Jefferson Airplane journeyed on the wings of change

By JEFF MIERS
News Pop Music Critic

7/20/2003

Got a Revolution! The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane
By Jeff Tamarkin

Atria Books

408 pages, $27

If, as James Joyce suggested in "Ulysses," history is a nightmare from which we must awake, then Jeff Tamarkin's "Got a Revolution! The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane" goes a long way toward pulling the late 1960s from the quicksand of historical revisionism.

"If you remember the '60s, you weren't there" goes the tired axiom, but Tamarkin spent several years grilling the members of the now-legendary Jefferson Airplane. And despite a rather unhealthy appetite for LSD, cocaine, pot, hash, alcohol and just about anything else they could get their hands on, the parties in question seem to remember the '60s just fine, thank you.

Tamarkin's remarkable "Got a Revolution!" succeeds on two levels. First, it offers a painstakingly detailed recounting of the formation, flourishing and ultimate failure of one of the first and, many feel, finest bands to emerge from San Francisco.

But Tamarkin's book also offers a much broader tale, one of a society swinging hard to the left as the mores of the previous decade met the minds of the succeeding one. Jefferson Airplane, Tamarkin makes it clear to us, arrived on the scene just as the world began to shift on its axis and the 1950s imploded upon breathing the heady air of a temporarily Edenic new garden.

It's a sad, often pathetic, but highly compelling story of a handful of brilliant artists looking to find their way through a turbulent time while treading the fine line between mind expansion and just plain self-abuse. In the end, "Revolution" must be considered a tragedy, for the experiment that was both Jefferson Airplane ultimately hit the ground with a thud that resounded failure.

But one certainly can't fault them for trying.

Haight, not hate

The principals in Tamarkin's tome - Paul Kantner, Marty Balin, Grace Slick, Jorma Kaukonen, Jack Casady, Spencer Dryden, a host of bit players and associates - were bound by one common trait: they were hellbent on questioning what had come before.

When Kantner, a young, cocky former Military Academy student, hit the streets of San Francisco as a teen, he began soaking up the then-burgeoning folk scene. He eventually landed on the coffeehouse circuit, where he slowly built a name for himself. When he met singer Marty Balin - late of the Kingston Trio-like Town Criers - Kantner set about forming an act that would reflect the changes suggested by Bob Dylan, who had recently turned the folk world on its ear by integrating elements of music considered by the folk elite to be "impure."

That was all Kantner needed to hear - he wasn't all that talented in the traditional sense anyway, but he had vision, guts and a seemingly unshakeable confidence in himself. Balin set about scouring San Francisco for talent. He eventually handpicked the first version of Jefferson Airplane, most notably, a lanky blues and folk purist named Jorma Kaukonen who would become perhaps the first guitar hero to emerge from the West Coast during this era.

Tamarkin, with the full cooperation of Balin, Kantner and Kaukonen, who are quoted heavily, recounts this initial period quite vividly. The addition of original vocalist Signe Toly Anderson, the opening of the band's club, the Matrix, the fine-tuning of the lineup following the hiring of drummer Skip Spence and bassist Casady, the all but sudden explosion of the group in the Bay area, and ultimately, the signing of a record deal with RCA, are all vividly recounted.

The band's self-titled debut would be a big regional hit, but outside of the Bay area in 1966, no one knew who the Jefferson Airplane was. That was all about to change.

Grace, too

Tamarkin makes it quite clear that it was Grace Slick who got the Airplane off the ground.

The former Grace Wing, member of the Great Society and wife of that band's drummer, Jerry Slick, was the missing link between Jefferson Airplane's regional success and its subsequent role as an arbiter of social change throughout the country.

Anderson had grown weary of the road, the drugs, the drama. She was pregnant and sick of it all. When the band met Slick, it became clear that she was the one. The world agreed.

With Slick and Balin sharing the lead vocal duties, and the rhythm section of new drummer Spencer Dryden and bassist Casady in place, Jefferson Airplane recorded one of the strongest albums of the 1960s, "Surrealistic Pillow," perhaps the platter most responsible for launching the psychedelic rock movement. It hit the streets as the Summer of Love began, and its two singles, "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit," became the soundtrack of that summer.

Jefferson Airplane on record, as represented by "Pillow," was a left-leaning, esoteric rock outfit, but in concert, the band was intent on blowing minds. Improvisational, long-winded and groundbreaking, the group's performances paved the way for the work of other San Francisco acts including the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company and Santana.

In Balin and Slick, the band had two aces in the hole - Balin the romantic crooner and Slick the irreverent avenger with piercing eyes, barbed tongue and mellifluous, if often acidic, vocal tendencies.

Following Slick's arrival, the rest of the '60s became a whirlwind of touring and recording. Tamarkin pins these rapid-fire events to the page for our perusal with a loving but honest eye.

Crash and burn

This is, of course, more than the story of Jefferson Airplane. It's a document of a time when young people - a majority of them white and middle class - came into their own in a social, political and economic sense. Jefferson Airplane didn't invent the '60s, but it certainly aided and abetted the spread of such concepts as free love, irreverence toward supposed modes of authority, embracing of mind-altering substances, and the forging of a new way of life completely at odds with that espoused by the previous several generations.

Along the way, the band became more than peripherally involved in the anti-war movement - ironic, given the fact that few of the songs directly addressed the issue.

Like the best and most significant rock artists - Dylan springs immediately to mind - Jefferson Airplane members never truly aligned themselves with what many today refer to as "the movement." They were far too individualistic, too skeptical, too proud to join any club that would have them.

Tamarkin's portraits of Kantner and Slick in particular drive this point home. Kantner was too concerned with following the personal imperatives of his own soul to be classified a hippie.

Slick never bought into any of it at the time - the feminism, the eco-friendly concerns, the armpit hair. She was then and is today a smart, witty and free-spirited woman. Slick took the idea of free love to its absolute limit, according to Tamarkin. She may have gobbled acid and smoked tons of dope, but Slick's drug of choice was always alcohol, considered de rigeur by most hippies. She was rude, willful and given to attacking audiences verbally whenever so inclined.

Some of the best anecdotes in "Got a Revolution" come courtesy of the volatile Slick.

Here's Grace appearing, for no apparent reason, in blackface on the Smothers Brothers show; donning a Hitler moustache at the Fillmore, while playing a show promoted by Holocaust survivor and band manager Bill Graham; drag racing through the streets of San Francisco in the wee hours with Kaukonen, drunk, headed for a near-fatal wreck; attempting to crash a party at the White House, with the intention of dropping LSD in President Nixon's drink; bailing out of a gig in Germany at the last minute, leaving the crowd in the mood to riot and burn the place to the ground (they did); collapsing on stage after berating another European audience in the mid-70s. Tamarkin wisely makes no attempt to sugarcoat these activities.

As the 1960s ended, so did Jefferson Airplane as a major force.

Kaukonen and Casady formed the often brilliant Hot Tuna. Balin quit. Slick and Kantner hooked up, had a child, bought a house. The band ran out of steam. Still, Kantner would keep the group going, rechristening it Jefferson Starship, and delving into an improvisation-free form of slightly esoteric pop-rock that, for the most part, paled by comparison to the Airplane's best work.

Tamarkin treats this period in Airplane/Starship history fairly, though it is obvious that he feels that such '70s albums as "Red Octopus" and "Freedom at Point Zero" represent lesser work from a band he considers "One of the greatest bands of all time, hugely successful and influential, highly creative."

The '60s, like Jefferson Airplane, ultimately failed to change the world in a way that stuck. The '70s and '80s made sure of that, as the love generation turned inward, Nixon and Reagan made it difficult to believe in the country's leadership, and psychedelic drugs gave way to designer ones.

But for that brief time, the world did change, and Tamarkin convinces us that the Jefferson Airplane had a hand in heralding that change.