tower of Power, Sons of Chaplin, the Steve
MillerBand, Boz Scaggs and the Beau Brummels sounded like real
musical combos, living and playing together, rather than pop
confections based around putting little tunes out and touring to
sell records. The Jefferson Airplane joined this club when they
took aboard Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen which added a roaring
rhythm momentum to a powerful, high-flying, vocal-based folk
style. If
the San Francisco "sound" is
ultimately a bit vague (the bands didn't have their sound grafted
like other bands grafted the Beatles/Stones sound, for example),
the San Francisco "approach," with its attractive sense
of communal sharing and its support of boundless musical
exploration was almost unanimously latched onto and legitimized
as a style that was blowing in the wind, perhaps, but pretty much
eluding bands far and wide. (Contrary to Dave Marsh's
unfathomable suggestion that Creedence Clearwater Revival were
the only good Bay Area improvisors, all of the San Francisco
bands reached improvisatory highs that remain interesting today).
Regarding the Jefferson Airplane, it's important to remember the
atmosphere of the times. It's important to remember 1968. In
1968, highway patrolmen opened fire on black students from South
Carolina State University who were marching to protest
segregation at a bowling alley. They killed 3, wounded 37. Riots
began in Detroit and Newark. Robert Kennedy was assassinated. An
increasingly unpopular war was raging which would eventually
leave 54,000 American soldiers dead. Big Brother (the
government's version) was looking over people's shoulders: a
staffer on the National Security Council was responsible for
monitoring every anti-Vietnam war speech in the Congressional
Record. American officials were trying to put narcotic agents in
the Army, even though amphetamines were widely distributed as
stimulants to G.I.s. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not only
wire-tapped, but harassed by the FBI with cryptic warnings and
unveiled threats. When King was murdered, fires spread to within
two blocks of the White House. 65,000 troops saw riot duty across
the United States. Columbia University was taken over by students
for six days - an action repeated across the nation during the
next year. In Chicago, the 1968 Democratic presidential
convention was on its way to town, but everyone was on strike -
electrical workers, telephone installers, bus and taxi drivers.
The convention itself would be ringed with electrified barbed
wire; the security force had at its disposal flame-throwers and
bazookas. Even though (because?) one in six demonstrators in
Chicago may have been undercover cops, the police brutality that
resulted was so extreme it changed people's political emphasis
overnight. In California, Ronald Reagan would soon be warning of
bloodbaths. More riots, the Weathermen bombings, the murder of
students at Jackson State, the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial and
much more were still to come. There was momentousness, paranoia,
and danger on the national scene. Across America rednecks and
warmongers were punching out people who grew their hair long. A
feeling of shared oppression was widespread. The
Airplane/Starship songs and albums that reflect this time, like
Woody Guthrie's songs of strife and turbulence before them, are
classics of historicity. These would include "Plastic
Fantastic Lover," "The Last Wall of the Castle,"
"Wild Tyme" (with its summation "we're doing
things that don't even have a name yet"), "Won't You
Try/Saturday Afternoon," "If You Feel,"
"Crown of Creation," "Greasy Heart,"
"The House at Pooneil Corner," Bless Its Pointed Little
Head, Volunteers, Blows Against the Empire, "Lawman,"
"Rock and Roll Island," "War Movie,"
"Diana," "Have You Seen the Saucers,"
"Mexico," "Long John Silver," "Flowers
of the Night," "White Boy," "Ride the
Tiger," Devil's Den," "Come to Life,"
"Dance With the Dragon," "Song to the Sun,"
"Show Yourself to Me" and "Twilight Double
Leader." The ultimate importance of the Jefferson Airplane
has very little to do with the twin hits "White Rabbit"
and "Somebody to Love".
Paul Kantner and Grace Slick were witnesses to a generation's
coming of age and its aftermath. They were compelled to write
about it much like Fitzgerald and Hemingway wrote about their
particular time, place and circumstances. Kantner's focused,
all-encompassing, metaphorical story telling is generational
writing at its best. What's refreshing is how steadfastly both
Slick and Kantner have managed to keep the substance of the dream
alive while depicting the horror glimpsed, in their decades-long
musing on the yawning abyss of social tragedy that took place in
the 60's. Only the Grateful Dead were as committed to staying
true to one generation's experience while fashioning the music
into universal truths. For both bands this has resulted in grand
and rapturous high pop art.
The Sex Pistols well-regarded and well-known 1977 rock classic Never
Mind the Bollocks, offers a comfortable starting place for
assessing the Airplane's politics and style. Long John Silver,
released in 1972, is a Jefferson Airplane classic played loosely,
the band seemingly setting up microphones in the studio and going
for it, the result being a little unfocused, the vocals a bit dry
and a couple of the songs - "Easter?" and "The Son
of Jesus" - badly crafted. But Long John Silver is
fused by an original style of playing and thinking that is deeper
and more earned than the simpler rock and roll retroisms of the
Sex Pistols' music and that band's snide and witty lambasting of
late seventies' England. Musically and thematically the Airplane
wasn't blatantly retreading anything: even the ever-present,
quasi-blues contributions of Jack Casady, Jorma Kaukonen and Papa
John Creach ("Milk Train" and "Eat Starch,
Ma,") rise well above convention given their thick,
molten-lava rhythmic flow and Grace Slick's pull-out-the-stops
vitriolic fervor.
Long John Silver, ring in his ear;
He's the hero, make that clear."
The two lines that irreverently kick off Long John Silver recall
the irreverence of Never Mind the Bollocks: while the
sacrilegious overtones on the Pistols' "God Save the
Queen" and "Anarchy in the UK" are present on the
Airplane's "Easter?" ("Golden velvet robes on Pope
Paul; he's walking/He's stalking devils of flesh/Rides
chauffeured through the streets instead of walking/I think his
holy story is a mess"), and "The Son of Jesus"
("Jesus had a son by Mary Magdalene/Young Jesus raised him
loud/Mother Mary raised him proud/And he tracked the men who laid
his father down/God loved the Son of Jesus/God got off on the
sparklin' daughter too"). But the sprawling musicianship and
the epical, multi-faceted, poetic concerns of the Airplane
ultimately, I think, surpass the loud, ear-tiring approach and
the State of the Union message of the Pistols' Never Mind the
Bollocks. "Twilight Double Leader" and
"Alexander the Medium," written by Paul Kantner, have
an uninhibited musicality - the former in its sense of movement,
its sense of unclear events happening and having just happened,
its atmosphere of pagan celebration, of momentous occasionality.
It's an eventful song even though it's a mysterious event - a
war, a battle, a victory? What "Twilight Double Leader"
conveyed was the turbulence of the Watergate era. In lines like
"And if you're lost midway, third of the week; she'll find a
way to get to you" or "have you heard about your
brothers and your sisters living in the mountains, free of the
city life?" the song moves from everyday cheer-you-up
enthusiasm to that poetic hint of a secret, shared community that
Kantner is so good depicting and extending.
"Alexander the Medium" has the same quality of time
being displaced: it connects us to the past in an impressionistic
way and the forlorn, celebratory pacing of the song gives it a
weary, majestic sweep. There's ancient ladies and maritime
splendor, priests and pyramids, a theme of resurrection and
death, and the suggestion "if you laugh real hard, you win
the game hands down: before old Alexander was just the same as
now; can you smell the blood of fame, lightness and
liberty?" It's a song that deflates a certain kind of
post-war grandeur while embracing another.
The tunes Grace Slick co-wrote for the album with various members
of the band were more extemporaneous. There's the previously
mentioned ode to a pirate, "Long John Silver;"
"Milk Train" is a weird tune that's pro-feminist and
anti-capitalist with its assessment of males and its strange
comparison of females, cows and corporations as milk producers
("have a little taste of mine: it'll cost you nothing"
- Slick's way with a lyric is always exemplary, though sometimes
surrealistic). "Eat Starch, Mom," involves machines and
vegetarianism; there's a more focused metaphor in "Aerie
(Gang of Eagles)" about democracy and freedom; and an
anti-Vatican tirade on "Easter?." What was so great
about the Jefferson Airplane (and the early Jefferson Starship)
was that the band was so damn smart. I don't know why it isn't
generally recognized that the Sex Pistols' anti-hippie,
anti-people, anti-state rhetoric couldn't have been possible
without the groundbreaking work of sixties' songwriters like
Slick and Kantner. What Never Mind the Bollocks gleans
is simply a reflection of sixties' rhetoric updated marginally
with its neo-fresh, retro-sonic assault and its neo-audacious way
of speaking. 
Never Mind the Bollocks, in
1977, wasn't such a long way away from 1972's Long John
Silver, but by 1977 Kantner and the Starship were speaking
to a generation no longer much interested in art or politics
(they were raising children), while the Pistols were able to
light a younger generation on fire (a generation since replaced
by a few more generation's burning and fading). But Kantner and
Slick never disengaged, never abdicated,. Many of the tunes from
1975 through 1978 - "Ride the Tiger," "Be Young
You," "Devil's Den," "Hyperdrive,"
"Come to Life," "Fastbuck Freddy,"
"Dance With the Dragon," "Song to the Sun,"
"Skateboard," "Show Yourself," "All Nite
Long" - are not complacent. Kantner's and Slick's music was
still strong even during the long, devastating, decline of the
Starship. Dreams, Wrecking Ball,
"Lightning Rose," "Things to Come,"
"Girl With the Hungry Eyes," "Freedom at Point
Zero," "Stairway to Cleveland" (a great song that
critics hated because it was about them), "Fox Face,"
"Bikini Atol," "The Mountain Song,"
"Showdown," "Muriel," "America,"
and the 1989 Jefferson Airplane reunion album all show a
persevering commitment and a high level of achievement.
The body of work of these artists is extraordinarily impressive
and horribly overlooked. Some wrongly blame the problem of
polemic as music though it's actually just the age old problem of
artists with too much singularity to consistently please the
market - and as goes the public, so goes the media-corporations
and the critics they hire to sell products. The question of
polemics becomes a rhetorical one - i.e. whether or not one can
like Mahalia Jackson or gospel music if one isn't a Christian; or
love songs if one is a confirmed bachelor; or MerleHaggard songs
if one isn't an Okie from Muskogee - and certainly Haggard's
pseudo-patriotic jingoism and old-fashioned values have fatally
devalued a huge number of his songs. But the universal in gospel
music and Mahalia Jackson's voice is the sound of human need that
soars beyond the realms of fundamentalist religion. And Haggard
isn't merely a jug-headed reactionary; though inconsistent, he's
often able to break through with a down-home humanism that
transcends his weaknesses in other areas. Likewise, to consider
the Airplane/early Starship as simply a polemical, political band
misses the hugeness of their palette.
Mostly what is overlooked is the resonance and scope of Slick's
and Kantner's writing. It's somewhat forgotten that no less a
critic than Lester Bangs was a defender of the band ("one of
my very favorite") and its various offshoots during their
transitional period (1970-1974) noting "there has always
been an element of sheer juggernaut rock & roll thunder in
the Airplane's music." Bangs, on the strength of his
interest in later day Airplane projects (Bark and Long
John Silver) and the solo projects (Sunfighter, Blows
Against the Empire) was questioning the presumption that
Jorma and Jack were the synergy in the band. He wrote, "I'm
beginning to wonder if the balance of energy in the band hasn't
shifted, [towards Slick and Kantner]." Maybe it was never
there to begin with. Lester Bang's interest to punk and post-punk
sensibilities because of his writing on garage bands like the
Seeds and the Troggs; and his early defense of the raw power of
Iggy and the Stooges and the Velvet Underground, may have
actually marginalized perceptions of his taste.
Looking back at early criticism, it's obvious that the Jefferson
Airplane's career and the projects that followed were
controversial, and controversy was not a level plain from which a
definitive, long-lasting assessment could be made. For instance,
Ed Ward in his glowing review of Volunteers mentioned
(supposedly apolitical) friends complaining about the band's
politics. Ward worried that the Airplane were "turning off
... those who might be called successors to the
it's-got-a-nice-beat-and-you-can-dance-to-it people." Lester
Bangs, on the other hand, mentioned that "a lot of people
across a wide range of political persuasions" are irritated
because "you don't see them in any active side of the
Movement much." (Lester didn't actually care himself.)
Anybody thinking that youthful rebellion was one big happy family
should think again. Too political or not political enough?
Critics had to decide and they ran the gamut from neo-Marxist
effete aesthetes (Greil Marcus), to ultra-conservative
reactionaries (Dave Marsh), to confused, politically correct,
liberal-populists (Robert Christgau). Considered by some to be
overly political and by others, not political enough and, later,
to be indulging in simple science-fiction meandering, Kantner's
music actually did communicate in a major way (and this may have
been what Bangs meant when writing about them, he said,
"music should be considered as pure music first and the
morality or cogency of its message second"). The word
"vision," when applied to Kantner's work, usually
suggests a sci-fi writer's futurist, pulpy imagination. But
Kantner's imagination sets off sparks of all sorts: his work
touches on everything from sixties existentialist freedom
("The Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil,"
"Martha," "White Boy"), to apolitical songs
of romance and possibility that stand on their own ("Have
You Seen the Stars Tonight?," "Lightning Rose,"
"Girl With the Hungry Eyes," "St. Charles,"
"Lillith' "All Nite Long," "Caroline"),
to carefully delineated slices of historical/social events
("Mariel", "America," "Have You Seen the
Saucers?," "Diana," "We Can Be
Together," "Volunteers," "Wild Tyme,"
"Won't You Try/Saturday Afternoon," "Dance With
the Dragon,"), to poetically resonant pastiches of more
fanciful historical landscapes ("Epic #38,"
"Sketches of China," "Walkin'", "When
the Earth Moves Again," "Twilight Double Leader,"
"Alexander the Medium"), to wild escapism heightened in
import by its reaction to national tragedy, betrayal and murder (Blows
Against the Empire, "Wooden Ships," "War
Movie," "Rock and Roll Island," "I Want to
See Another World," "Saint Charles," "All
Night Long," "Things to Come," "DCBA,"
"In Time," Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra).
Grace Slick was more sarcastic and hard-edged than Kantner.
Robert Christgau, referring to the Jefferson Starship's Dragonfly,
made the perplexing remark (perhaps attributable to the brief
amount of time he spends with each record), "it proves that
you can't get along forever on generalized imprecations against
the powerful." But I don't know how much less generalized
and more detailed Slick songs can get: "Devil's Den"
(is that grey man sane/no color no name), "Mexico"
("how long will the Panthers' race/wait for the iron bars to
bend"), "Panda" ("he was born on the
mountain's western side"). "Fast Buck
Freddie," (it's hard to get serious when a rich man's
reflection, looks like a gun that's gonna smile"),
"Lawman" ("Lawman, I'm afraid you just walked in
here at the wrong fucking time/my old man's gun has never been
fired but there's a first fucking time"). To say that
"Lawman" is generalized, considering it's practically a
philosophical dissertation, suggests that Christgay has somehow
misread this music and much of Slick's and Kantner's work. Also
misguided on Christgau's part was an attempt to hold Kantner to
journalistic, documentarian, rhetorical standards, since
Kantner's artistic proclivities have always been sensuous,
imaginative and poetic rather than analytical, mundane and
literal.
In Kantner's most heated rallying cries there is always a
narrative dimension. Questions are being asked. Preaching to the
converted has always been a sham problem in art - who knows who's
going to pick up the book, record, movie, magazine article? Who
knows how they will respond? At his most ostensibly political -
on Volunteers - Kantner's range is evident. We find him
poking fun at back-to-the-earth communality ("The
Farm"); Lester Bangs noticed, on "We Can be
Together," the sarcastic delivery of the line "And we
are very proud of ourselves." It is on this song that Slick
sings a "motherfucker" counterpoint to the band's
"up against the wall," and there's a suggestion of
violence implied, but the resolution, "Tear down the walls;
tear down the walls," is a plea for communication - not
destruction; the tune is open-ended like John Lennon's
"don't you know that you can count me out - and in" on
the Beatles' "Revolution." Both songs are mature
statements, which is why they embrace a bit of contradiction.
Ambivalence as a political decision gives you room to move, which
makes it necessary for the artist, as well as the politician;
political dogma is an artistic straight-jacket that John Lennon
fell into on Sometime in New York, though he obviously
knew better. The same kind of mistake was never present in the
Airplane's songs. "We Can Be Together" is an update of
the hippie anthem "Get Together,' but with all the angry
reaction that then-current affairs had necessitated.
"Volunteers" depicts events in such a state of flux,
that considering the song a simple partisan rallying cry is
missing the message:
"One generation had soul; one generation got old;
This generation's got no destination to hold."
Lester Bang's considered "When I was a Boy I Watched the
Wolves" from Sunfighter an overlooked classic.
Musically it rolls and rises in a wolfpack-like manner; it evokes
animalistic freedom, but also captures an adolescent sense of
friendship and adventure - "when I was young and low out
here in San Francisco, I could rely on the fire of my friends/now
I can carry a few and I do when I can." Reading him as a
poet of hope and social responsibility pulls more out of
Kantner's songs than simply cruising along on the sci-fi/fantasy
surface. Likewise "Your Mind Has Left Your Body" (Baron
Von TollBooth) is more than just a trippy drug odyssey: its
depiction of the shamanistic ability to transcend the here and
now in order to find wisdom to sustain the tribe gets added
weight from Kantner's tribal/generational strength as a
witchdoctor (the kind of metaphorical role model Patti Smith
would ascribe to Jim Morrison). "Song For the Sun/Don't Let
It Rain" (Spitfire) has a sci-fi conceit, but its
"Moon, I'll take it" refrain is as high on the splendor
of nature and life's possibilities as it is on space travel; and
playing against it are the beautiful lines, "There are
children being born, who will amaze you with their minds: we are
not alone" which subvert the sci-fi theme, transcend it,
bring it to earth with a sweet epiphany. "The Mountain
Song" which is an inspired updating of Woody Guthrie's
"This Land is Your Land" is Kantner's main theme
elucidated. The song starts from nature's "intimations"
of freedom, gathers aspects of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I
have a dream" speech, combines them with imagery from Woody
Guthrie's classic fifties' songs, thus invoking the timelessness
and the gravity of a struggle that has been, and must be,
maintained. On "Wooden Ships" and the classic Blows
Against the Empire, escapist enterprises are given moral
weight by the hurt and antagonism that propelled the songs in the
first place. Kantner always knew that the escape was in the music
and in the mind; the care the Airplane/Starship generally gave
his songs give them a voluptuous conceptual splendor; the band's
musical deftness makes it easy to "Come ride the
music."
The solo work of Kantner and Slick is also effective. Slick's Software,
a new-waveish solo album released in 1983, is only intermittently
interesting but it is much better than the popular Eurythmics'
debut album from the same year, which shares Software's
ultra-keyboard approach. The Eurythmics' soul-less enterprise is
marred by chic sexuality hung on sketchy/trendy lyrics and
techno-keyboard coldness, while Software's realism pulls
much out of melody and lyric. Even better is Slick's straight
rock and roll album, Welcome to the Wrecking Ball, which
tackles Bad Company territory and makes Paul Rodgers seem like an
amateur singer (Slick remains one of rock's best, most dramatic,
phrase-milking vocalists).
A partial list of the band's miscellaneous accomplishments can be
drawn up that are impressive in themselves. Slick's odes to Lenny
Bruce, pandas and the Common Market, and her eerie raga singing
with The Great Society, as well as her distinction as a back-up
vocalist. Marty Balin's pop ballads, which kept the band
commercially airborne, were no more personal than Al Green's
perhaps, but as an interpreter and occasional writer Balin was a
believable, good-natured romantic, eschewing
"you're-gonna-miss-me-when-I'm-gone" and
"why-are-you-cheating-on-me" platitudes in favor of
sensuous, opulent serenades. (Balin was a hero of sorts during
the violence at Altamont Speedway, which suggests that his
passion was more than merely rhetorical.) Also worth detailing
were Jorma's and Jack's blues-based excursions, Slick's
stream-of-consciousness vocal improvisations and lyrics, the
band's rip-roaring, rocking tunes that run from "Tobacco
Road," and "Go To Her," on their 1966 debut,
through the Starship's "St. Charles" (a baroque and
brilliant piece of rock architecture), all the way up to
"The Wheel" on the 1989 reunion album.
Much of the importance of the band's career is a result of
stunning musicianship. Jack Casady remains one of rocks' greatest
bass players and remains great today (he's brilliant on the new
Starship album Windows of Heaven). He has a heavy,
thundering thickness that has no match and a large quantity of
his bass-lines are memorably idiosyncratic. Jorma Kaukonen's
finger-picking solo style was in some ways unmatched to the early
Airplane sound, and a few of his early solos sound truncated and
uneven as he tries to find a place within the bands' huge cavern
of sound. He grew into the role quickly:. On Bless Its
Pointed Little Head, Kaukonen was finding his space and
playing more passionately. He reached heights of pathos on
"Wooden Ships," and "Alexander the Medium."
Spencer Dryden was a good, functional drummer for a band with
aspirations towards improvisation. Dryden could hang back and let
the groove solidify until it was time to move. (Johnny Barbata,
the Jefferson Starship's first official drummer after the
break-up of the Airplane, pursued the opposite of Dryden's
tom-based approach - he possessed an ahead-of-the-beat intensity
so insistent it seemed to push the band along on an air
escalator. The Starship's bass players - David Frieberg and Pete
Sears - weren't frequency hogs like Casady, so the band was much
more lithe in movement than the Airplanee. Crag Chaquico had a
beautiful guitar tonality and was one of the seventies' most
melodic guitar players: his work with the Starship, especially on
Kantner's anthems and some of Balin's ballads, showcase enduring
examples of 70's style fretwork. Extra texture came from Papa
John Creach's fiddle. Forced to deal with his instrument's
tendency to get lost in the mix of a heavy rock band, he could
make his presence felt with superbly executed
ascending/descending glissandos. Whenever Creach was given room
to move, he rose to the occasion. If the Airplane churned and
rolled, the Starship soared - and, with the later band, there was
initially a perfect match of conceptual art and learned
musicianship. Along with the forceful, accomplished vocal
harmonies of Grace, Marty and Paul, both bands were intoxication
machines delivering art buzzes on a major scale. The Starship's
later harmonies with Mickey Thomas weren't as effective, though
Thomas has his defenders; Balin's, by comparison, understated
soulfulness, and Slick's hip phrasing, earthy tonality and
push-the- boundaries attack were much more pleasant than Thomas'
over-the-top showmanship and senseless enthusiasm.
The latest incarnation of the Starship, represented so far only
by the rather rough live album Deep Space, Virgin Sky,
and the somewhat sublime Windows of Heaven, is actually
much improved over the late-eighties model. The band is still
artistically infused with what Paul Kantner and Marty Balin found
on San Francisco's Haight Street in the sixties. For those of us
who have crossed paths with the band on their long journey, and,
who for part of the way took the same road, these are aesthetic
ties that bind.
PHOTOS BY BOBBY CASTRO
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