Episode 158: “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane

A History of Folk Music and Five Hundred Songs

Episode 158

White Rabbit

By Jefferson Airplane Before I start, I need to confess an important and hugely embarrassing error in this episode.

I've only ever seen Marty Ballin's name written down, never heard it spoken, and only after recording the episode, during the editing process, did I discover I mispronounce it throughout.

It's usually an advantage for the podcast that I get my information from books rather than TV documentaries and the like, because they contain far more information, but occasionally it causes problems like that.

My apologies.

Also, a brief note that this episode contains some mentions of racism, anti-Semitism, drug and alcohol abuse, and gun violence.

One of the themes we've looked at in recent episodes is the way the centre of the musical world at least, the musical world as it was regarded by the people who thought of themselves as hip in the mid sixties, was changing in 1967.

Up to this point, for a few years there had been two clear centres of the rock and pop music worlds.

In the UK there was London, and any British band who meant anything had to base themselves there.

And in the US, at some point around 1963 the center of the music industry had moved west.

Up to then it had largely been based in New York and there was still a thriving industry there as of the mid-60s but increasingly the records that mattered that everyone in the country had been listening to had come out of LA.

Soul music was of course still coming primarily from Detroit and from the country soul triangle in Tennessee and Alabama.

But when it came to the new brand of electric guitar rock that was taking over the airwaves, LA was, up until the first few months of 1967, the only city that was competing with London, and was the place to be.

But as we heard in the episode on San Francisco, with the Monterey Pop Festival, all that started to change.

While the business part of the music business remained centered in LA, and would largely remain so, LA was no longer the hip place to be.

Almost overnight, jangly guitars, harmonies, and Brian Jones hairstyles were out, and feedback, extended solos, and drooping moustaches were in.

The place to be was no longer LA, but a few hundred miles north in San Francisco, something that the LA bands were not all entirely happy about.

In truth, the San Francisco music scene, unlike many of the scenes we've looked at so far in this series, had rather a limited impact on the wider world of music.

Bands like Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were all both massively commercially successful and highly regarded by critics, but unlike many of the other bands we've looked at before and will look at in future, they didn't have much of an influence on the bands that would come after them.

musically at least.

Possibly this is because the music from the San Francisco scene was always primarily that, music created by and for a specific group of people and inextricable from its context.

The San Francisco musicians were defining themselves by their geographical location, their peers and the situation they were in, and their music was so specifically of the place and time that to attempt to copy it outside of that context would appear ridiculous.

So while many of those bands remain much loved to this day, and many made some great music, it's very hard to point to ways in which that music influenced later bands.

But what they did influence was the whole of rock music culture.

For at least the next 30 years, and arguably to this day, the parameters in which rock musicians worked if they wanted to be taken seriously, their aesthetic and political ideals, their methods of collaboration, the cultural norms around drug use and sexual promiscuity, ideas of artistic freedom and authenticity, the choice of acceptable instruments, in short, what it meant to be a rock musician, rather than a pop, jazz, country, or soul artist.

All those things were defined by the cultural and behavioural norms of the San Francisco scene between about 1966 and 1968.

Without the San Francisco scene, there's no Woodstock, no Rolling Stone magazine, no Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, no hippies, no Groupies, no Rock Stars.

So, over the next few months, we're going to take several trips to the Bay Area and look at the bands which, for a brief time, defined the counterculture in America.

The story of Jefferson Airplane, and unlike other bands we've looked at recently, like The Pink Floyd and The Buffalo Springfield, they never had a definite article at the start of their name to wither away like a vestigial organ in subsequent years, starts with Marty Balin.

Balin was born in Ohio, but was a relatively sickly child.

He later talked about being autistic, and seems to have had the chronic illnesses that so often go with neurodivergence.

So, in the hope that the dry air would be good for his chest, his family moved to Arizona.

Then, when his father couldn't find work there, they moved further west to San Francisco, in the Haight-Ashbury area, long before that area became the byword for for the hippie movement.

But it was in LA that he started his music career and got his surname.

Balin had been named Marty Bookwald as a kid, but when he was nineteen, he had accompanied a friend to LA to visit a music publisher, and had ended up singing backing vocals on her demos.

While he was there he had encountered the arranger Jimmy Haskell.

Haskell was on his way to becoming one of the most prominent arrangers in the music industry, and in his long career he would go on to do arrangements for Bobby Gentry, Blondie, Steely Dan, Simon and Garfunkel, and many others.

But at the time, he was best known for his work on Mickey Nelson's hits.

Haskell thought that Marty had the makings of a Ricky Nelson style star, as he was a good-looking young man with a decent voice, and he became a mentor for the young man.

Making the kind of records that Haskell arranged was expensive, and so Haskell suggested a deal to him.

If Marty's father would pay for studio time and musicians, Haskell would make a record with him and find him a label to put it out.

Marty's father did indeed pay for the studio time and the musicians, some of the finest working in LA at the time.

The record, released under the name Marty Balin, featured Jack Nitchie on keyboards, Earl Palmer on drums, Milt Jackson on vibraphone, Red Callender on bass, and Glenn Campbell and Barney Castle on guitars, and came out on Challenge Records, a label owned by Gene Autry.

I get a thrill

only

with you.

You're another

I

love

nobody

but you.

Neither that, nor Balin's follow-up single, sold a noticeable amount of copies, and his career as a teen idol was over before it had begun.

Instead, as many musicians of his age did, he decided to get into folk music, joining a vocal harmony group called the Town Choirs, who patterned themselves after the weavers, and performed the same kind of material that every other clean-cut folk vocal group was performing at the time.

The kind of songs that John Phillips and Steve Stills and Cass Elliott and Van Dyke Parks and the rest were all performing in their own groups at the same time.

The town criers never made any records while they were together, but some archival recordings of them have been released over the decades.

that whistle

Lord, I'm walking down the track,

and there's tears in my eyes.

Trying to read a letter

from my home.

If that trainer runs me right,

I'll be home.

The town criers split up, and Balin started performing as a solo folky again.

But like all those other then-folk musicians, Balin realised that he had to adapt to the KT event-level folk music extinction that happened when the Beatles hit America like a meteorite.

He had to form a folk rock group if he wanted to survive, and given that there were no venues for such a group to play in San Francisco, he also had to start a nightclub for them to play in.

He started hanging around the Hootinannis in the area, looking for musicians who might form an electric band.

The first person he decided on was a performer called Paul Cantner, mainly because he liked his attitude.

Cantner had got on stage in front of a particularly drunk, loud crowd, and performed precisely half a song before deciding he wasn't going to perform in front of people like that and walking off stage.

Cantner was the only member of the new group to be a San Franciscan.

He'd been born and brought up in the city.

He'd got into folk music at university, where he'd also met a guitar player named Yoma Kalkernen, who had turned him onto cannabis, and the two had started giving music lessons at a music shop in San Jose.

There, Cantner had also been responsible for booking acts at a local folk club, where he'd first encountered acts like Mother McCree's Uptown Drug Champions, a drug band which included Jerry Garcia, Pig Pen McKernan, and Bob Weir, who would later go on to be the core members of the Grateful Dead.

Now Henry's feeling funny, the police gave him marked money.

Now he's got a ball and chain around his feet.

The judge gave him two years

and Henry shed a tear.

Cantler had moved around a bit between northern and southern California and had been friendly with two other musicians on the Californian folk scene, David Crosby and Roger McGuinn.

When their new group, the Birds, suddenly became huge, Cantler became aware of the possibility of doing something similar himself, and so when Marty Balin approached him to form a band, he agreed.

On bass, they got in a musician called Bob Harvey, who actually played double bass rather than electric, and who stuck to that for the first few gigs the group played.

He had previously been in a band called the Slippery Rock String Band.

On drums they brought in Jerry Peliquin, who had formerly worked for the police, but now had a day job as an optician.

And on vocals they brought in Sydney Tolly, who would soon marry and change her name to Sydney Anderson, so that's how I'll talk about her to avoid confusion.

The group also needed a lead guitarist though.

Both Balin and Kantner were decent rhythm players and singers, but they needed someone who was a better instrumentalist.

They decided to ask Kantner's old friend Yoma Kalkernen.

Kaukanen was someone who was seriously into what would now be called Americana or roots music.

He'd started playing the guitar as a teenager, not like most people of his generation inspired by Elvis or Buddy Holly, but rather after a friend of his had shown him how to play an old Carter family song, Jimmy Brown the Newsboy.

I'm very cold and hungry, sir, my clothes are worn and and thin.

I wander about from place to place, my daily bread I will.

But never mind, sir, how I look, don't swear at me or frown.

I sell the morning paper, sir, my name is Jimmy Brown.

Kalkinen had had a far more interesting life than most of the rest of the group.

His father had worked for the State Department, and there's some suggestion he'd worked for the CIA, and the family had travelled all over the world, staying in Pakistan, the Philippines, and Finland.

For most of his childhood, he'd gone by the name Jerry, because other kids beat him up for having a foreign name and called him a Nazi.

But by the time he turned 20, he was happy enough using his birthname.

Kalkinen wasn't completely immune to the appeal of rock and roll.

He'd formed a rock band, The Triumphs, with his friend Jack Cassidy when he was a teenager, and he loved Ricky Nelson's records.

But his fate as a folky had been pretty much sealed when he went to Antioch College.

There he met up with a blues guitarist called Ian Buchanan.

Buchanan never had much of a career as a professional, but he had supposedly spent nine years studying with the blues and ragtime guitar legend Reverend Gary Davis, and he was certainly a fine guitarist, as can be heard on his contribution to the Blues Project, the album Electra put out of white Greenwich Village musicians like John Sebastian and Dave Van Monk playing old blues songs.

Coconut became something of a disciple of Buchanan.

He said later that Buchanan probably taught him how to play because he was such a terrible player, and Buchanan couldn't stand to listen to it.

As did John Hammond Jr.,

another student at Antioch at the same time.

After studying at Antioch, Calkanen started to travel around, including spells in Greenwich Village and in the Philippines, before settling in Santa Clara, where he studied for a sociology degree and became part of a social circle that included Dino Valenti, Jerry Garcia, and Billy Roberts, the credited writer of Hey Joe.

He also started performing as a duo with a singer called Janice Joplin.

Various of their recordings from this period circulate, mostly recorded at Kalkinen's home, with the sound of his wife typing in the background while the duo rehearse, as on this performance of an old Bessie Smith song.

By 1965, Kalkanen saw himself firmly as a folk blues purist, who would not even think of playing rock and roll music, which he viewed with more than a little contempt.

But he allowed himself to be brought along to audition for the new group, and Ken Keesy happened to be there.

Keesy was a novelist who had written two best-selling books, one flew over the cuckoo's nest and sometimes a great notion, and used the financial independence that gave him to organise a group of friends who called themselves the Merry Pranksters, who drove from coast to coast and back again in a psychedelic painted bus before starting a series of events that became known as acid tests, parties at which everyone was on LSD, immortalized in Tom Wolfe's book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Nobody has ever said why Keesy was there, but he had brought along an Echoplex, a reverb unit one could put a guitar through, and nobody has explained why Keesy, who wasn't a musician, had an Echoplex to hand.

But Kalkinen loved the sound that he could get by putting his guitar through the device, and so for that reason more than any other, he decided to become an electric player and join the band, going out and buying a Rickenbacker twelve string and box treble booster, because that was what Roger McGuin used.

He would later also get a Guild Thunderbird six string guitar and a stand el Super Imperial lamp, following the same principle of buying the equipment used by other guitarists he liked, as they were what Zalyanovsky of the Love and Spoonful used.

He would use them for all his six string playing for the next couple of years, only later to discover that the Lovin' Spoonful despised them, and only used them because they had an endorsement deal with the manufacturers.

Kalkinen was also the one who came up with the new group's name.

He and his friends had a running joke where they had bluesman names, things like Blind Outrage and Little Son Goldfarb.

Kalkinen's bluesman name, given to him by his friend Steve Talbot, had been Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane, a reference to the 1920s blues guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson.

At the band meeting where they were trying to decide on a name, Kalkinen got frustrated at the ridiculous suggestions that were being made, and said, You want a stupid name?

How's about this?

Jefferson Airplane He said in his autobiography, It was one of those rare moments when everyone in the band agreed, and that was that.

I think it was the only band meeting that ever allowed me to come away smiling.

The newly named Jefferson Airplane started to rehearse at the Matrix Club, the club that Balin had decided to open.

This was run with three sound engineer friends, who put in the seed capital for the club.

Balin had stock options in the club, which he got by trading a share of the band's future earnings to his partners, though as the group became bigger, he eventually sold his stock in the club back to his business partners.

Before their first public performance, they started working with the manager, Matthew Katz, mostly because Katz had access to a recording of a then-unreleased Bob Dylan song, Lay Down Your Weary Tune.

Lay down,

The group knew that the best way for a folk rock band to make a name for themselves was to perform a Dylan song nobody else had yet heard, and so they agreed to be managed by Katz.

Katz started a pre-publicity blitz, giving out posters, badges, and bumper stickers saying, Jefferson Airplane Loves You all over San Francisco, and insisting that none of the band members were allowed to say hello when they answered the phone anymore.

They had to say, Jefferson Airplane Loves You!

For their early rehearsals and gigs, they were performing almost entirely cover versions of blues and folk songs.

Things like Fred Neal's The Other Side of This Life and Dino Valenti's Get Together, which were the common currency of the early folk rock movement, and songs by their friends, like one called Flower Bomb by David Crosby, which Crosby now denies ever having written.

They did start writing The Odd Song, but at this point they were more focused on performance than on writing.

They also hired a press agent, their friend Bill Thompson.

Thompson was friends with the two main music writers at the San Francisco Chronicle, Ralph Gleason, the famous jazz critic, who had recently started also reviewing rock music, and John Wasserman.

Thompson got both men to come to the opening night of The Matrix, and both gave the group glowing reviews in the Chronicle.

Record labels started sniffing around the group immediately as a result of this coverage, and according to Katz, he managed to get a bidding war started by making sure that when ANR men came to the club, there were always two of them from different labels, labels, so they would see the other person and realise they weren't the only ones interested.

But before signing a record deal, they needed to make some personnel changes.

The first member to go was Jerry Peliquin, for both musical and personal reasons.

Peliquin was used to keeping strict time, and the other musicians had a more free flowing idea of what tempo they should be playing at.

But also he had worked for the police while the other members were all taking tons of illegal drugs.

The final break with Peliquin came when he did the rest of the group a favour.

Paul Cantner's glasses broke during a rehearsal, and as Peliquin was an optician, he offered to take them back to his shop and fix them.

When he got back, he found them auditioning replacements for him.

He beat Cantner up, and that was the end of Jerry Peliquin in Jefferson Airplane.

His replacement was Skip Spence, who the group had met when he had accompanied three friends to the Matrix, which they were using as a rehearsal room.

Spence's friends went on to be the core members of Quicksilver Messenger Service, along with Dino Valenti.

I throw it up before

the sword of party.

I'll tell you where it

But Balin decided that Spence looked like a rock star, and told him that he was now Jefferson Airplanes drummer, despite Spence being a guitarist and singer, not a drummer.

But Spence was game and learned to play the drums.

Next, they needed to get rid of Bob Harvey.

According to Harvey, the decision to sack him came after David Crosby saw the band rehearsing and said, Nice song, but get rid of the bass player, along with an expletive before the word bass, which I can't say without incurring the wrath of Apple.

Crosby denies ever having said this.

Harvey had started out in the group on double bass, but to show willing, he'd switched in his last few gigs to playing an electric bass.

When he was sacked by the group, he returned to double bass and to the slippery rock string band,

who released one single in 1967.

On the ninth of January, nineteen hundred and sixty-three

in the year of our Lord, good old Annold Domini, Domini, Domini, Domini.

I send it poised upon a single spam of love

when you snuck right up behind me and

Harvey's replacement was Kalkinen's old friend Jack Cassidy, who Kalkinen knew was now playing bass, though he'd only ever heard him playing guitar when they played together.

Cassidy was rather cautious about joining a rock band, but then Kalkinen told him that the band were getting $50 a week's salary each from Cats, and Cassidy flew over from Washington DC to San Francisco to join the band.

For the first few gigs, he used Bob Harvey's bass, which Harvey was good enough to lend him despite having been sacked from the band.

Unfortunately, right from the start, Cassidy and Cantner didn't get on.

When Cassidy flew in from Washington, he had a much more clean-cut appearance than the rest of the band, one they've described as being nerdy, with short, slicked-back, side-parted hair, and a handlebar moustache.

Cantner insisted that Cassidy shave the moustache off.

and he responded by shaving only one side.

So in profile, on one side he looked clean-shaven, while from the other side he looked like he had a full moustache.

Cantner also didn't like Cassidy's general attitude or his playing style at all, though most critics since this point have pointed to Cassidy's bass playing as being the most interesting and distinctive thing about Jefferson Airplane's style.

This line-up seems to have been the one that travelled to LA to audition for various record companies, a move that immediately brought the group a certain amount of criticism for selling out, both for auditioning for record companies and for going to LA at all, two things that were already anathema on the San Francisco scene.

The only audition anyone remembers them having specifically is one for Phil Spector, who, according to Kaukernen, was waving a gun around during the audition, so he and Cassidy walked out.

Around this time as well, the group performed at an event billed as A Tribute to Doctor Strange, organised by the radical hippie collective Family Dog.

Marvel Comics, rather than being the multi-billion dollar Disney-owned corporate juggernaut it is now, was regarded as a hip, almost underground company, and around this time they briefly started billing their comics not as comics, but as Marvel pop art productions.

The magical adventures of Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts, and in particular the art by far-right libertarian artist Steve Ditko, were regarded as clear parallels to both the occult dabblings and hallucinogen use popular among the hippies, though Ditco Ditko had no time for either, following as he did an extreme version of Iron Ran's objectivism.

It was at the tribute to Doctor Strange that Jefferson Airplane performed for the first time with a band named The Great Society, whose lead singer, Grace Slick, would later become very important in Jefferson Airplane's story.

to be light

and

all the joy within you

dies,

don't you want somebody to love?

Don't you need somebody to love?

Wouldn't you love somebody to love?

You but one somebody to love

that gig was also the first one where the band and their friends noticed that large chunks of the audience were now dressing up in costumes that were reminiscent of the Old West.

Up to this point, while Katz had been managing the group and paying them $50 a week even on weeks when they didn't perform, he'd been doing so without a formal contract, in part because the group didn't trust him much.

But now they were starting to get interest from record labels, and in particular RCA Records desperately wanted them.

While RCA had been the label who had signed Elvis Presley, they had otherwise largely ignored rock and roll, considering that since they had the biggest rock star in the world, they didn't need other ones, and concentrating largely on middle-of-the-road act.

But by the mid-60s, Elvis' star had faded somewhat, and they were desperate to get some of the action for the new music.

And unlike the other major American labels, they didn't have a reciprocal agreement with the British label that allowed them to release anything by any of the new British stars.

The group were introduced to RCA by Rod McEwan, a songwriter and poet who later became America's best-selling poet and wrote songs that sold over a hundred million copies.

At this point, McEwen was in his Jacques Drell phase, recording loose translations of the Belgian songwriters' songs, with McEwen translating the lyrics.

in the sky

Now that the spring is in the air

Little children everywhere

Think of me and I'll be there We had joy, we had fun

We had seasons and the sun

But the song and a ride McEwan thought that that Jefferson Airplane might be a useful market for his own songs and brought the group to RCA.

RCA offered Jefferson Airplane $25,000 to sign with them, and Katz convinced the group that RCA wouldn't give them this money without them having signed a management contract with him.

Calkinnen, Cantner, Spence and Balin all signed without much hesitation, but Jack Cassidy didn't yet sign, as he was the new boy, and nobody knew if he was going to be in the band for the long haul.

The other person who refused to sign was Sidney Anderson.

In her case, she had a much better reason for refusing to sign, as unlike the rest of the band, she had actually read the contract, and she found it to be extremely worrying.

She did eventually back down on the day of the group's first recording session, but she later had the contract renegotiated.

Jack Cassidy also signed the contract right at the start of the first session.

Or, at least, he thought he'd signed the contract then.

He certainly signed something without having read it.

But much later, during a court case involving the band's long-standing legal disputes with Katz, it was revealed that the signature on the contract wasn't Cassadi's and was badly forged.

What he actually did sign that day has never been revealed to him or to anyone else.

Katz also signed all the group as songwriters to his own publishing company, telling them that they legally needed to sign with him if they wanted to make records, and also claimed to RCA that he had power of attorney for the band, band, which they say they never gave him.

Though, to be fair to Katz, given the band members' habit of signing things without reading or understanding them, it doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that they did.

The producer chosen for the group's first album was Tommy Oliver, a friend of Katz's who had previously been an arranger on some of Doris Day's records, and whose next major act after finishing the Jefferson Airplane album was Trombones Unlimited, who released records like Holiday for Trombones.

The group weren't particularly thrilled with this choice, but were happier with their engineer, Dave Hassinger, who had worked on records like Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones, and had a far better understanding of the kind of music the group were making.

They spent about three months recording their first album, even while continually being attacked as sellouts.

The album is not considered their best work, though it does contain blues from an airplane, a collaboration between Spence and Balin.

Even before the album came out, though, things were starting to change for the group.

Firstly, they started playing bigger venues.

Their home base went from being the Matrix Club to the Fillmore,

a large auditorium run by the promoter Bill Graham.

They also started to get an international reputation.

The British singer-songwriter Donovan released a track called The Fat Angel, which name-checked the group.

He'll ride away on his silver bike.

And apart from that, he will be so kind in consenting to blow your mind

Fly

Jevers and airplane, get you there on time

Fly

Jefferson airplane get you there on time

The group also needed a new drummer.

Skip Spence decided to go on holiday to Mexico without telling the rest of the band.

There had already been some friction with Spence, as he was very eager to become a guitarist and songwriter, and the band already had three songwriting guitarists and didn't really see why they needed a fourth.

They sacked Spence, who went on to form Moby Grape, who were also managed by Katz.

For his replacement, they brought in Spencer Dryden, who was a Hollywood drat like their friend David Crosby.

In Dryden's case he was Charlie Chaplin's nephew, and his father worked as Chaplin's assistant.

The story normally goes that the great session drummer Earl Palmer recommended Dryden to the group, but it's also the case that Dryden had been in a band, The Heartbeat, with Tommy Oliver and the great blues guitarist Roy Buchanan, so it may well be that Oliver had recommended him.

Dryden had been primarily a jazz musician, playing with people like the West Coast jazz legend Charles Lloyd, though like most jazzers he would slum it on occasion by playing rock and roll music to pay the bills.

But then he'd seen an early performance by The Mothers of Invention, and realised that mock music could have a serious artistic purpose too.

He'd joined a band called The Ashers, who had released one single, the Jackie DeShannon song Is There Anything I Can Do?, in December 1965.

bet you

I know why

It's because

of her

You're not the happy guy

Is there anything I can do

I know she's been bad to you

But maybe it'd be true

The Ashes split up once Dryden left the group to join Jefferson Airplane, but they soon soon reformed without him as the Peanut Butter Conspiracy, who hooked up with Gary Usher and released several albums of psychedelic sunshine pop.

Dryden played his first gig with the group at a Republican Party event on June 6th, 1966, but by the time Dryden had joined, other problems had become apparent.

The group were already feeling like it had been a big mistake to accede to Katz's demands to sign a formal contract with him, and Balin in particular was getting annoyed that he wouldn't let the band see their finances.

All the money was getting paid to Katz, who then doled out money to the band when they asked for it, and they had no idea if he was actually paying them what they were owed or not.

The group's first album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, finally came out in September, and it was a comparative flop.

It sold well in San Francisco itself.

selling around 10,000 copies in the area, but sold basically nothing anywhere else in the country.

The group's local reputation hadn't extended outside their own immediate scene.

It didn't help that the album was pulled and reissued, as RCA censored the initial version of the album because of objections to the lyrics.

The song Running Round This World was pulled off the album altogether for containing the word trips, while in Let Me In they had to re-record two lines.

I gotta get in, you know where was altered to you shut the door, now it ain't fair, and don't tell me me you want money became don't tell me it's so funny.

Similarly, in Runaround, the phrase as you lay under me became as you stay here by me.

Things were also becoming difficult for Anderson.

She had had a baby in May, and was not only unhappy with having to tour while she had a small child, she was also the band member who was most vocally opposed to cats.

Added to that, her husband did not get on well at all with the group, and she felt trapped between her marriage and her bandmates.

Reports differ as to whether she quit the band or was fired, but after a disastrous appearance at the Monterey Jazz Festival, one way or another, she was out of the band.

Her replacement was already waiting in the wings.

Grace Slick, the lead singer of the Great Society, had been inspired by going to one of the early Jefferson Airplane gigs.

She later said, I went to see Jefferson Airplane at the Matrix, and they were making more money in a day than I made in a week.

They only worked for two or three hours a night, and they got to hang out.

I thought, this looks a lot better than what I'm doing.

I knew I could more or less carry a tune, and I figured if they could do it, I could.

She was married at the time to a film student named Jerry Slick, and indeed she had done the music for his final project at film school, a film called Everybody Hits Their Brother Once, which sadly I can't find online.

She was also having an affair with Jerry's brother Darby, though as the Slicks were in an open marriage, this wasn't particularly untoward.

The three of them, with a couple of other musicians, had formed the Great Society, named as a joke about President Johnson's programme of the same name.

The Great Society was the name Johnson had given to his whole programme of domestic reforms, including civil rights for black people, the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts, and more.

While those projects were broadly popular among the younger generation, Johnson's escalation of the war in Vietnam had made him so personally unpopular that even his progressive domestic programme was regarded with suspicion and contempt.

The Great Society had set themselves up as local rivals to Jefferson Airplane, where Jefferson Airplane had buttons saying, Jefferson Airplane loves you, the Great Society put out buttons saying, The Great Society really doesn't like you much at all.

They signed to Autumn Records and recorded a song that Darby Slick had written, titled Someone to Love, though the song would later be retitled Somebody to Love.

That track was produced by Sly Stone, who at the time was working as a producer for Autumn Records.

The Great Society though didn't like working with Stone, because he insisted on them doing 45 takes to try to sound professional, as none of them were particularly competent musicians.

Grace Slick later said, Sly could play any instrument known to man.

He could have just made the record himself except for the singers.

It was kind of degrading in a way, and on another occasion, she said that he did end up playing all the instruments on the finished record.

Someone to Love was put out as a promo record, but never released to the general public.

I know of any of the Great Society's other recordings for autumn records released.

Their contract expired and they were let go.

At which point they were about to sign to Mercury Records, but then Darby Slick and another member decided to go off to India for a while.

Grace's marriage to Jerry was falling apart, though they would stay legally married for several years, and the Great Society looked like it was at an end, so when Grace got the offer to join Jefferson Airplane to replace Sidney Anderson, she jumped at the chance.

At first, she was purely a harmony singer, she didn't take over any of the lead vocal parts that Anderson had previously sung.

as she had a very different vocal style, and instead she just sang the harmony parts that Anderson Anderson had sung on songs with other lead vocalists.

But two months after the album they were back in the studio again, recording their second album, and Slick sang lead on several songs there.

As well as the new line-up, there was another important change in the studio.

They were still working with Dave Hessinger, but they had a new producer, Rick Jarrard.

Jarrard was at one point a member of the folk group The Wellingtons, who did the theme tune for Gilligan's Island, though I can't find anything to say whether or not he was in the group when they recorded that track.

That started from this traffic port aboard this tiny ship.

The mate was a mighty sailing man, the skipper brave and sure.

Five passengers set sail that day for a three-hour tour.

A three-hour tour.

The weather started getting

Gerard had also been in the similar folk group the Greenwood County Singers, where as we heard in the episode on heroes and villains, he replaced Van Dyke Parks.

He'd also released a few singles under his own name, including a version of Parks's High Coin.

fine.

Yeah, it's my time.

While Gerrard had similar musical roots to those of Jefferson Airplanes members, and would go on to produce records by people like Harry Nilsson and the Family Tree.

He wasn't any more liked by the band than their previous producer had been, so much so that a few of the band members have claimed that while Gerrard is the credited producer, much of the work that one would normally expect to be done by a producer was actually done by their friend Jerry Garcia, who, according to the band members, gave them a lot of arranging and structural advice, and was present in the studio and played guitar on several tracks.

Gerard, on the other hand, said categorically, I never met Jerry Garcia.

I produced that album from start to finish, never heard from Jerry Garcia, never talked to Jerry Garcia.

He was not involved creatively on that album at all.

According to the band, though, it was Garcia who had the idea of almost doubling the speed of the retitled Somebody to Love, turning it into an up-tempo rocker.

within you

dies.

Don't you want somebody to love?

Don't you need somebody to love?

Wouldn't you love somebody to love?

You better find somebody to love.

And one thing everyone has agreed on is that it was Garcia who came up with the album title when, after listening to some of the recordings, he said, that's as surrealistic as a pillow.

It was while they were working on the album that was eventually titled Surrealistic Pillow that they finally broke with Katz as their manager, bringing Bill Thompson in as a temporary replacement.

Or at least, it was then that they tried to break with Katz.

Katz sued the group over their contract and won.

Then they appealed, and they won.

Then Katz appealed the appeal, and the Superior Court insisted that if he wanted to appeal the ruling, he had to put up a bond for the $50,000 the group said he owed them.

He didn't, so in 1970, four years after they sacked him as their manager, the appeal was dismissed.

Katz appealed the dismissal and won that appeal, and the case dragged on for another three years, at which point Katz dragged RCA records into the lawsuit.

As a result of being dragged into the mess, RCA decided to stop paying the group their songwriting royalties from record sales directly, and instead put the money into an escrow account.

The claims and counterclaims and appeals finally ended in 1987, 20 years after the lawsuits had started, and 14 years after the band had stopped receiving their songwriting royalties.

In the end, the group won on almost every point, and finally received $1.3 million in back royalties and $700,000 in interest that had accrued, while Katz got a small small token payment.

Early in 1967, when the sessions for Surrealistic Pillow had finished, but before the album was released, Newsweek did a big story on the San Francisco scene, which drew national attention to the bands there, and the first big event of what would come to be called the hippie scene, the human be-in,

happened in Golden Gate Park in January.

As the group's audience was expanding rapidly, they asked Bill Graham to be their manager, as he was the most business-minded of the people around the group.

The first single from the album, My Best Friend, a song written by Skip Spence before he quit the band, came out in January 1967 and had no more success than their earlier recordings had, and didn't make the Hot 100.

The album came out in February, and was still no higher than number 137 on the charts in March, when the second single, Somebody to Love, was released.

Ever in your head, baby, I'm afraid you don't know where it is.

Don't you want somebody?

That entered the charts at the start of April, and by June it had made number five.

The single success also pushed its parents' album up to number three by August, just behind the Beatles, Sgt.

Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band, and the Monkees' headquarters.

The success of the single also led to the group being asked to do commercials for Levi's Jeans.

white leave-ins coming in black, flashing bravo blue, I love you

right now with your white leave-in

cactus in blue and white, crashing golden

that once again got them accused of selling out.

Abby Hoffman, the leader of the Yippies, wrote to the Village Voice about the commercials, saying, It summarised for me all the doubts I have about the hippie philosophy.

I realize they are just doing their thing, but while the Jefferson airplane grooves with its thing, over a hundred workers in the Levi Strauss plant on the Tennessee-Georgia border are doing their thing, which consists of being on strike to protest deplorable working conditions.

The third single from the album, White Rabbit, came out on the 24th of June, the day before the Beatles recorded All You Need Is Love, nine days after the release of C.

Emily Play,

and a week after the group played the Monterey Pop Festival, to give you some idea of how compressed the time period we've been in recently.

We talked in the last episode about how there's a big difference between American and British psychedelia at this point in time, because the political nature of the American counterculture was determined by the fact that so many people were being sent off to die in Vietnam.

Of all the San Francisco bands though, Jefferson Airplane were by far the least political.

They were into the culture part of the counterculture, but would often and repeatedly disavow any deeper political meaning in their songs.

In early 1968, for example, in a press conference, they said, don't ask us anything about politics, we don't know anything about it.

And what we did know, we just forgot.

So it's perhaps not surprising that of all the American groups, They were the one that was most similar to the British psychedelic groups in their influences, and in particular their frequent references to children's fantasy literature.

White Rabbit was a perfect example of this.

It had started out as White Rabbit Blues, a song that Slick had written influenced by Alice in Wonderland, and originally performed by The Great Society.

when she's ten feet tall.

And if you go chasing rabbits, and you know you're going to fall,

tell about who your

smoking caterpillar has given you the call.

Slick explained the lyrics and their association between childhood fantasy stories and drugs later by saying, It's an interesting song, but it didn't do what I wanted it to.

What I was trying to say was that between the ages of zero and five, the information and the input you get is almost indelible.

In other words, once a Catholic, always a Catholic.

And the parents read us these books, like Alice in Wonderland, where she gets high, tall, and she takes mushrooms, a hookah, pills, alcohol.

And then there's The Wizard of Oz, where they fall into a field of poppies and when they wake up they see Oz.

And then there's Peter Pan, where if you sprinkle white dust on you, you could fly.

And then you wonder why we do it?

Well, what did you read to me?

While the lyrical inspiration for the track was from Alice in Wonderland, the musical inspiration is less obvious.

Slick has, on multiple occasions, said that the idea for the music came from listening to Miles Davis's album Sketches of Spain, and in particular to Davis's version of, and I apologise for almost certainly mangling the Spanish pronunciation badly here, Conchieto de Arranuez, though I see little musical resemblance to it myself.

She has also, though, talked about how the song was influenced by Ravel's Bolero, and in particular the way the piece keeps building in intensity, starting softly and slowly building up, rather than having the dynamic peaks and troughs of most music, and that is definitely a connection I can hear in the music.

Jefferson Airplanes' version of White Rabbit, like their version of Somebody to Love, was far more professional, far, and apologies for the pun, slicker than the Great Society's version.

It's also much shorter.

The version by The Great Society has a four and a half minute instrumental intro before Slick's vocal enters.

By contrast, the version on Surrealistic Pillow comes in at under two and a half minutes in total and is a tight pop song.

One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small.

And the ones that mother gives you don't do anything

at all.

Go ask Alice

when she's ten feet tall

And maybe you go

Jack Cassidy has more recently said that the group originally recorded the song more or less as a lark

because they assumed that all the drug references would mean that RCA would make them remove the song from the album.

After all, they'd cut a song from the earlier album because it had a reference to a trip.

So how could they possibly allow a song like White Rabbit, with its lyrics about pills and mushrooms?

But it was left on the album and ended up making the top ten on the pop charts, peaking at number eight.

In an interview last year, Slick said she still largely lives off the royalties from writing that one song.

It would be the last hit single Jefferson Airplane would ever have.

Marty Bailyn later said, Fame changes your life.

It's a bit like prison.

It ruined the band.

Everybody became rich and selfish and self-centered and couldn't care about the band.

That was pretty much the end of it all.

After that it was just working and living the high life and watching the band destroy itself living on its laurels.

They started work on their third album, After Bathing at Baxter's, in May 1967, while Somebody to Love was still climbing the charts.

This time, the album was produced by Al Schmidt.

Unlike the two previous producers, Schmidt was a fan of the band, and decided the best thing to do was to just let them do their own thing without interfering.

The album took months to record, rather than the weeks that Surrealistic Pillow had taken, and cost almost ten times as much money to record.

In part, the time it took was because of the promotional work the band had to do.

Bill Graham was sending them all over the country to perform.

which they didn't appreciate.

The group complained to Graham in business meetings, saying they wanted to only play in big cities where there were lots of hippies.

Graham pointed out in turn that if they wanted to keep having any kind of success, they needed to play places other than San Francisco, LA, New York, and Chicago, because in fact most of the population of the US didn't live in those four cities.

They grudgingly took his point.

But there were other arguments all the time as well.

They argued about whether Graham should be taking his cut from the net or the gross.

They argued about Graham trying to push for the next single to be another Grace Slick lead vocal.

They felt like he was trying to make them into just Grace Slick's backing band, while he thought it made sense to follow up two big hits with more singles with the same vocalist.

There was also a lawsuit from Balin's former partners in The Matrix, who remembered that bit in the contract about having a share in the group's income, and sued for $600,000.

That was settled out of court three years later.

And there were interpersonal squabbles too.

Some of these were about the music.

Dryden didn't like the fact that Kalkinen's guitar solos were getting longer and longer, and Balin only contributed one song to the new album because all the other band members made fun of him for writing short poppy love songs rather than extended psychedelic jams.

But also the group had become basically two rival factions.

On one side were Kalkinen and Cassidy, the old friends and virtuoso instrumentalists, who wanted to extend the instrumental sections of the songs more to show off their playing.

On the other side were Grace Slick and Spencer Dryden, Dryden, the two oldest members of the group by age, but the most recent people to join.

They were also unusual in the San Francisco scene for having alcohol as their drug of choice.

Drinking was thought of by most of the hippies as being a bit classless, but they were both alcoholics.

They were also sleeping together, and generally on the side of shorter, less exploratory songs.

Cantner, who was attracted to Slick, usually ended up siding with her and Dryden, and this left Balin the odd man out in the middle.

He later said, I got disgusted with all the ego trips, and the band was so stoned that I couldn't even talk to them.

Everybody was in their little shell.

While they were still working on the album, they released the first single from it, Cantor's The Ballad of You and Me and Pooh Neil.

The Pooh Neal in the song was a figure that combined two of Cantor's influences: the Greenwich Village singer-songwriter Fred Neal,

the writer of Everybody's Talking and Dolphins, and Winnie the Pooh.

The song contains several lines taken from A.

A.

Milne's children's stories.

That only made number 42 on the charts.

It was the last Jefferson Airplane single to make the top 50.

At a gig in Bakersfield, they got arrested for inciting a riot, because they encouraged the crowd to dance, even though local bylaws said that nobody under 16 was allowed to dance.

And then they nearly got arrested again after Canter's behaviour on the private plane they they chartered to get them back to San Francisco that night.

Cantor had been chain smoking, and this annoyed the pilot, who asked Cantna to put his cigarette out.

So Cantna opened the door of the plane mid-flight and threw the lit cigarette out.

They chartered that plane because they wanted to make sure they got to see a new group, Cream, who were playing the fillmore.

After seeing that, the divisions in the band were even wider.

Kalkinen and Cassidy now knew that what the band needed was to do long extended instrumental jams.

Cream were the future.

Two-minute pop songs were the past.

Though they weren't completely averse to two-minute pop songs, the group were recording at RCA studios at the same time as the Monkees, where members of the two groups would often jam together.

The idea of selling out might have been anathema to their audience, but the band members themselves didn't care about things like that.

Indeed, at one point, the group returned from a gig to the mansion they were renting and found squatters had moved in and were using their private pool, so they shot at the water.

The squatters quickly moved on.

As Dryden put it, we all, Paul, Yorma, Grace, and myself, had guns.

We weren't hippies.

Hippies were the people that lived on the streets down in Haight-Ashbury.

We were basically musicians and art school kids.

We were into guns and machinery.

After Bathing at Baxter's only went to number 17 on the charts.

Not a bad position, but a flop compared to their previous album, and Bill Graham, in particular, took this as more proof that he had been right when for the last few months he'd been attacking the group as self-indulgent.

Eventually, Slick and Dryden decided that either Bill Graham was going as their manager, or they were going.

Slick even went so far as to try to negotiate a solo deal with Electro Records.

As the voice on the hit, everyone was telling her she was the only one who mattered anyway.

David Anderley, who was working for the label, agreed a deal with her, but Jack Holtzman refused to authorise the deal, saying, Judy Collins doesn't get that much money, why should Grace slick?

The group did fire Graham, and went one further and tried to become his competitors.

They teamed up with the Grateful Dead to open a new venue, the Carousel Ballroom, to compete with the Fillmore.

But after a few months they realised they were no good at running a venue and sold it to Graham.

Graham, who was apparently unhappy with the fact that the people living around the Fillmore were largely black, given that the bands he booked appealed to mostly white audiences, closed the original Fillmore, renamed the carousel The Fillmore West, and opened up a second venue in New York, the Fillmore East.

The divisions in the band were getting worse.

Kalkinen and Cassidy were taking more and more speed, which was making them play longer and faster instrumental solos, whether or not the rest of the band wanted them to, and Dryden, whose whose hands often bled from trying to play along with them, definitely did not want them to.

But the group soldiered on and recorded their fourth album, Crown of Creation.

This album contained several songs that were influenced by science fiction novels.

The most famous of these was inspired by the right libertarian author Robert Heinlein, who was hugely influential on the counterculture.

Jefferson Airplane's friends the Monkeys had already recorded a song based on Heinlein's The Door into Summer, an unintentionally unintentionally disturbing novel about a 30-year-old man who falls in love with a 12-year-old girl and who uses a combination of time travel and cryogenic freezing to make their ages closer together so he can marry her.

And he thought he heard the echoes of a benny whistle bad,

Now Jefferson Airplane were recording a song based on Heinlein's most famous novel, Stranger in a Strange Land.

Stranger in a Strange Land has dated badly, thanks to its casual homophobia and rape apologia, but at the time it was hugely popular in hippie circles for its advocacy of free love and group marriages.

So popular that a religion, the Church of All Worlds, based itself on the book.

David Crosby had taken inspiration from it and written Triad, a song asking two women if they'll enter into a polygamous relationship with him, and recorded it with the birds.

your eyes alive, your mind still growing,

saying to me,

What can we do now that we both love you?

I love you too.

And I don't really see

why can't we go on as three?

But the other members of the birds disliked the song, and it was left unreleased for decades.

As Crosby was friendly with Jefferson Airplane, and as members of the band were themselves advocates of open relationships, they recorded their own version with Slick singing lead.

something new

if you're crazy too.

I don't really see

why can't we go on as three.

The other song on the album influenced by science fiction was the title track.

Paul Cantler's Crown of Creation.

This song was inspired by The Chrysalids, a novel by the British writer John Wyndham.

The Chrysalids is one of Wyndham's most influential novels, a post-apocalyptic story about young children who are born with mutant superpowers and have to hide them from their parents as they will be killed if they're discovered.

The novel is often thought to have inspired Marvel Comics's X-Men, and while there's an unpleasant eugenic taste to its ending, With the idea that two species can't survive in the same ecological niche, and the younger, superior species must outcompete the old.

That idea also had a lot of influence in the counterculture, as well as being a popular one in science fiction.

Kant's song took whole lines from the chrysalids, much as he had earlier done with A.

A.

Milne.

The Crown of Creation album was in some ways a return to the more focused songwriting of Surrealistic Pillow, although the sessions weren't without their experiments.

Slick and Dryden collaborated with Frank Zappa and members of The Mothers of Invention on an avant-garde track called Would You Like a Snack, not the same song as the later Zappa song of the same name, which was intended for the album, though went unreleased until a CD box set decades later.

A real slap and a little Sony ass sounds like sneak done it, done it, the only sleep.

But the finished album was generally considered less self-indulgent than After Bathing at Baxter's, and did better on the charts as a result.

It reached number six, becoming their second and last top ten album, helped by the group's appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in September 1968, a month after it came out.

That appearance was actually organised by Colonel Tom Parker, who suggested them to Sullivan as a favour to RCA Records, but another TV appearance at the time was less successful.

They appeared on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, one of the most popular TV shows among the young hip audience that the group needed to appeal to, but Slick appeared in Blackface.

She's later said that there was no political intent behind this, and that she was just trying the different makeup she found in the dressing room, as a purely aesthetic thing, but that doesn't really explain the black power salute she gives at one point.

Slick was increasingly obnoxious on stage, as her drinking was getting worse and her relationship with Dryden was starting to break down.

Just before the Smothers Brothers appearance, she was accused at a benefit for the Whitney Museum of having called the audience filthy Jews, though she has always said that what she actually said was filthy jewels and that she was talking about the ostentatious jewellery some of the audience were wearing.

The group struggled to a performance at Altamont, an event we will talk about in a future episode, so I won't go into it here, except to say that it was a horrifying experience for everyone involved, and performed at Woodstock before releasing their fifth studio album, Volunteers, in 1969.

America, all the cheers of America.

That album made the top 20, but was the last album by the classic line-up of the band.

By this point, Spencer Dryden and Grace Slick had broken up, with Slick starting to date Cantner, and Dryden was also disappointed at the group's musical direction and left.

Balin also left, feeling sidelined in the group.

They released several more albums with varying line-ups, including at various points their old friend David Freiberg of Quicksilver Messenger Service, the violinist Papa John Creech, and the former drummer of the Turtles, Johnny Barbata.

But as of 1970, the group's members had already started working on two side projects.

An acoustic band called Hot Tuna, led by Kaukenen and Cassidy, which sometimes also featured Balin, and a project called Paul Canter's Jefferson Starship, which also featured Slake, and had recorded an album, Blows Against the Empire, the second side of which was based on the Robert Heinlein novel Back to Methuselah, and which became one of the first albums ever nominated for science fiction's Hugo Awards.

Do you know

we could go?

That album featured contributions from David Crosby and members of the Grateful Dead, as well as Cassidy on two tracks.

But in 1974, when Kalkinen and Cassidy quit Jefferson Airplane to make Hot Tuna their full-time band, Cantner, Slick, and Freiberg turned Jefferson Starship into a full band.

Over the next decade, Jefferson Starship had a lot of moderate-sized hits, with a varying line-up that at one time or another saw several members, including Slick, go and return, and saw Marty Balin back with them for a while.

In 1984, Cantner left the group and sued them to stop them using the Jefferson Starship name.

A settlement was reached, in which none of Cantner, Slick, Calkinen, or Cassidy could use the words Jefferson or Airplane in their band names without the permission of all the others, and the remaining members of Jefferson Starship renamed their band Just Starship and had three number one singles in the late 80s with Slick on lead, becoming far more commercially successful than their precursor bands had ever been.

We built this city

We built this

Slick left Starship in 1989 and there was a brief Jefferson airplane reunion tour with all the classic members but Dryden.

But then Slick decided that she was getting too old to perform rock and roll music and decided to retire from music and become a painter, something she stuck to for more than 30 years.

Canter Cantner and Balin formed a new Jefferson Starship, called Jefferson Starship The Next Generation, but Cantner died in January 2016, coincidentally on the same day as Sydney Anderson, who had occasionally guested with her old bandmates in the new version of the band.

Balin, who had quit the reunited Jefferson Starship due to health reasons, died two years later.

Dryden had died in 2005.

Currently, there are three bands

Airplane.

Hot Tunis still continued to perform, there's a version of Starship that tours featuring one original member, Mickey Thomas, and the reunited Jefferson Starship still tour, led by David Freiberg.

Grace Slick has given the latter group her blessing, and even co-wrote one song on their most recent album, released in 2020, though she still doesn't perform anymore.

Jefferson Airplane's period in the commercial spotlight was brief, they had charting singles for only a matter of months, and while they had top 20 albums for a few years after their peak, they really only mattered to the wider world during that brief period of the Summer of Love.

But precisely because their period of success was so short, their music is indelibly associated with that time.

To this day, there's nothing as evocative of summer 1967 as White Rabbit, even for those of us who weren't born then.

And while Grace Slick had her problems, as I've made very clear in this episode, she inspired a whole generation of women who went on to be singers themselves, as one of the first prominent women to sing lead with an electric rock band.

And when she got tired of doing that, she stopped and got on with her other artistic pursuits, without feeling the need to go back and revisit the past for ever-diminishing returns.

One might only wish that some of her male peers had followed her example.

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