ReasonToRock: Jefferson Airplane

11. Jefferson Airplane

Bill Thompson [the band’s manager] remembers the moment when he knew for sure that Jefferson Airplane really had the power to transform people. It happened not in San Francisco, but in Iowa, Grace Slick’s first show with the band away from California.

BILL THOMPSON: It was the Grinnell College homecoming dance. All of the girls wore these long, frilly dresses down to their ankles, and corsages, the guys had suits and ties and their parents with them, sitting in the bleachers watching. The band did three sets. We brought a light show with us. The first set, they’re looking at us like we’re Martians: “What the hell is this?” The band had pretty long hair at the time, even compared to the Beatles. The second set, they started to dance. Then the parents all went home, and by the third set, the kids went nuts.

PAUL KANTNER: All the kids came in prom gowns and tuxedos. Then we came back to Iowa a year later and they were having nude mud love-ins and everybody had their faces painted.

Jeff Tamarkin, 2003, from the book Got a Revolution! The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane

Jefferson Airplane was, in many important ways, the ultimate rock band.

They were, first of all, a cohesive creative unit, a group that was truly more than the sum of its many talented parts. The band had a distinctive identity, and its band members worked together, both in the studio and during live performances, to create unique artistic works.

Their home was in San Francisco, and they were both influenced by and influenced the rock scene that formed there in the late sixties, making this city the epicenter of the rock movement during this period. Many other notable bands came from this place at this time, including the Grateful Dead, and this was also the home of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters (immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), the city that gave birth to Rolling Stone magazine, and the location of the famed Fillmore West, a concert venue operated by Bill Graham.

The Airplane was one of the first rock bands to include a woman and, in Grace Slick, they had a woman who was physically attractive, intelligent, assertive and outspoken, and a full artistic equal to the men. In other words, Slick was not there because she was a pretty face, or because she had a pretty voice, or because she was romantically involved with one of the male band members: she was truly a member of the band because of who she was, and because the Airplane could not have been the group that they were without her. At a time when many all-male bands were still very openly chauvinistic, this was a huge accomplishment, and one that enabled the Airplane to deliver a message of liberation from traditional gender-based roles for both men and women.

The group included multiple strong and distinctive songwriters, including Marty Balin, Paul Kantner, Grace Slick and Jorma Kaukonen. Lyrically, they were more influenced by the folk tradition, than by blues or pop, which gave them the advantage of seeing their songs as having a broad range of thematic possibilities. They also had multiple vocalists, multiple lead vocalists, and beautiful trademark harmonies. Slick’s vocals, in particular, were distinctive, with a voice that was icy yet powerful, and an ability to improvise vocally, both on record and in live performances.

The group successfully produced Top 40 hits, most notably “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love” and, while both tracks succeeded on AM radio’s own terms, they also stretched the envelope of what was acceptable to such a format, with the first song very overtly recommending the use of psychedelic drugs, and the second one being a sort of hard-hitting militant love song not about the sweetly saccharine joys of romantic love, but about the desperate urgency of the human need for love.

At the same time, the Airplane produced some of the most artistically successful rock albums, and many songs that became staples of the FM radio playlists that featured longer, more artistically adventurous tracks than those that fit the more restrictive format of AM radio.

The band also delivered some of the most powerful live performances in rock history, with singers and instrumentalists improvising adventurously, yet still preserving the essential and distinctive natures of the songs in their repertoire.

Bassist Jack Casady and lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen were two of the best and most distinctive instrumentalists of their generation on their respective axes, adding yet another powerful dimension to the group’s sound. Casady played a driving, dynamic, rumbling bass, while Kaukonen played a psychedelic, blues-influenced lead guitar that also managed to sound exotically nordic. (What does that sound like? Picture frozen banshees howling across arctic fjords.) And Spencer Dryden’s drumming was both propulsive and ornamental, driving the songs along when he needed to, supplying quiet color in the background when anything more would have been intrusive or heavy-handed.

The name of the band, in retrospect, reveals a great deal in terms of their core values. Jefferson, of course, whether one thinks of Blind Lemon or Thomas, is a particularly American name, and one that establishes a link with traditions of the past. Airplane, on the other hand, is a symbol of modern technological liberation, literally freeing humankind from the gravitational pull that has bound us to the surface of the earth for so many centuries. And the combination reveals the group’s love for unlikely combinations of words and ideas, sometimes revealing itself in playful whimsey, and sometimes in thought-provoking insights.

When looking back at the sixties, it is often difficult to find accurate and lasting musical testaments to the cultural unrest that was so much a part of these times. Many of the songs that retain some counter-cultural flavor now seem either terribly dated, terribly shallow, or terribly disposable.

Almost alone among their contemporaries, the Airplane produced a body of work whose thematic center was genuinely revolutionary — not in a narrow political sense, but in a way that was targeted squarely at producing an upheaval of sentiment and sensibilities — and yet also a body of work that still sounds fresh and relevant and powerful almost five decades later. Bruce Springsteen has said that Elvis Presley liberated our bodies, and Bob Dylan liberated our minds. Perhaps Jefferson Airplane’s greatest contribution was its unrivaled ability to advance human liberation on both these fronts and more, and in fact to accept nothing less than the liberation of human beings as integrated wholes whose bodies and minds, thoughts and feelings, loves and passions, individuality and community, could never be separated or devalued.

As with many rock bands that were generously endowed with talent, in time some of the members felt artistically constrained by the need to shoehorn their musical tastes into the sounds of a collective, and many of the band members went their separate ways. Kaukonen and Casady formed a band named Hot Tuna that focused more on blues and instrumental prowess, while the Jefferson Starship became a vehicle for Balin, Slick and Kantner.