" I was consuming three bottles of wine...every day...Grace Slick "

Sandy Pearlman was the first longhair I ever made friends with. It was 1965 and he was president of the student government at the State University of New York at Stony Brook on Long Island. He got me to run for freshman class president. He told me about Vietnam, Negroes, the Rolling Stones and LSD. When our leftist government was swept out of office the next year, Pearlman's last official action was to appoint me chairman of the student activities board for the following year, a position I held for about three years, controlling in excess of $100,000 a year for concerts, dances, lectures, athletics, etc.

They tried to impeach me when I put on a Fugs concert. When Stony Brook and Bryn Mawr College hired the Airplane to play their first East Coast concerts—for $750—only 300 students showed up. The next week they tried to impeach me again. They wanted Dave Brubeck, The Chad Mitchell Trio and the Four Tops. I gave 'em the Doors, Hendrix, Mitch Ryder, Country Joe and—every year—the Airplane. I told them that one day they'd thank me.

Recently I journeyed back to New York to see the Ramones recording their new album. I went out to the old alma mater and talked to some student leader creeps. "Ramones? Dictators? Nuns? Talking Heads? What are you talkin' about? We want the Dead.and the Starship, sucker."

Nothing really ever changes, does it? I was driving the Dictators' Adny Shernoff to the airport a couple of days ago and he said, "What I'm looking forward to is when they start calling The Dictators old wave, then I'll know we've made it."

In the late 1960's the Airplane were singing the anthems of a generation. They were Joshua at the Battle of Jericho; I took my first acid trip at their first East Coast concert; so did a dozen of my closest friends. What a band they were! And what magic times those were! Magic, magic, magic.

Thirteen years, almost to the day, after the Airplane played the Matrix gig that landed them their RCA contract, CREEM had me talking to the Starship at their infamous Fulton Street mansion in San Francisco. ("Caruso slept here the night after the Great Earthquake," Craig Chaquico told me.)

So, Craig, the kid, the band's professional baby, wanted to be my source of information. OK, kid, help me crack the mystery that baffled Lester Bangs. What is the hook for this band? What holds this bunch together, this idiotically diverse group? The old Airplane hold-overs—Balin, Slick and Kantner—are like elder statesmen for the 60's generation.

"And that's what I sit around with my scurvet brain and thin about..Grace Slick"

I talked to Grace upstairs, solo. Same with Paul. Balin I almost got to talk to, but not quite. Interviews just take too much energy outta the guy and he's never happy with how the deceitful press treats him anyway. (I didn't much care. I respect the guy's privacy, and all he does is write the sappy love songs anyway. Sappy-lovesong fans, never fear—he is touring with them this fall. Ain't that amazing!) The rest of the guys I got in pairs, downstairs in the living room. The first two were Pete Sears and David Freiberg. Pete's English; Freiberg kinda fits in with the old hippie crowd upstairs. (They both play bass and keyboards. We suggested they do a double bass solo one day and they seem to go for the idea—nice guys.) Second shift was Johnny Barbata and the kid. Barbata hated the Airplane and wants everyone to know it. ("I never could stand the Airplane; it wasn't my bag. I was an L. A. studio musician. I was into the Turtles, the Association and the Rascals.") Craig has long, long hair. He was an Airplane fanatic when he was barely out of diapers and then he wound up living out a dream when he got to play lead guitar for the Starship. He'd die for his hair—almost did once, he says. And you know what Craig told me the common thread is? Honest to God— everyone in the Starship AND the Airplane—and that includes secretaries and roadies and all (they're still a damn democratic band)—is either a Scorpio or their mom or pop is a Scorpio! Hey, pass the crunchy granola, guys, and let's talk about transmutation, 'cause everybody knows that Scorpio is the sign of change and if that ain't what this band's all about...it ain't about nothin' (another very good possibility).

When I was small I used to stand with my hand on my heart

And I would sing to you.

You were my son and my lover My father and my brother.

I believed in you.

It was easy then So easy then,

But where are you now?

It seems like you can't hear me anymore.

Maybe you're just getting too... OLD

But can you remember 201 years ago When you were young How strong you had become Promising everyone your sweet

gift of freedom.

The first change was Grace. Last time I had seen her—my first day in San Francisco, at a Starship/B.O.C. show at Winterland—she was fat. •Jesus, a former model and she was fat...looked pretty happy, though, and I felt embarrassed for her. Now, a couple of albums and tours later, and she's slimmer'n ever and purty as a picture.

"Grace, you look great! You look like you've s lost some weight," 1 offered, hoping to give a little support to my ace photographer who was on standby 'til Grace decided whether or not she was in the photo-snappin' mood. She looked up, almost shyly. She seemed pleased, pleased with herself for looking beautiful again, pleased with me for mentioning it. We got some great photos, too.

"I weighed 155 pounds," she admitted. "I was consuming three bottles of wine every other day—or every day. When I stopped, my metabolism changed." And change is the name of the game. So while we're on the subject, I kinda inject a throw-away, takeit-as-you-like-it type question to get the show on the road—has the band changed any?

"Yeah," she deadpanned; "we talk to each other."

Woooooooo, Gracie. Like it was my first acid trip. Don't tell me the Airplane folks weren't all bursting with love and peace and brotherhood and grooviness! Didn't you guys talk to each other when you were the Airplane?

"Well, no, because we didn't see Jack or Jorma for a couple of years. That's how the Starship got started. Fora while there was the Jefferson Airplane and then Jack and Jorma were forming what they wanted to do with Hot Tuna because they preferred to play more instruments than one can actually sell records with. And they also took up speed-skating."

Speed-skating? Sounds like fun to me. Only problem was—if took the bass player and the lead guitar player to Europe for three or four months at a time. And it was hard to get any albums done without 'em. Spencer, the drummer, was gone ("They either fired him or he quit—I forget what happened; ! guess a little of each") and then in 1971 Marty Balin split. And although "The Airplane" put out a couple of more albums, everyone knew that they were flying with half a tank and a crash landing was imminent.

"'Show Yourself", ©Rowin Music 1977

"I never could stand the Airplane, It wasn't my bag. —Johnny Barbata"

And crash they did, which led to the phoenix-like rise of the Starship. They started selling gold and platinum records, making more money than the Airplane ever did, and winning unhippie-like awards like Don Kirshner's Single of the Year and Playboy's Record of the Year, and gathering unto itself fans who may have heard their parents playing "Somebody to Love" while they were in playpens.

Pete says the Starship's a totally new band. "It ddesn't sound like the Airplane; it's a new energy. The backing music is giving it a totally new flavor." What's more, this new band is going to the effort of making their trip presentable in a musical way, sez Pete—like Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Fleetwood Mac. (Paul kind of agrees. "I felt our records were real pooty compared to the way we played live. We could never capture that. But we had good ideas and we did sing good. We just got it across with 60-70% efficiency.")

"For my money, the Airplane don't make records and never did—not quality records where you can hear all the instruments." (That could only be drummer Johnny Barbata's money, the old Rascals fan.) "We changed the style of the band. In the Starship we baffle our amps like studio musicians do in Hollywood. It's a whole different technique. It's kind of boring but it's a big part in the change of the music which really we don't get credit for." (You just got it, Johnny.)

Back with Grace, it was like pulling teeth to get her to tell us how she thought the band had changed, not because she was uncooperative (like Marty)—au contraire, au contraire— but because, when you come right down to it, she didn't know. Nobody ever knows. The lyrics seem different, Grace. How about that? You're saying something a little different, no?

"When a child's five years old," she began, "you teach him how to tell time. And when he's 10 you don't say, 'Here's how to tell time again, kid.' Or he says, 'I've hdard that.' If you say, 'Let's all 50 smoke dope and be happy and try to love each other and up against the wall motherfucker...' if we were to try to say that again, they'd say, 'Yes, we've tried dope and we have tried communal living and we do know about up against the wall motherfucker.' They already know that; they've heard that; they've been told that. So, as a child grows older, you tell 'em something new, something that you have learned or that you feel that they might wanna know or that you just simply wanna say regardless of whether anybody likes it or not."

Hep, real cool. So what does she think the new thing the band's tellin' the kids is? "Depends what I'm thinking about at the time, if you're talking about me. And if you're talking to Paul, it would be something else and if you're talking to Marty, it would be something else."

OKvwhat is it. Spell it out, huh? "All different. We aren't all getting together and saying, 'Let's write an album about fish. You do a trout song; I'll do a salmon song; you could possibly get a little off the wall by doing an oyster song. But generally we wanna do fish.' We don't do that. Paul writes about going to the moon, I'm generally sarcastic, Marty writes love, songs, and that's pretty much the way it always goes."

Well, what happened to the social comment in the last...seven or eight years, I was wondering. (Like, a lot of people, used to like them 'cause of all that Battle of Jericho jazz—not me though, but I thought I'd throw the question in anyway.)

"That you'd have to talk to Paul about. How social do you wanna get? See, I like social comments like:

Seven inches of pleasure

Seven inches going home

Somebody must've down the old

bone.

Now, you can call a prick a bone or you could call a pearl-handled .38 a bone. What I do in lyrics is try and double it up so you can take it any way you want to. I may be talking about guns and I may be talking about a prick. And that's what I sit around with my scurvied brain and think about. That's what's fun about playing with the English language—it's complex."

Same old Grace, when you come right down to it. And even the new guys like some of that old Airplane stuff in the Starship. Everybody loves the free concerts, even Barbata. "We had 100,000 people in Central Park on a Monday afternoon. It was a great feeling.

"Christ brought hordes. We're not Christ," he conceded, "but we're doing that. Great feeling!"

"Christ bought whores? What did he say?" Craig woke up from the nap he had taken while Barbata had been doing his anti-Airplane routine. Whores...I think it was Papa John that had told me to be sure to get a good whore story out of the kid. OK, Chaquico, let's spice up the CREEM article. He made a couple of halfhearted, for-the-record attempts to wangle out of telling the story. It didn't' take much to get him going, and once he started, there was no holding him back, though Lord knows we all tried. (If this kind of smut offends you, skip the next few paragraphs.)

"You've gotta understand where I was coming from, man. I was just a young kid—very impressionable. I was 19. Well, if you were in a rock 'n' roll group and a beautiful chick waited for you to be done with the show, would you go for it? She just happened to turn out to be a professional. So here goes another immoral story from Craig Chaquico: California kid goes to New York and gets corrupted. It wasri't my fault, Mom; I was 19.

"For my money, the Airplane don't make records and never did, —Pete Sears"

"It was David Freiberg's birthday; we had a fantastic party, a very deca-r dent party with limousines and everything and our manager got this whole Italian restaurant. After the dinner me

and a couple of the roadies wanted to go skateboarding. They had to go up and get their skateboards before we split so I told the limousine driver to wait and me and Mike Keller—one of our lighting crew—were doing tricks in front of the hotel. You know, skateboard tricks. But 'tricks' in New York means something else. As we're standing there in front of this verv) plush hotel, all these hookers are running in and out. And it's obvious that's what they are. That kind of blew my mind. I don't see that everyday. We're riding up and down on our skateboards, watching all these chicks come on. None of 'em looked that great. Then this one girl walks out and she's gorgeous—she's beautiful! And I think, 'She's not a hooker. I know that; she's too good-lookin', right?' This beautiful blond girl...I'm falling in love and we're doing our 360's and stuff , up and down the sidewalk and this girl walks right up to us and says, 'Can you guys do any tricks on those things?' And the way she said 'tricks' I thought, 'What is this?'

"I didn't know anybody in New York; I'm a thousand miles away from my girlfriend's house. So I go, 'What are you doing here?' And she says, 'I'm just trying to make a living.' Well, I'm still waiting for my friends to come down with their boards and I figure it would be thrilling to do it once with a.... a ...prostitute, that kinda thing. I was afraid of getting a disease and all that, so I asked her if she could give me a blow job. Is it OK to talk about this shit? Jorma would talk about it.

"I didn't know what to say or what to do. I asked her how much for a blow job. I figured I'd try it once in my life. New York—it's a town of sin, a disgusting city. I hate to say it but even though it's a-center of a lot of art, it's really disgusting to me. I hate to see that much concrete and all that disgusting pollution and that whole trip. So I was in New York—this sinful place—and I asked her how much. And she said 25 bucks and I figured, 'That's worth it.' So we jumped in the limo and I told the guy to drive around the block a few times and she starts to give me head. I couldn't believe it. At first I was embarrassed. I couldn't get it up. I was nervous. 'What'll I do now?

I never done this before.' And she said, 'Oh, I'll take care of that.' And she did. And it was great. I was sitting back ^ind watching the skyline of New York go by me. I couldn't believe I was there. So she gets done. I mean I get done. It was great. So I told the limousine driver to go back to the hotel.

"I was a little embarrassed. I felt that it was weird that such a beautiful girl had to resort to this kind of activity in our society. I had all these questions in my mind that I wanted t6 ask her. I didn't even know her and I knew I was gonna say goodbye in 30 seconds. She told me she knew who I was and she said, 'I could charge you a lot more money and I know I could get it, but I just really like your music and my sister really loves your music. And if you could just give me your autograph, I'm sure she would be thrilled.' I said, 'Sure, have you got-anything to write on?' And she goes, 'Yeah, could you write on my arm?' It wasn't the first time I had written on somebody's arm. She pulled her jacket up and I noticed it was a fake arm, not that there's anything wrong with that. But it was a shock for some reason. And she knew it would be a shock and she did that to blow my mind. It was like a rubber arm. I didn't wanna act appalled because I thought it would make her feel even less of a human being than maybe she thought she Tvas, having to be a prostitute in New York. Now that I've thought about it, it was beautiful—she was a human being. So she pulls out a pen and I didn't know what to write, except, 'Thanks for the blow job, John Barbata.'

TURN TO PAGE 73

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 46

"Don't make me look like a slob when you print that story. I told it in good faith. I don't do that every weekend. I was drunk. You asked for it. This is the only whore story I know. I'll never give any more interviews like this. You forced it out of me and I'd better see it in print that way or I'm gonna come looking for you, motherfucker."

Every group should have a wholesome American skateboard player like Craig. Maybe he's a little excessive with the chicks, a little excessive with the licks too, but if that ain't what rock 'n' roll's all about, you might as well get a bunch of dull old studio hacks to be your heroes. And, let's face it, Craig's what's keeping even a semblence of rock 'n' roll in this band. Marty'd just as soon go MOR—my conjecture, since he wouldn't talk— and Paul's looking forward to singing "Superman" with Barbra Streisand in Golden Gate Park. (The guy's so cool and together and consciousnessexpanded, you gotta figure he's fuckin' above everything, even rock 'n' roll.)

Anyway, they all make a big to-do about how the band's all new and changed and all, but if you're merciless and really pin one of 'em down, you can get the truth out of 'em—the real truth. I badgered Grace for an hour. All she wanted to talk about was DNA codes and crud like that, but I wanted to get her to tell me exactly what she was doing these days, what this band is trying to say today. Finally-, exasperated, she screamed:

"Show yourself AT&T I wanna see the man Who's got all my money Show yourself, show yourself to me

You're the one who told me I was born to be free Conceived in liberty, eh?

Show your face I wanna see your eyes Show yourself to me.

"Only about 130 decibels louder, repeated over and over again. That's specific."

Next album?

"Yeah. They're gonna be hearing the same old shit in a different form. So essentially, I'm still trying to teach my 10-year-old how to tell time. They should already know how to tell time, but they don't 'cause they're dumb."

That's right Gracie, they are dumb—like the Ramones say: DUMB, dumb. It's the times that've changed. It's not 1965 anymore and all the dummies who wanted to hear Chad Mitchell then finally caught up with you guys now. You are it for them. They love you, they want you; you're great. You're stars. Craig is proud that he used to get beaten up for being a hippie. Now they love him for it and Johnny Rotten and the Screamers are getting beaten up by long hairs. And, of course, Paul loves punk rock; supports it, enjoys it, is in touch with it. Johnny Barbata, the old Airplanehater, despises it; Sears, too, and Craig ("I like the energy, but they can't p/ay") And why should they like it—

they're musicians (damn good ones, maybe) and that means a helluva lot, especially to musicians.