Grace Slick With Paul Kantner: The Rolling Stone Interview
Grace Slick and Paul Kantner have unofficially assumed the leadership of that mindless, mindful San Francisco rock and roll starship, the Jefferson Airplane.
They hadn’t planned on it. Members of the Airplane foresee very little of what happens to them. But Marty Balin, who put together the first Jefferson Airplane (including Kantner, Jorma Kaukonen, Skip Spence as drummer, Bob Harvey as bassist, and Signe Toly Anderson as second lead vocalist behind Balin) in the summer of 1965, has stepped back behind Grace. For years and two or three albums, their soaring vocal trade-offs have been a mark of the Indian/jazz/mechanical/blues/rock sound of the group. But now Kantner is writing and singing more and more; he’s been busted again and again for dope and other extra-legal activities; and he’s hanging out with people like the Dead’s Jerry Garcia, and CSN&Y’s David Crosby, and the Airplane’s Grace Slick, who in December will be the mother of his child, named god (“Just ‘god,'” said Grace. “No last name, no capital G. And he can change his name when he feels like it.”).
Which says a lot for Paul, because Grace, slim slo Scorpio slider, damn well knows she’s a rock and roll queen (and not because Janis is gone; Janis was Little Girl Blues) and does what she damn well pleases. “White Rabbit” and Finch finishing school and all that.
When Grace and Paul speak for the Airplane, they’re representing a haphazard community of people who’ve set some important paces — for San Francisco, for the elite of the hip scene, and for rock and roll bands everywhere. Sure, it’s “gotta revolution,” but it’s still “Jefferson Airplane Loves You,” the slogan for their first promotional button in 1966. The Airplane still plays free park concerts. They still battle their record company on behalf of the people (RCA recently re-released ‘After Bathing at Baxters’ with a reduction on the original $5.98 retail price, which had outraged the Airplane in early 1968) and their own aesthetics and politics.
The politics and the lifestyle are clear. Laissez-faire; non-violent revolution (as Kantner explains), and revolt-inspired optimism for youth: “Free minds . . . free dope . . . free bodies . . . free music. . . The day is on its way. . . the day is ours,” Kantner writes in his new solo album ‘Blows Against the Empire’). All the hassles, all the busts, all the Nixonian-instituted repressions — “It doesn’t mean shit to a tree,” Grace sings. And if RCA objects — well, all right. “It doesn’t mean fred to a tree.” After all, it doesn’t mean shit . . .
(And Hot Tuna — Jorma and Jack’s spinoff group, resulting from one of the lazy periods between Airplane albums, when the lead guitar and loony bass began jamming together at The Matrix nightclub — was named when someone allowed as to how the record people and probably the radio people might not dig the name Hot Shit.)
From the very beginning, the Airplane has been short and terse, their humor simple and unanswerable — unlike their music. In the very first story on the band, in the San Francisco Chronicle in August, 1965, the writer described Balin’s newfound base, The Matrix nightclub. “One wall is a huge collage,” he wrote, adding Balin’s explanation: “We call it the huge collage wall.” Grace, in an interview for a women’s page feature, explained her housekeeping: “Yeah, we try to keep the house from falling down.”
But the anti-norm, anti-intelluctual, anti-art stance isn’t an obligatory posture. That’s just the way they choose to live their life, in line with or despite what the media has forced upon them. And there is that aristocratic air about them as they sit in their bed in their overwrought Tiffany mansion/rehearsal place. The room is just naturally littered, just as the second-floor office is filled with whimsical art, the Jefferson Airplane’s anti-idea of what’s funny. (That ten-inch-square color photo of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich that surprised you when you opened up the ‘Volunteers’ album — that was funny, see?) And downstairs, instead of furniture, there’s a pool table and a torture rack, the rack occupied by a stuffed walrus.
It all fits if you and he and she are all together in that aristocratic circle that moves between the mansion across Golden Gate Park down to the studios in the whorehouse district and out to Marin County where the Dead and Quicksilver live. One musician called it a “booster club” in Rolling Stone. And Kantner explained: “Well, he doesn’t get off in this situation.” And Garcia would add: “Of course, it’s our situation.”
So Grace and Paul, step-parents of the Airplane and perhaps a good part of San Francisco’s spare chaynge children, don’t have to reach out to you. But they are far from cold. Kantner seems satisfied with a monotonish mumble, and Slick is as flat in voice as she is in body. But Grace is a beautiful wit, snapping off word-plays and irreverence at every opportunity, and rewarding herself with a sexy giggle. And if you get into it, and toy with their answers and put down their put-ons, they’ll warm up, and it becomes a rap. They’re very human.
A couple of weeks ago — after Jimi, before Janis — Annie Leibowitz, the photographer, and I went to the Airplane mansion for the interview, waited half an hour while they were waking up, and retreated briskly up the stairs as the office was invaded by a suntanned promotion team from RCA. — B.F.-T.
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I remember once you were talking about why Signe Anderson left the Airplane, and you’d said it was because she was pregnant and couldn’t handle all those things — touring, recording, having a baby, hanging out — all at the same time. And that’s what forced her out. How does that compare with your situation now?
Grace: Well, people all around me have been trying to force me out. . . It’s been going on for five years now. But I think there were other pressures on Signe that made her leave. In my case, there are a whole lot of different chicks around and everybody is sort of helping each other out with various different things and they can take the child for awhile and I can theirs at the house at the beach, and we can trade off.