Once upon a time there was a band called the Jefferson Airplane. Starting from San Francisco, they became so renowned for such tunes as “White Rabbit” and “3/5 of a Mile in Ten Seconds” that they ended up being hailed as the avatars of acid rock by the likes of the Saturday Evening Post. What they were really best at, however, was love songs, mostly from the pen of their lead male singer, Marty Balin, who was one of the greatest rock singers of all time even though the lead female singer, Grace Slick, got most of the press because she was a woman and shot off hter mouth a lot more. Just about the time that acid started to get replaced by downs as the audience’s drug ! |of choice, Marty quit the Airplapje, although Ith^ two events had nothing to do with jeiacn other. Soon thereafter the band’s music and fortunes took a, you will excuse the pun, nosedive. They recorded two Balin-less albums, then the lead guitarist and bassist, Jormaj Kaukonen and Jack Casady, more Or less quit, forming a laid-back blues trjp called Hot Tuna and ice-skatirig around Europe. The Airplane waited two years for Jorma and Jack’s return, whiling away the months with a series of solo albums of greater or lesser dreariness. Finally they regrouped, with young hotshot guitarist Craig Chaquico replacing Kaukonen’s, merciless attacks with his more fluid/ lyrical style, and two bassists who also doubled on keyboards replacing Casady: Englishman Pete Sears and ex-Quicksilver Messenger David Frieberg, who had toured with the Airplane in their final days and sang three-part harmony with Grace and Paul Kantner. The group recorded an album called Dragonfly, on which Balin was invited back to sing one of his own compositions. The album sold 450,000 copies. Balin, according to an article I read last year in CREEM, decided “The old karma’s back,” so he rejoined the Jefferson Starship, which then recorded another album called Red Octopus, which, with the help of a hit single, “Miracles,” sold two million copies. There then followed the album Spitfire and the single “With Your Love,” which were respectively splendid and reminiscent of a remake of “Miracles.” The Starship were more popular than the Airplane had ever been, and everybody lived happily ever after. The End.

* * *

Most rock articles, like most rock songs, have hooks. A hook is the theme that pulls the article together, or the musical unit around which the rest of the song keeps circling. The absence of hooks sometimes causes songs Or even whole albums to come off as musical slopbuckets or aimless ramblings, and articles to be described by editors in rejection notes to writers as “unfocused.” This is going to be an article without a hook. Oh, I could invent one, like talking about how the Jefferson Starship relates to the decline of the counter culture, and cite as proof the fact that Grace Slick lives with her new hubby in a singles apartment complex in the Bay Area. But to do that I would have to cheat and leave out that John Barbata leads the laidback hippie life on a farm. There are seven people in this goddamn band, each with his/her own lifestyle, desires, dreams, etc. Another hook would be that the Starship have come full circle with the Airplane, ending up exactly where they started out—with nontopical love songs. T told that to both Marty Balin and the Freiberg/Sears duo in interviews and they told me I was right and that was that and the conversation died. So fuck the hooks. This may well turn out to be the “Twilight Double Leader” of rock articles, but so what? This is CREEM Magazine and you’re used to people rambling incoherently or you wouldn’t buy it.

* * *

One of the problems encountered by many modern rock ‘n’ roll groups is the difficulty in coming up with cogent original material, as the Jefferson Airplane discovered not long after Marty Balin left them. Which is not to say that Marty’s the sole driving force behind the new or old bands—but he helps a lot, at least lyrically. Grace admits: “I like love songs, but I don’t write them too well. I feel it, but I can’t put it into words. Marty’s a lot better at that, and since mainly lyrics are me and Paul and Marty, Marty helps a lot at bringing it down to a regular level, speaking normal terms that other people can understand. ‘Cause I’m screwy and off the wall, hyperdrive, circles, corners and tell me which is Buckminster Fuller, and that doesn’t connect with the general public, and Paul’s off in space which is not necessarily the norm. Marty brings it down to the real stuff.”

Over the long distance wires, Marty Palin’s voice seems to recede slightly, like Leonard Cohen’s singing sans the resigned drone, into some twilight of .its own contrivance: “Like Michaelangelo said, within each stone is a statue. So I take whatever I find there and just keep chipping away. I don’t just cram lyrics into things: I’m very into the metaphysics of each tone.”

Right. Don’t ask me how this professional stranger keeps things down to earth. But he does allow that aside from his own obviously crucial influence “Everybody’s beginning to realy contribute.”

I’ll say. Grace describes the interaction behind the composing credits to “St. Charles” on Spitfire, which lists four different authors including someone called “Thunderdawk”: “Paul Wrote the music, and he did have some lyrics that he wasn’t really thrilled with, and he asked ‘Could you write some?’ and people would stick stuff in but it never quite came together, so Marty finally did write most of the lyrics to ‘St. Charles,’ and a couple of ‘em are mine, a couple of ‘em are Freiberg’s, and aN couple of licks are Craig’s, and at some point over at Marty’s some people that I don’t even know wrote parts. It’s all casual, we don’t have meetings where somebody says ‘Now you write this and you write that,’ it’s all day to day. Somebody’ll stick something in, and later we vaguely figure out what percentage it is for publishing.” A triumph of collectivism, and after their Revolutionaty period yet! David Freiberg adds: “Marty has a lot of people that write songs specifically for him, like this guy Charlie Hickox from Bodacious DF (a short-lived intermediate Balin band) that wrote ‘Crusin’,’ and Dick Smith, and Joey Covington wrote,” he sings, “ ‘with your love’—just those words! I wonder how much he’s gettin’ for that one.”

Right about now, you’re probably saying three cheers for group consciousness, but what ever happened to the ROAR of the Airplane? Why do the Starship, in fact, display distinct MOR proclivities? So here is answered Why don’t Jefferson Starship play any acid rock? (italics author’s) Grace: “Yeah, I think if you were in the insurance business for ten years, you’d probably get smoother at it. Or drunker at it.” Marty: “If it seems to you like it’s a little too MOR, that’d be my fault, not the rest of the group’s. I don’t mind MOR at all.” Grace: “For one thing, the really violent acid rock, or heavy metal, or screwball music is hard to get on a record. The machines just won’t pick it up. You can do that live, but on records it sounds better if when somebody is singing somebody else is not playing through the singing, and the singers stop when the guy wants to play. Even four part harmony is hard to pick up—it has a tendency to sound mushy. So the less screwy you get, the better it sounds on the record.” . . K

Iam bitchy sober, but if I have any alcohol it*s compounded by about ten. mm m

For some reason, a great many people tend to think of the Airplane/ Starship as a drug-oriented band. I have never seen any of them do anything that might tend to indicate that they had been taking drugs. As Marty said when I asked him why he reportedly never slept: “When you’re ‘good you got a lot of energy goin’ through your body* and it’s hard to control.” And furthermore, “The night hours are some of the most beautiful hours. I feel the whole world’s energy is mine to use.”

Besides, Grace Slick is a notorious drunk, and it is well known that alcohol is not a drug. Currently on the wagon, Grace says: “I am bitchy sober, but if I have any alcohol it’s compounded by about ten. I always thought it was just funny sarcasm but nobody agreed with me. I’ve never met anybody who said No, I think you’re kinda charming and funny and sarcastic when you’re drunk.’ Everybody else says, ‘I think you’re an asshole when you’re drunk.’ So since it’s 100%, I assume they’re right.”

Marty adds: “The Bitch is a hard role to play, the ball toter. The public expects that. Who wants to get drunk every night? After awhile you drink so much it’s physically exhausting; it’s like a sport.”

Marty is a male chauvinist pig. In the interest of WomenSports and a better world I suggest that every person reading this write Grace a letter c/o ,Grunt Records, San Francisco, and tell her that she is indeed charming and clever and funny when she is bombed out of her mind.

H ?! :

The next obvious question is: If the Starship don’t take drugs, how can they have that all-important component of pop stardom, an Image? And the answer is, again, they don’t. Marty: “When the Airplane got famous at first it was crazy. Everybody thinks you change, but they change towards you. All they think about is you, you, you, they don’t think about themselves. You can play that role or not. If you’re really heavy, you can change the role. I got through that period where everybody was dying around me. Black wings were fluttering in my ears every day. As long as they can’t put their finger on me I’m safe. Nobody knows what the fuck I’m doing. I don’t have an image. It’s a groove. When you’re a Master, anonymity is the most important thing to have.”

Grace Slick is sitting in her living room, a little nervous, chain smoking. Cigarettes. Photographs of naked male asses, some of them framed, some accompanied by the rest of the body, adorn all four walls. I ask her what' kind of angle she would like me to use for this article. She says: “What the fans wanna hear—now FANS! What you wanna hear—they like the same kinda stuff I like, which is... Rock ‘n’ Roll News. ‘Gregg Allman and Cher Bono were in the X Restaurant the other night, and Gregg, due to a little too much heroin, landed face down in his spaghetti.’ That is what I wanna hear—I don’t care what key ‘White Rabbit’ is in or any of that stuff—and I always feel bad that I don’t have any of those kind of bits to tell people. I’d like to be able to say that our singer’s pants fall down and he doesn’t care, but I can’t. I don’t care about the music, or ‘How long does it take to make a record?’ I don’t think* interviews oughta be done" unless you’ve just driven a Rolls Royce into a Holiday Inn pool. Musicians may be some of the dullest people in the world offstage. Alice Cooper drinks beer and plays golf. I talked to Mick Jagger. He sits around his room, and: ‘Well, yes, would you like to try—a cup of tea?’ The guy’s really laid-back, and quiet, unpresuming, and—nothing, y’know, he’s not like this maniac that you see. I think musicians are kinda half-conscious anyway, either from drugs or—if you are given the gift of being able to hear music, something else from your brain is taken away. The whole left half of the head, as a matter of fact. I never know about interviews—one of the best interviewers, some nut and I can’t remembet his name, he didn’t used to interview us. He’d just write stuff. He’d say ‘Jack Casady has now decided to be a plumber,’ and he’d go into a whole thing about how Jack is working out his whole house so all the pipes are on the outside and you can see all of them because Jack likes pipes. It was all horseshit, and it was great! Because it didn’t have anything to do with what we were doing. It was an excellent interview! All the other stuff is boring. So when you do yours, just make something up.”^>

TURN TO PAGE 66.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 49