Yet again…the Airplane was an amazing live and recording band…Kantner a fine rhythm guitarist and songwriter. Casady, Kaukonen, Slick… damn.
Paul Kantner, one of the giants of the San Francisco music scene, died Thursday, Jan. 28, of multiple organ failure. Mr. Kantner, founding member of the Jefferson Airplane, was 74 and had suffered a heart attack earlier this week.
His death was confirmed by longtime publicist and friend, Cynthia Bowman, who said he died of multiple organ failure and septic shock..
Mr. Kantner suffered from a string of health problems in recent years, including a heart attack in March 2015.
With Jefferson Airplane, Mr. Kantner pioneered what became known as the San Francisco sound in the mid-1960s, with such hits as "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit."
The Airplane was renowned for thrilling vocal gymnastics by singers Marty Balin, Grace Slick and Mr. Kantner, the psychedelic blues-rock sound developed by guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and bass player Jack Casady and the LSD-spiked, '60s-era revolutionary fervor of its lyrics.
The band was formed in a Union Street bar called the Drinking Gourd, when lead Balin met Mr. Kantner and expressed his interest in forming a "folk-rock" band. It didn't take long for the Airplane to attract a sizable local following, enough so that when fledgling promoter Bill Graham opened his legendary Fillmore Auditorium, the Jefferson Airplane served as the first headliner.
The Airplane was the first of the so-called "San Francisco sound" bands to sign a recording contract with a major label, and in August of 1966, its debut album, “The Jefferson Airplane Takes Off," was released. Slick joined the band a year later and songs like "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit" became national hits as the love children came streaming into San Francisco.
The group quickly became an integral part of the ‘6os rock scene, from the Matrix club to Golden Gate Park's "Human Be-In" to Monterey Pop. The Airplane's high point may have been its sterling early-morning performance at Woodstock, while its nadir may have come only months later, at the violence-plagued Altamont concert, when Balin was knocked unconscious by the rampaging Hells Angels.
After the band was grounded by feuds and a lawsuit, Mr. Kantner and vocalist Grace Slick transformed the band into Jefferson Starship in 1974, taking the name from a Kantner solo album.
When Mr. Kantner left the Starship in 1985, he accepted an $80,000 settlement in exchange for a promise not to use the names "Jefferson" or "Airplane" without Slick's consent.
Slick stayed with the Starship and had a hit with "We Built This City" before the band folded in the late 1980s.
A sometimes prickly, often sarcastic musician who kept his own counsel and routinely enraged his old bandmates — they sued him for trademark infringement (and settled) after he started his own version of Jefferson Starship in 1991 -- Mr. Kantner lived to become something of a landmark on the San Francisco music scene, the only member of the pioneer '60s San Francisco band still living in town.
"Somebody once said, if you want to go crazy go to San Francisco," he said. "Nobody will notice."
Mr. Kanner was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 for his work with the Jefferson Airplane during the band's glory years -- from the breakthrough 1967 "Surrealistic Pillow" album through historic rock festivals such as Woodstock and Altamont.
"We never made plans," said Mr. Kantner, "Well, we made plans, but they went awry. It was good to have a plan in case they didn't go awry."
He maintained a strenuous touring schedule, performing regularly with some version of the Jefferson Starship name. His group sometimes included Jefferson Airplane vocalist and co-founder Marty Balin, as well as David Freiberg of the Quicksilver Messenger Service, another leading Bay Area band from the '60s.
"When I look back on it, that's probably longer than any of the other bands I've been in," Mr. Kantner said.
Paul Lorin Kantner was born in San Francisco on March 17, 1941.
His father, a traveling salesman, sent Mr. Kantner to military school after his mother’s death. He sought escape in science fiction books and music, before being inspired by Pete Seeger to follow a path as a folk singer. He attended Santa Clara University and San Jose State College before dropping out to pursue music.
When not on the road with his band, Mr. Kantner was a fixture at Caffe Trieste in North Beach.
"I've always loved San Francisco better than anywhere,” he said. “It's always had its problems, but just the weather alone, the views. This corner alone has proved so nourishing."
Mr. Kantner is survived by three children; sons Gareth and Alexander, and daughter China.
Funeral arrangements are pending.
WTF? Man.
RIP Paul
Marty Balin, Jorma Kaukonen Remember Paul Kantner:
http://www.jambands.com/news/2016/01/29/marty-balin-jorma-kaukonen-remember-paul-kantner/
Look for the jamband community to pay respect in the way that would make Paul smile.
Muleman what are you doing in a Paul Kantner thread, especially a Paul Kantner mourning thread? Paul represented absolutely everything you are against! Paul Kantner was a radical ultra-progressive anarchist, made most leftists look like conservatives he was so far ahead of humanity in his vision. You really are a puzzler. You have heroes like John Lennon and Paul Kantner, but you sound like Archie Bunker. This is like David Duke showing up at Martin Luther King's funeral.
Or maybe you are just paying honorable respects to your worthy adversary. You are certainly welcome here, but for once keep your neocon poison to yourself.
Paul Kantner and John Lennon are always a couple of the first sixties icons that get attacked on conservative Christian radio, I've heard it many times. I have heard Christian Right dissections of "Imagine" and Airplane songs that make them out to be the actual scriptures of Commie Satan himself.
Muleman what are you doing in a Paul Kantner thread, especially a Paul Kantner mourning thread? Paul represented absolutely everything you are against! Paul Kantner was a radical ultra-progressive anarchist, made most leftists look like conservatives he was so far ahead of humanity in his vision. You really are a puzzler. You have heroes like John Lennon and Paul Kantner, but you sound like Archie Bunker. This is like David Duke showing up at Martin Luther King's funeral.
Or maybe you are just paying honorable respects to your worthy adversary. You are certainly welcome here, but for once keep your neocon poison to yourself.
Paul Kantner and John Lennon are always a couple of the first sixties icons that get attacked on conservative Christian radio, I've heard it many times. I have heard Christian Right dissections of "Imagine" and Airplane songs that make them out to be the actual scriptures of Commie Satan himself.
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I do not inject politics into music.
Try to control yourself and respect the man.
Paul Kantner was an extremely political musician. Your very existence is blatant disrespect for Paul Kantner.
Just get on back to your ultraconservative red state or wherever you lurk, and leave us Best Coasters to mourn our own
You have the whole Whipping Post, get your neocon the * out
It's turncoat neocons like you that killed the revolution that Kantner was trying for
Paul Kantner remained a revolutionary to the end
The Jefferson Airplane founder saw his band as explicitly political, and never gave up his faith that music could effect change
My appointment with the great Paul Kantner, a founding member of Jefferson Airplane, was for 7am at a coffee bar on North Beach, San Francisco. Except that, throughout the night, the rendezvous kept changing: 7.30am, then 6.30, then back to 7. Kantner seemed to presume I was, like him, frantically awake, frantically online.
I arrived at the bar long before 7 – just in case, and through a scalpel-edged cold wind – to find the early-morning coffee crowd gathering: long beards, pony tails. After a while, a figure approached, walking up the steep street in slippers, no socks, hair flowing from beneath a beret with a red star on it. Unmistakably: Paul Kantner.
He sat down and pulled out the first of eight unfiltered Camels he’d smoke during the hour that followed: “One cigarette closer to Jesus,” he said. “I’m not going to give up the few things I enjoy. Might as well die of something I like.”
Now, the man who did more than almost any other to forge the sound of psychedelia has finally bade farewell to his earthly life, which – for several decades – he believed to have been no more than an accompaniment to one lived in outer space. Kantner believed this stuff, and it is no crazier than any other religious idea.
It can be said of a very few bands and artists that they changed the sound of sound in the mid-to-late 1960s, each in their own distinctive way. They are: the Beatles, Dylan, Hendrix, the Velvet Underground, Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, the Grateful Dead – and Jefferson Airplane. I bought my copy of Surrealistic Pillow, not yet 13 years old, for 32/6 (£1.65) of saved-up pocket-money and listened to it all evening, every evening for weeks.
The Airplane were quintessential to the counter-cultural revolution in and around San Francisco from 1965, when the band was formed – a status they shared only with the Grateful Dead. Their great early hits, White Rabbit and Somebody to Love, were icons of their time, that goes without saying.
Kantner’s contribution musically was an inimitably raw jazzy-blues fusion; discordant chords made of bright silver chrome, it seemed – welded and wrought with Marty Balin. It was at once menacing and ethereal. Plus, of course, those two vocal powerhouses, Grace Slick and Kantner himself. Kantner played and sang across all moods: from metallic blues on Bark to the visionary ballad Good Shepherd.
But there was more to Airplane than the music. Kantner said in that conversation on North Beach: “By 1965 in San Francisco, the music was just another thing to do at the concert. Sometimes it was the least interesting thing. Everything was exploding: a challenge to the establishment. DON’T TRUST THESE PEOPLE. People call it hedonism, but it wasn’t. It was: ‘We will break your laws at our leisure.’ For me, it was political. And the band got irritated by this – they were like the Dead, just musicians. They didn’t want all this revolutionary shit.”
Along with John Kay of Steppenwolf, Kantner epitomised whatever was political about the hippy rebellion. He was born in San Francisco, of German and French heritage, and educated at a Catholic boarding school, against which he rebelled with science fiction as a child, and drugs and politics as a teenager.
Accordingly, the Airplane were unapologetically didactic. Kantner turned them into psychedelic revolutionaries; for him, peace was armed – not necessarily with guns, but with a mixture of insurgent joy and burning rage. Volunteers was more than an anthem of the revolutionary wing of hippy-ism, it was its definition, and the version sung at Woodstock was one of that festival’s defining moments.
After the breakup of Airplane in 1972, Kantner embarked on his own project, Jefferson Starship, which – over four decades – picked and chose from former Airplane members and other Bay area “family” from the Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Janis Joplin/Big Brother and the Holding Company orbit. Starship was labelled more “commercial” – unfairly so: the band was based on a concept that Kantner brought to fruition as late as 2008, with the protest album Jefferson’s Tree of Liberty. The notion was that the earth is sick, infected by man’s greed, and that the seed of a tree of freedom has escaped into the ether, a better place. It is the ethos of Kantner’s greatest song: Wooden Ships.
I saw the Airplane/Starship a number of times. First, at the Bath festival in 1970 (I was too young for the famous Roundhouse concert in 1968), when driving rain obliged them to play an acoustic set. I saw them twice in the USA, and poignantly at Santa Barbara in 1981. I drove from Big Sur to blag a ticket from a scalper, way up top of the amphitheatre, with a view across the luxurious Pacific town and its marina. “Look what’s happening out in the streets,” belted Kantner far below, “Gotta revolution, gotta revolution.” The streets were peacefully, comfortably empty.
But Kantner kept the faith and kept going, unswervingly. Occasionally one just has to stop trying to be cool or clever and say that one just loves someone’s music, and I loved and love Paul Kantner’s. I saw him on other occasions, few more memorably than a Starship gig at the 100 Club in Oxford Street in 2008, supported by Quicksilver Messenger Service, another San Francsico institution from the 60s. Kantner was obliged to sit for most of the concert, but occasionally stood, and did so for a White Rabbit of epic proportions.
When Starship played their 40th anniversary tour of Britain in 2014, I went twice in hope of seeing Kantner, but he was too ill. The band, however, played on.
I always try to explain the entwined processes of age and politics in terms of two lines written by Paul Kantner. One is “Tear down the wall” – self-explanatory, from the Airplane’s revolutionary canon – and the other is “We are leaving / You don’t need us”, from Wooden Ships. It was written with his friend Dave Crosby, and is one of very few songs of its stature to enjoy success in two concurrent versions: performed – in very different moods – by both Airplane and Crosby, Stills and Nash.
One line affirms the revolutionary faith that is only extinguished – if it was ever felt – in those who lack soul. The other is the realisation with age that “the Wall” is still there, doing just fine, but one’s head hurts from banging against it and it is time to leave. For that distant place, be it in space – as Kantner believed – or within, or some shore towards which the Wooden Ships sail on their “fair wind blowing”.
By the end of our conversation on North Beach, Kantner seemed ready to set sail. He broke into a requiem for all the things he and psychedelia had stood for, and a tirade against former vice president Dick Cheney – “almost as dangerous as fascism – at least Hitler had a cause!” – against SUV vehicles and mobile phones. But, he insisted, once the Summer of Love had happened in San Francisco, and the Airplane’s music was unleashed, “You are not going to be able to unring the bell! Thank you for your time.” With that, he stood up, shook my hand, signed my vinyl first edition of Surrealistic Pillow and strode off into the morning, cigarette in hand.
http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2016/jan/29/paul-kantner-revolutionary-jefferson-airplane
You have the whole Whipping Post, get your neocon the * out
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Yea I know the Freedom of Speech is not something the far-left liberals support but dig it son, I don't give a sh!t what you think.
You clearly missed much of what his lyrics tries to express; love, not hate.
[Edited on 1/29/2016 by Muleman1994]
Ain't gonna happen here. You want to hang out here, keep your neocon trap shut.
I don't give a sh!t what you think.
You don't give a sh!t what anyone thinks... son.
I do not inject politics into music
Take the politics out of the Airplane and you will be left with silence! Yes you will still hear some guitars and drums, but it won't be the Airplane. Here is a reply I just got when I mentioned this thread to a friend:
"How can you NOT view Paul Kantner's music as political? Well, I guess that f*cker never really heard the Airplane. It is almost all politically based. Human douchery truly grows more staggering every day."
Anyone suggesting the Airplane wasn't political needs to go listen to the Volunteers album in its entirety and report back.
no doubt! What part of the following line is not political, and could be viewed as merely feelgood rockarolla all american entertainment?...:
"All your private property is target for your enemy,
And your enemy is me." ( from "We Can Be Together)
And Crown Of Creation! good god ! So radical it makes the entire left-right political spectrum look like the peabrained one-sided mutual Establishment support system that it is! The blind voting against the blind!
"In loyalty to their kind,
They cannot tolerate our minds,
In loyallty to our kind,
We cannot tolerate their obstruction...."
SIGN ME UP AS A DIPLOMAT MY ONLY OFFICE IS THE PARK!
Alas we hardlly knew ye..... rip paul kantner....
Why is it that the liberals are so driven by hate?
Is it that you just cannot control yourselves?
Now that's an odd post.
Why is it that the liberals are so driven by hate?
Is it that you just cannot control yourselves?
The only person on this site who hates everyone and everything is you. Only you.
I'm pretty much diametrically opposite philosophically to Muleman and have posted to that effect many times, but I do appreciate the respectful post he made. I'm sure he's aware of Kantner's positions, yet he chose to pay respects instead of dredge up politics. I wish this thread hadn't taken this turn.
[Edited on 1/29/2016 by rmack]
just some Paul Kantner quotes. You don't like reading them then blame Paul! Not even saying if i am for or against, they are largely unattainable ideals imo, but any hate you are picking up is in the eyes of the beholder, your movie camera, bro. Irritation, yes. Wish you would leave at least this one thread be, yes. Like love, hate exacts a huge emtional toll, and you are not worth it.
What else did non-political Paul Kantner say that we should remember him as simply a cool guy with a guitar who somehow spoke to white suburban longhairs who ended up ultraconservative christian fascists?
Let's see:
"Mau Mau" is a personal favorite:
By Paul Kantner, Grace Slick, Joey Covington
Put your old ladies back into bed
Your old men back into their graves
Cover their ears so they can't hear us sing
Cover their eyes so that can't see us play
Get out of the way
Let the people play
We're gonna get down on you
Come alive all over you
Dancin' down into your town
Tyrannosaurus Rex was destroyed before
By a furry little ball that crawled along
The primeval jungle floor
And he stole the eggs of the dinosaur
CLOSE YOUR EYES & CREATE THE SOUND
OPEN YOUR HANDS & REBUILD THE GROUND
We are egg snatchers -
Flashin' sunshine children
Diamond thieves
You unlease the dogs
Of a grade-B movie star governor's war
While you sit in the dark -
Insane with the fear of dying
We'll ball in your parks
- insane with the flash of living
I AM ALIVE
I AM HUMAN
I WILL BE ALIVE AGAIN
So drop your fuckin' bombs
Burn your demon babies
I WILL BE AGAIN -
The rabid lover-feelin' the starch in your grin
Callin' for acid cocaine and grass
And receiving your homemade gin
PUSH THE BUTTON
PULL THE SWITCH
CUT THE BEAM
C'MON MAKE IT MARCH
Sign me up as a diplomat - my only office is the park
You need to be out before you come in
And after you come you go
In the midst of Yang is a smaller part of Yin
And when it happens you know -
THE DAWN COMES
HEY DICK
Whatever you think of us is totally irrelevant
Both to us now and to you
We are the present
We are the future
You are the past
Pay your dues and get outta the way
'Cause we're not the way you used to be
When you were very young
We're something new
We don't quite know what it is
Or particularly care
We just do it - You gotta do it
Open your eyes there's a new world a-comin'
Open your eyes there's a new world today
Open your hearts people are lovin'
Open it all we're here to stay
OPEN THAT DOOR
I'm pretty much diametrically opposite philosophically to Muleman and have posted to that effect many times, but I do appreciate the respectful post he made. I'm sure he's aware of Kantner's positions, yet he chose to pay respects instead of dredge up politics. I wish this thread hadn't taken this turn.
[Edited on 1/29/2016 by rmack]
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I respect the man and his music.
BrerRabbit took this thread to the sewer.
Sad but some people just do not recognize there are places where decorum and respect is fundamental and spreading their hate is discourteous.
Time for some Morning Maniac Music.
Sad but some people just do not recognize there are places where decorum and respect is fundamental and spreading their hate is discourteous.
Irony strikes again.
Jorma And Jack And Friends
Celebrate 50 Years Of The Jefferson Airplane
Lockn' Festival, Arrington, Virginia
9/11/2015
http://bt.etree.org/details.php?id=583675
Source: Schoeps CCM4V's>Lunatec V2>Benchmark AD2K>
Sound Devices 722 (24/44)
FOB/DFC/KFC/ZFC/AARP 91' From Stage, 7 1/2' High
DSP: Sound Devices 722>Sound Forge 10.0>CD Wave>flac(16)
Recorded By: Z-Man
Seeded By: Z-Man
Disc I
01 Introduction
02 3/5 Of A Mile In 10 Seconds
03 Greasy Heart
04 Good Shepherd
05 White Rabbit
06 Law Man
07 Plastic Fantastic Lover
08 Somebody To Love
09 Eskimo Blue Day
10 Band Introductions
11 *Come Back Baby
12 *Volunteers
13 *Feel So Good
14 Band Introductions
* With Bill Kreutzman On Drums
Jorma Kaukonen - Guitar And Vocals
Jack Casady - Bass
Larry Campbell - Guitar And Vocals
Teresa Williams - Vocals
Rachel Price - Vocals
Jeff Pehrson - Vocals
Justin Guip - Drums
I'm pretty much diametrically opposite philosophically to Muleman and have posted to that effect many times, but I do appreciate the respectful post he made. I'm sure he's aware of Kantner's positions, yet he chose to pay respects instead of dredge up politics. I wish this thread hadn't taken this turn.
[Edited on 1/29/2016 by rmack]
__________________________________________________________________________
I respect the man and his music.
BrerRabbit took this thread to the sewer.
Sad but some people just do not recognize there are places where decorum and respect is fundamental and spreading their hate is discourteous.Time for some Morning Maniac Music.
Paul Kantner lived in a state of perpetual revolution. Recognize Kantner for the man he was and not some neutered version you've fabricated to avoid the complexity of what he was trying to convey.
I'm pretty much diametrically opposite philosophically to Muleman and have posted to that effect many times, but I do appreciate the respectful post he made. I'm sure he's aware of Kantner's positions, yet he chose to pay respects instead of dredge up politics. I wish this thread hadn't taken this turn.
[Edited on 1/29/2016 by rmack]
__________________________________________________________________________
I respect the man and his music.
BrerRabbit took this thread to the sewer.
Sad but some people just do not recognize there are places where decorum and respect is fundamental and spreading their hate is discourteous.Time for some Morning Maniac Music.
Paul Kantner lived in a state of perpetual revolution. Recognize Kantner for the man he was and not some neutered version you've fabricated to avoid the complexity of what he was trying to convey.
_________________________________________________________________________
BrerRabbit took this thread to the sewer.
" not some neutered version you've fabricated to avoid the complexity of what he was trying to convey." is your trash.
Like I said: I respect the man and his music.
I'm pretty much diametrically opposite philosophically to Muleman and have posted to that effect many times, but I do appreciate the respectful post he made. I'm sure he's aware of Kantner's positions, yet he chose to pay respects instead of dredge up politics. I wish this thread hadn't taken this turn.
[Edited on 1/29/2016 by rmack]
__________________________________________________________________________
I respect the man and his music.
BrerRabbit took this thread to the sewer.
Sad but some people just do not recognize there are places where decorum and respect is fundamental and spreading their hate is discourteous.Time for some Morning Maniac Music.
Paul Kantner lived in a state of perpetual revolution. Recognize Kantner for the man he was and not some neutered version you've fabricated to avoid the complexity of what he was trying to convey.
_________________________________________________________________________
BrerRabbit took this thread to the sewer.
" not some neutered version you've fabricated to avoid the complexity of what he was trying to convey." is your trash.
Like I said: I respect the man and his music.
You take every thread to the sewer. For you, it is a step up. 😛
Signe Anderson, original Jefferson Airplane singer, dead at 74
Published February 01, 2016 - Associated Press
Signe Toly Anderson, a vocalist and original member of the Jefferson Airplane who left the band after its first record and was replaced by Grace Slick, has died.
Anderson died Thursday at her home in Beaverton, Oregon, according to her daughter, Onateska Ladybug Sherwood. Anderson was 74 and had been suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Anderson, who survived cancer in her 30s, died on the same day that another Airplane member, Paul Kantner, died.
Born Signe Toly in Seattle and raised in Portland, Oregon after her parents divorced, she was a folk and jazz singer who had performed in groups since high school. She moved to San Francisco in her 20s and began appearing at a popular folk club, the Drinking Gourd. Vocalist Marty Balin heard her sing and asked her to join what became the Jefferson Airplane, which in 1966 released "The Jefferson Airplane Takes Off." Strongly influenced by the folk-rock sound of the time, "Takes Off" was a word-of-mouth hit that combined original songs and covers, including a showcase for Anderson and her soulful contralto, "Chauffeur Blues."
But by the time the album came out, Anderson had given birth to her first child and she left after a farewell concert at the Fillmore in October 1966. The switch from Anderson to Slick, formerly of the San Francisco group the Great Society, proved momentous for the Airplane and for rock history. Slick brought with her two future standards, "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit," and a fierce vocal style and confrontational attitude that departed notably from Anderson's. The next album, "Surrealistic Pillow," was a landmark of psychedelic rock that made the Airplane superstars and representatives of the "San Francisco Sound."
"You have to look at the priorities in your life, the reality in your life," Anderson told radio station KGON in Portland in 2011, remembering the ordeals of bringing her baby on tour. "I had to wait in the San Francisco airport in July of 1966 for 36 hours before we got on the airplane and flew to Chicago. All the diapers were gone."
"I don't regret having left," she added.
Anderson was a footnote in the Airplane's history, but was regarded with respect and affection by fans and stayed in touch with Kantner, Balin and other band members with whom she performed on occasion over the following decades. On Facebook, bassist Jack Casady remembered her as "a real sweetheart with a terrific contralto voice." Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen wrote on his blog that Anderson was "our den mother in the early days of the Airplane" a voice of reason for "our dysfunctional little family." Balin, writing on Facebook, imagined that she and Kantner "woke up in heaven and said 'Hey what are you doing here? Let's start a band.'"
Anderson was married twice, to Merry Prankster Jerry Anderson and to Michael Alois Ettlin, who died in 2011. She is survived by two children and three grandchildren.
Well…this deserves an almighty WTF!$?.
It was the 60s.
If you remember it you did it wrong.
