The story of Jefferson Airplane

Folk singers at the Matrix

The story begins with a young singer called Martyn Jerel Buchwald, born in Cincinnati in January 1942 and raised in San Francisco. In 1962 he changed his name to Marty Balin and cut two singles for a small Los Angeles label, Challenge Records. Neither went anywhere. He moved on to a folk quartet called the Town Criers, but when the Beatles arrived and folk music started going electric, Balin wanted a band of his own, and a place for it to play. In 1965 he and a group of investors bought an old pizza parlor on Fillmore Street and turned it into a nightclub. He called it the Matrix. Now all he needed was a band to put on its stage.[1] [2] [3]

Balin found his first partner at a hootenanny, an open stage night, at a folk club called the Drinking Gourd. A young man walked in carrying two guitar cases, a six string and a twelve string. Balin loved the twelve string sound, so he asked to see him play. The newcomer tuned up, started a song, then said he could not do it and walked off. Balin later said that was exactly the man he wanted. His name was Paul Kantner, a native San Franciscan who had drifted around the California folk circuit with friends like David Crosby, Jerry Garcia and David Freiberg. Kantner had grown up hard. His mother died when he was eight, and he was sent to the circus instead of her funeral.[1] [2] [3]

Both men wanted a woman's voice in the band. At the Drinking Gourd, Balin heard Signe Toly, a respected jazz and folk singer raised in Portland, Oregon, and invited her to share the lead. Soon after joining she married Jerry Anderson, one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, and became Signe Anderson. For bass they hired a bluegrass player named Bob Harvey, and for drums a former Marine band drummer, Jerry Peloquin. Kantner then called an old friend from Santa Clara University, a blues guitarist from Washington named Jorma Kaukonen. Jorma thought of himself as a country blues purist and was reluctant. What won him over was a tape delay machine from Kesey's Acid Test sound system. He later said technology sucked him in.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jorma also gave the band its name. A friend of his, Steve Talbot, liked to invent silly blues names, and had dubbed Jorma Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane, a joke on the bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson. When the band was stuck on a string of names Jorma thought were really stupid, he told them that if they wanted something truly silly, they should try Jefferson Airplane. It stuck. A manager arrived by chance too. Peloquin met Matthew Katz in a music shop near the club, and Katz won the band over by saying he had access to an unreleased Bob Dylan song. On the thirteenth of August 1965 Jefferson Airplane played the opening night of the Matrix.[1] [2] [3]

The first lineup did not last long. Within weeks Jerry Peloquin was gone, clashing with his bandmates and unhappy about their drug use. His replacement was a guitarist who had never really played drums. Skip Spence, a Canadian born musician who had just been approached by Quicksilver Messenger Service, was offered the drum stool by Balin, reportedly because he looked the part. He learned fast and debuted at the Matrix in September. Then the band decided Bob Harvey's upright bass was not up to scratch. Jorma knew exactly who to call, his teenage friend Jack Casady from Washington, who had played the capital's clubs with a forged ID. Casady played his first show with them on the thirtieth of October 1965, at the University of California in Berkeley.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Takes Off

The band improved quickly, and one newspaper column changed everything. Ralph J. Gleason, the jazz critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, saw them at the Matrix and wrote in September 1965 that he did not know who they would record for, but they would obviously record for someone. Bob Harvey later said there was pandemonium after that column. Labels came calling. Under Katz the band turned down Capitol, Elektra, Fantasy and others, and Columbia rejected a demo. Kantner said Columbia saw them as a little anarchic. Then RCA Victor sent producer Al Schmitt to hear them, and on the fifteenth of November 1965 the band signed with RCA for an advance of twenty five thousand dollars. It was an unheard of sum, five times what Capitol had offered.[1] [2] [3]

San Francisco's new dance hall scene was forming around them. On the sixteenth of October 1965 the Airplane played a dance at the Longshoremen's Hall, the first of the city's famous happenings, and a local band called the Great Society opened for them. Its singer was a former model named Grace Slick, and that night Paul Kantner met her for the first time. In November the Airplane played a benefit for the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the first show promoted by a rising organizer named Bill Graham. On the tenth of December 1965 they played the first Bill Graham concert at the Fillmore Auditorium, with the Great Society on the bill again. Billboard later credited the Airplane as the first band to headline the Fillmore.[1] [2] [3]

The debut album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, came out on the fifteenth of August 1966. It was Balin's record. He sang most of the leads and had a hand in all the original songs, including the first single, It's No Secret, which he wrote imagining Otis Redding singing it. RCA was nervous about the lyrics. Executives made the band change lines in two songs that sounded too sexual, and pulled a third song entirely because it used the word trips. Early pressings with the original words became collector's items. The album only reached number one hundred and twenty eight on the Billboard chart, but it sold strongly in California, and Balin's dream of a San Francisco band with a national record deal had come true.[1] [2] [3]

By then the lineup was changing again. Skip Spence left after the album sessions. One account says he was let go after taking an unannounced trip to Mexico. His replacement was Spencer Dryden, a Los Angeles jazz drummer who had been playing in a strip club band. Dryden played his first show on the Fourth of July 1966 at the Berkeley Folk Festival. In August the band fired Matthew Katz, starting a legal battle that ran until 1987. Balin's friend and roommate Bill Thompson, a former Chronicle staffer, stepped in as road manager. And Signe Anderson, who had given birth to a daughter in May, told the band that a newborn and life on the road did not mix.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Signe agreed to stay while the band found a replacement. Her last shows were two sets at the Fillmore on the fifteenth of October 1966. Near the end, Balin told the crowd she was leaving. She thanked everyone, told them she loved them, and at the fans' request the band played her signature song, Chauffeur Blues, one more time. The recording was finally released in 2010 as Signe's Farewell. Jorma Kaukonen later called her the band's den mother, a voice of reason in their dysfunctional little family. She went home to Oregon, sang for years with a local group, and survived cancer in the 1970s. The very next night, the sixteenth of October 1966, her successor walked onto the Fillmore stage.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Grace and the Surrealistic Pillow

Grace Slick was born Grace Barnett Wing in Chicago on the thirtieth of October 1939, the daughter of an investment banker. She grew up around San Francisco and Palo Alto, went to Finch College in New York, a finishing school for young women, and later worked as a model at the I. Magnin department store. She had no real plan to be a musician until she read about Jefferson Airplane in the Chronicle and went to see them at the Matrix. That was enough. With her husband Jerry Slick on drums and his brother Darby on guitar, she formed the Great Society, which debuted on the fifteenth of October 1965. Soon after, she wrote a song inspired by Alice in Wonderland called White Rabbit.[1] [2] [3]

The Great Society made one single, produced by Sylvester Stewart, soon to be famous as Sly Stone. The B side was a song by Darby Slick called Someone to Love, written after a breakup. The story goes that Stone walked out after the band needed more than fifty takes of the A side. By the autumn of 1966 Columbia wanted to sign them, but it was Jack Casady who asked Grace to join the Airplane. She said yes at once. She loved his bass playing, she said, and liked that the Airplane was run like a professional outfit. Her Great Society contract was bought out for seven hundred and fifty dollars, and without her the group fell apart. She brought two songs with her.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Just two weeks after Grace joined, on the thirty first of October 1966, the band walked into RCA's Hollywood studio with producer Rick Jarrard. RCA wanted something commercial, so the long jams from their live shows were left out. The album was cut in thirteen days for about eight thousand dollars. Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead hung around the sessions, helped rearrange Somebody to Love, the new title of Darby Slick's song, and was credited on the sleeve as spiritual advisor. It was Garcia who said the music was as surrealistic as a pillow is soft, and that gave the album its name. Jarrard banned marijuana from the sessions. The band ignored him, and did not hire him again.[1] [2] [3]

Surrealistic Pillow came out on the first of February 1967. The first single, Skip Spence's My Best Friend, flopped. Then Somebody to Love took off in the spring and reached number five, the band's biggest hit. White Rabbit followed and reached number eight. Grace had written it on a fifty dollar red upright piano with eight or ten keys missing, and said she could hear the missing notes in her head. It moves like Ravel's Bolero, one long build, over a dark Spanish march inspired by Miles Davis. She said the song was aimed at parents who read their children Alice in Wonderland and then wondered why their kids took drugs. The album climbed to number three and stayed on the chart for over a year.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The rest of the album showed off every member. Balin sang the tender Today, which he said he wrote hoping to impress Tony Bennett, recording in the studio next door. His Plastic Fantastic Lover was a love song to a television set, written after the band toured a plastics factory in Chicago. Kaukonen's acoustic instrumental Embryonic Journey, the first piece he ever wrote, went on at the producer's insistence. Critics have ranked the album among the greatest ever made, and in 2024 the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry. The songs also carried the San Francisco sound to the rest of America, and helped draw thousands of young people to the Haight Ashbury in the months that followed.[1] [2] [3]

The Summer of Love and Baxter's

The year 1967 opened with the Airplane at the center of the new counterculture. On the fourteenth of January they played the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park alongside the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service, a gathering where Timothy Leary told the crowd to turn on, tune in and drop out. Around the same time Bill Graham took over as the band's manager. On television they appeared on the Smothers Brothers show, where the producers used an early chroma key effect to imitate their swirling light show, and on American Bandstand and Ed Sullivan. Kantner remembered how fast America changed. On their first tour, he said, kids came in prom gowns and tuxedos. A year later in Iowa, they were holding nude mud love ins.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In June 1967 they were one of the headliners at the Monterey International Pop Festival, the event that launched Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Otis Redding to a wider audience. Grace sang in a long blue robe while a liquid light show swirled overhead, and after the concert members of the Airplane, the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Grateful Dead jammed backstage for four more hours, stopping only for breakfast at dawn. D. A. Pennebaker's film of the festival carried two of their songs to cinemas. By that summer the Airplane were the highest paid live act in America, with a punishing schedule of shows across the country, including free concerts with the Grateful Dead in Montreal during Expo 67.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then the band made a record almost nobody at RCA wanted. They scrapped their first sessions after hearing Sgt. Pepper, and new producer Al Schmitt let them experiment freely. They rented a Beverly Hills mansion with a pool and an underwater shooting range, and the partying was wild. Jorma once rode a motorcycle into the studio. Kantner recalled nitrous oxide tanks, marijuana everywhere and smoke rising from the mixing desk. The title, After Bathing at Baxter's, was code. Baxter was the band's word for LSD. The album mixed long suites, a sound collage by Spencer Dryden and a nine minute jam cut from a twenty four minute take. It cost more than eighty thousand dollars, ten times the price of Surrealistic Pillow.[1] [2]

Baxter's was released on the twenty seventh of November 1967 and peaked at only number seventeen, with no gold record. Rolling Stone's founder Jann Wenner called the Airplane possibly the best rock band in America, but the singles stalled, and AM radio grew wary of a band with drug songs. The record also marked a shift in power. Kantner and Slick became the main writers, and Balin, who had written five songs on the last album, got just one. He was disgusted by what he called star trips and inflated egos. Bill Graham demanded they go back to hit making. Instead, in February 1968, Grace gave the band an ultimatum, either he goes or I go. Graham was fired, and Bill Thompson became manager.[1] [2]

The mansion and the Crown of Creation

With Thompson in charge, the band put its money into a home. They bought a twenty room mansion at 2400 Fulton Street, across from Golden Gate Park near the Haight Ashbury, for seventy three thousand dollars. It became their office, their communal home and their rehearsal space, with a studio in the basement. The next album, Crown of Creation, was released in August 1968. It was tighter and more commercial than Baxter's, and it reached number six, their second and last top ten album. Kantner took the title song's words from John Wyndham's science fiction novel The Chrysalids, with permission. He later said he wrote it as a joke after the Democratic Party asked the band for a campaign song, knowing they would never use it.[1] [2] [3]

The album also held some of their most personal songs. Grace's Lather was written about her boyfriend, drummer Spencer Dryden, turning thirty, and about growing up in a movement that worshipped youth. The band covered Triad, a David Crosby song about a three way love affair that the Byrds had refused to release. Grace's Greasy Heart came out as a single and flopped. That February the band had performed at a telethon for Robert F. Kennedy and dined with him at his home, and the album's lyric sheet carried a picture of his dog Brumus. After Kennedy was assassinated in June, they tried to stage a free show with the Grateful Dead in Golden Gate Park, but police stopped them.[1] [2] [3]

In late summer 1968 the Airplane made their first big European tour, sharing bills with the Doors in the Netherlands, England, Germany and Sweden. In Amsterdam, Jim Morrison, full of drugs fans had handed him, wandered onstage during Plastic Fantastic Lover and spun around like a pinwheel as the band played faster and faster, until he collapsed at Balin's feet. He was taken to hospital, and Ray Manzarek sang the Doors set alone. It was also on that tour, Grace later wrote in her 1998 memoir, that she had a brief affair with Morrison. She told the Guardian in 2025 she was a little disappointed he never called back. Back home, Life magazine put the band on its cover that June.[1] [2]

The band was getting more political and more provocative. In the autumn of 1968 they played Crown of Creation on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and Grace appeared in blackface and ended with a raised fist, the Black Panther salute. It caused a stir then, and it is still an uncomfortable moment to watch. In November they played on the roof of the Schuyler Hotel in Manhattan for a film by Jean Luc Godard and D. A. Pennebaker. There was no permit, and police shut it down, two months before the Beatles' famous rooftop show. Several people were arrested, including Marty Balin and the actor Rip Torn. Their live album Bless Its Pointed Little Head followed in February 1969, and reached number seventeen.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Volunteers, Woodstock and Altamont

Early in 1969 the band had to stop. Grace needed surgery to remove nodes from her throat, and around this time her relationship with Spencer Dryden ended and she moved on to Paul Kantner. With time on their hands, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady began playing acoustic blues in small San Francisco clubs, including the old Matrix, with Kantner and a new drummer named Joey Covington. They first called the side project Hot Shit, then chose something more polite, Hot Tuna. Soon Hot Tuna was opening the Airplane's own shows. In the spring the band began recording at Wally Heider's new studio in San Francisco. Their next album was among the earliest records made on a sixteen track tape machine, which was pictured proudly on its back cover.[1] [2] [3]

That album was Volunteers, their angriest record, against the Vietnam War and full of calls for revolution. The title song began innocently. Balin said he was woken by crashing garbage cans outside the mansion and saw a truck from the Volunteers of America charity, so he wrote the name down and gave it to Kantner. The charity objected to the planned title, Volunteers of Amerika, so it was shortened. Kantner's We Can Be Together contained a famous obscenity, and RCA wanted it gone until the band pointed out RCA had already allowed the same word on the cast album of Hair. The lyric sheet printed it as fred. Released in November 1969, Volunteers reached number thirteen and went gold.[1] [2] [3]

In August 1969 the Airplane played Woodstock, joined by the British session pianist Nicky Hopkins. Their slot kept slipping, and they did not reach the stage until early Sunday morning, which Grace introduced as morning maniac music. She later said they had spent the long night before taking cocaine. Kantner remembered Woodstock fondly, but Grace and Spencer Dryden did not. Straight afterwards they taped The Dick Cavett Show with David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Joni Mitchell, and sang We Can Be Together with its obscenity intact. They are often credited as the first people to say that word on American network television. Their Woodstock performance of Volunteers became one of the most famous moments of the festival.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the sixth of December 1969 the Airplane played the Altamont Free Concert, headlined by the Rolling Stones, with the Hells Angels acting as security. Grace said the mood felt peculiar from the start. As the band played, Angels were beating people in front of the stage with pool cues. Marty Balin jumped down to break up a fight and was knocked unconscious. He said he woke up covered in boot marks. When Kantner told the crowd the Angels had just knocked out his singer, an Angel grabbed a microphone and argued with him. That night, during the Stones' set, a Hells Angel named Alan Passaro stabbed eighteen year old Meredith Hunter to death after Hunter drew a revolver. Passaro was acquitted of murder in 1971 on grounds of self defense.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Altamont made the Airplane the only band to play all three of the great sixties festivals, Monterey, Woodstock and Altamont. It also broke something. Spencer Dryden said the day looked less like happy hippies and more like a Hieronymus Bosch painting in sepia. Worn out by four years on what he called the acid merry go round, and at odds with the band's politics, he was voted out in February 1970. Joey Covington took over the drums. Dryden soon found a new home in the New Riders of the Purple Sage. The rest of the Airplane kept flying, but the classic lineup of Balin, Kantner, Slick, Kaukonen, Casady and Dryden, the one later honored by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, was over.[1] [2] [3]

Coming apart

In 1970 the Airplane grew and splintered at the same time. In October the veteran jazz violinist Papa John Creach, then in his fifties, joined both the Airplane and Hot Tuna. He had played with Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, and Covington had befriended him at a Los Angeles union hiring hall. He joined on the day Janis Joplin died. The only new Airplane record that year was a single, Grace's Mexico, an attack on President Nixon's campaign against marijuana smuggling. In April, Grace was invited to a White House tea for alumnae of Finch College, where Nixon's daughter Tricia had also studied. She arrived with the activist Abbie Hoffman as her escort, and by her own account, with LSD to slip into the President's tea.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Kantner, meanwhile, was dreaming of outer space. In November 1970 he released Blows Against the Empire, a concept album about hippies hijacking a starship to escape Earth, recorded with Grace, David Crosby, Graham Nash and members of the Grateful Dead. It was credited to Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship, the first time that name appeared. Kantner borrowed the idea from Robert A. Heinlein and wrote to ask permission. Heinlein replied that many people had used his ideas, but Kantner was the first to ask. The album reached number twenty and became the first rock album nominated for science fiction's Hugo Award. On the twenty fifth of January 1971, Grace and Paul's daughter, China Wing Kantner, was born.[1] [2] [3]

By then Marty Balin had stopped talking to the band. Janis Joplin's death shook him badly. He took up yoga, gave up drinking and drugs, and could not bear what he called the cocaine atmosphere around him. He said you could not deal with people on cocaine, that he could not even talk to the roadies, and that he no longer had the energy to fight Kantner. In April 1971 he officially left the band he had founded. Then, on the thirteenth of May 1971, Grace crashed her car into a wall in a tunnel near the Golden Gate Bridge while drag racing Jorma Kaukonen. She was badly hurt and needed months to recover, and later made a comic song about the crash.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In September 1971 came Bark, the first album without Balin and the first release on Grunt Records, a label the band ran themselves while RCA handled distribution. The name came from a joke working title for Volunteers. Bark came wrapped in a paper grocery bag, with a picture of a dead fish wearing false teeth inside. It reached number eleven, higher than Volunteers, and the Covington sung single Pretty As You Feel, taken from a jam with members of Santana, became the band's last chart hit. But the divisions were deep. The band split into two camps, Kantner and Slick on one side, Kaukonen and Casady on the other, while cocaine use escalated and Grace's drinking grew worse.[1] [2] [3]

They held together for one more studio album, Long John Silver, released in July 1972, its cover folding out into a box pictured holding cigars. Covington left during the sessions, and John Barbata, the former drummer of the Turtles, recommended by David Crosby, replaced him. David Freiberg, who had just served a prison sentence for marijuana possession, joined on vocals to fill Balin's role for the tour. That tour ended with two shows at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco on the twenty first and twenty second of September 1972, with Balin joining them for the encore. Nobody announced it, but it was the last Jefferson Airplane show for seventeen years. By December 1973 RCA had stopped paying the band's salaries.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Starship, Tuna and the long split

Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady simply walked into Hot Tuna full time. With Papa John Creach and later drummer Bob Steeler, Tuna grew from acoustic blues into a loud power trio, famous for sets that could run for hours. Kantner and Slick, their salaries cut, built something new. In January 1974 they formed Jefferson Starship with Freiberg, Barbata, Creach, a teenage guitarist named Craig Chaquico and, soon, the British bassist Pete Sears. Manager Bill Thompson persuaded them to keep the Jefferson connection for business reasons. Then Marty Balin came back. He co wrote and sang Caroline on their first album, joined full time in 1975, and wrote Miracles, a romantic ballad that reached number three.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The album Red Octopus went to number one in 1975, something the Airplane had never done. Rolling Stone noted that the band had been written off as charred remnants of a bygone era, and Balin said that at first the band was sold on nostalgia, but they were better than that. Spitfire and Earth followed, both platinum. But Grace was drinking heavily. In June 1978 in West Germany she was too drunk to perform, the show was cancelled and the crowd rioted and destroyed some of the band's gear. The next night in Hamburg she insulted the audience and mocked Germany over the war. Kantner asked for her resignation, and she left. Slick later said she had behaved that way deliberately to force her own exit.[1] [2] [3]

Months later, Balin quit too, tired of touring and of Grace's drinking, and the singer Mickey Thomas took his place. That same October, John Barbata was badly hurt in a car accident and had to leave. In October 1980 Kantner, just thirty nine, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. Doctors noted that an old injury from a motorcycle crash in the early sixties, which had left a hole in his skull, helped relieve the pressure, and he recovered without surgery. Grace returned in 1981, but Kantner came to hate the band's glossy hit making. In June 1984 he walked out, complaining it had become too commercial, and then sued his old bandmates over money and the Jefferson name.[1] [2] [3]

The settlement in March 1985 said no one could use Jefferson Starship without Kantner, and no band could call itself Jefferson Airplane without Grace Slick. The rest of the group became simply Starship. Kantner told a reporter that Grace now thought of him as Satan. Starship then scored three number one hits, We Built This City, Sara and Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now. When We Built This City hit the top in November 1985, just after her forty sixth birthday, Grace became the oldest woman to top the Billboard Hot 100, a record she held until Cher in 1999. She told the Guardian in 2025 that she thought the song was ridiculous, and that she only sang such hits to make amends for her drinking years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Airplane's first drummer had the saddest path of all. After leaving the band, Skip Spence co founded Moby Grape. In 1968, while the band was recording in New York, while high on LSD, he tried to break down a bandmate's hotel room door with a fire axe. He was jailed and spent six months in New York's Bellevue Hospital, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. On his release he went to Nashville and recorded Oar, a solo album on which he played every instrument. It later became a cult classic, but Spence struggled for the rest of his life with mental illness and addiction to heroin and cocaine, and spent years homeless or in care in the Santa Cruz area.[1] [2]

Reunion, farewells and legacy

The family slowly came back together. In the mid 1980s Kantner, Balin and Casady formed the KBC Band. By 1988 Kantner was touring as a guest with Hot Tuna, and he and Grace were speaking again after he wrote to their daughter China. On the fourth of March 1988, at a Hot Tuna show at the Fillmore, Grace walked out to sing with them. She called it a joke on Paul. In 1989 the classic lineup, without Spencer Dryden, who chose to stay retired, reunited for an album and a tour. The tour did well, but the album, polished in a modern Los Angeles style, stalled at number eighty five. Jorma said it was well done but not very passionate, and the reunion faded away.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The losses began in the 1990s. Papa John Creach died of heart failure on the twenty second of February 1994, aged seventy six. Grace retired from music, saying that rock and rollers over fifty looked stupid, and turned to painting, especially white rabbits and portraits of old friends like Janis Joplin and Jerry Garcia. Her troubles did not stop at once. She was arrested several times for what she called talking under the influence, and in 1994 she pointed an unloaded gun at a police officer who came onto her property. In 1996 the classic Airplane was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Grace missed the night because of a leg problem, and Kantner told the crowd she sent her love.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Skip Spence died of lung cancer on the sixteenth of April 1999, two days short of his fifty third birthday. Just before he died, he heard More Oar, a tribute album with Tom Waits, Robert Plant and Beck. Spencer Dryden's last years were hard. A fire destroyed his home in 2003, and he needed hip and heart surgery. Bob Weir and Warren Haynes played a benefit that raised thirty six thousand dollars for him. He died of colon cancer on the eleventh of January 2005. Joey Covington died on the fourth of June 2013, when his car hit a retaining wall on a curve in Palm Springs. Police said alcohol and drugs were not involved. He was sixty seven.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In January 2016 came a strange double blow. Paul Kantner, who had led a revived Jefferson Starship since 1992, died in San Francisco on the twenty eighth of January of multiple organ failure and septic shock after a heart attack. He was seventy four. On the same day, in Oregon, Signe Anderson, also seventy four, died of lung disease. Weeks later the band received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Marty Balin had open heart surgery that year and later sued the hospital, claiming neglect left him with a paralyzed vocal cord and the loss of a thumb and half his tongue. He died in Tampa on the twenty seventh of September 2018, aged seventy six. Drummer John Barbata died in May 2024.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

As of 2026, the surviving members of the classic lineup are Grace Slick, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady. Jorma and Jack still tour as Hot Tuna, a partnership that began in their Washington teens, and Jorma runs the Fur Peace Ranch guitar camp in Ohio. Grace, sober since a stay in rehab in the late 1990s, paints in Malibu and in 2025 joked about forming a punk band. The band got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2022. White Rabbit, which Grace says still pays her bills, keeps turning up in films, from Platoon to The Matrix Resurrections, whose director noted that the Airplane had formed to play a club called the Matrix. Jefferson Airplane remain the band that first carried the San Francisco sound to the world.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around Jefferson Airplane

Marty Balin and Paul Kantner. Balin picked Kantner first, after watching him walk off a folk club stage mid song, and Kantner taught him to roll a joint. They wrote Today and Volunteers together. But Kantner steadily took over the band, and Balin said he was hard headed and would only play his own music. Balin left in 1971, returned for Jefferson Starship's biggest hits, and on Kantner's death called him a hard headed German who worked himself too hard.[1] [2] [3]

Grace Slick and Paul Kantner. Kantner had loved Grace for a long time before her affair with Spencer Dryden ended. By 1969 they were living together, and Rolling Stone called them the psychedelic John and Yoko. They had a daughter, China, in 1971 but chose not to marry. Grace left him in 1975 to marry a roadie, Skip Johnson. After Kantner sued Starship in 1984 she thought of him as Satan, but they reconciled in 1988 through letters to China.[1] [2] [3]

Grace Slick and Spencer Dryden. Grace and the band's drummer were a couple for about two years in the late sixties, and she said she lived with him for a little over a year. She wrote Lather about his thirtieth birthday. The relationship ended in early 1969 as she moved on to Kantner. When Dryden died in 2005 she wrote a tribute quoting her own song, and said it was a pity everyone could not go in their sleep at about one hundred and twenty.[1] [2] [3]

Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady. They met as teenagers in Washington and played together in a band called the Triumphs, with Casady on lead guitar. Jorma brought Jack into the Airplane in 1965, and in 1969 they started Hot Tuna. In the last Airplane years they formed their own camp against Kantner and Slick. They split for a while in the late seventies, but reunited in the eighties, and as of 2026 they are still touring together, more than fifty five years on.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jefferson Airplane and Matthew Katz. Katz became the band's first manager in 1965, luring them with talk of an unreleased Bob Dylan song. Signe Anderson distrusted him so much she only signed with an escape clause. The band fired him in August 1966, and the lawsuits ran until 1987. Balin later produced a rock opera about a star jailed for failing to deliver a hit, drawing on those battles. Katz went on to manage Moby Grape, fought them in court for decades, and died in 2023.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jefferson Airplane and Bill Graham. The Airplane played the first shows Bill Graham ever promoted, and Graham managed them from early 1967. He pushed hard for more touring and more hits. After the uncommercial After Bathing at Baxter's, he demanded a return to the sound of Surrealistic Pillow. In February 1968 Grace Slick told the band that either he went or she did, and Graham was fired. He remained the promoter of the Fillmore shows that defined their era.[1] [2] [3]

Marty Balin and Bill Thompson. Thompson was Balin's friend and roommate, a former San Francisco Chronicle staffer who persuaded the critics Ralph Gleason and John Wasserman to see the band. He became road manager in 1966 and manager in 1968, bought the Fulton Street mansion, set up Grunt Records, and later steered Jefferson Starship. He once said that Marty was the one who started the San Francisco scene.[1] [2] [3]

Jefferson Airplane and Jerry Garcia. Garcia had known Kantner and Kaukonen from the folk circuit. He sat in on Surrealistic Pillow as an unofficial guide, was credited as spiritual advisor, and named the album. He played pedal steel on Volunteers, banjo and guitar on Blows Against the Empire, and the Grateful Dead shared countless bills with the Airplane, from the Human Be-In to free concerts in Montreal. Kantner said Garcia brought his particular madness to the whole project.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Paul Kantner and David Crosby. The two shared a communal house in Venice in their folk days. Crosby gave the Airplane Triad after the Byrds rejected it, wrote Wooden Ships with Kantner and Stephen Stills on his boat in Florida, and sang on Blows Against the Empire. He nicknamed Kantner Baron von Tollbooth and Grace the Chrome Nun, names they used for a 1973 album, and he recommended drummer John Barbata to the band in 1972.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Grace Slick and Marty Balin. Balin founded the band and was its first voice, but once Grace arrived with two top ten hits, Rolling Stone wrote, she stole his public thunder. His share of the songs shrank, and he withdrew. Their relationship stayed friendly. Balin called White Rabbit a masterpiece, and Grace said in 2025 that she had been involved with every man in the band except Marty, adding that she would have said yes to him too.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Jefferson Airplane

• Marty Balin's 1962 solo single featured Glen Campbell and Barney Kessel on guitar and jazz great Milt Jackson on vibes. Years before the Airplane, Balin cut I Specialize in Love for Challenge Records. The session band included Glen Campbell, Barney Kessel, bassist Red Callender and Milt Jackson, with backing vocals by the Blossoms.[1] [2]
• As a child, Marty Balin was diagnosed with autism. Balin, born Martyn Jerel Buchwald in Cincinnati, was diagnosed with autism as a boy. He grew up to found the band, open its nightclub and become one of its two lead voices.[1]
• Manager Matthew Katz won the band over by claiming access to an unreleased Bob Dylan song. Katz told the young band he could get them Lay Down Your Weary Tune, a Dylan song that had not been released. They appointed him manager, a decision that led to more than twenty years of lawsuits.[1] [2]
• The debut album's engineer, Dave Hassinger, was requested by the band because he had worked on the Rolling Stones' Satisfaction. RCA paired the band with producer Tommy Oliver, who had worked with Doris Day. The band asked specifically for engineer Dave Hassinger because of his work on the Stones hit.[1]
• The sleeve of the first album claimed Jack Casady had played with James Brown, which appears to be untrue. The liner notes quote Marty Balin saying Casady carries the band and had played with James Brown. There is no evidence Casady ever backed Brown, though he did play Washington clubs behind acts like Little Anthony and the Imperials.[1]
• Jack Casady's mother was related to Harriet Quimby, a pioneering American aviator. Casady's mother, Mary Virginia Quimby, was a relative of the early aviator Harriet Quimby, and some of her family had been in North America since the sixteen hundreds. A fitting family tree for a member of Jefferson Airplane.[1]
• Jack Casady played bass on Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Chile, and some copies misspell his name. Casady moonlighted widely during his Airplane years. He jammed on stage with Hendrix in 1968 and played on Voodoo Chile from Electric Ladyland, where some pressings credit him as Cassidy.[1]
• Casady owned Alembic bass number 001, the first instrument the company ever made. On Bark, Long John Silver and the live album Thirty Seconds Over Winterland, Casady played a custom Alembic bass that cost four thousand dollars. It was serial number one.[1]
• In his new wave band SVT, Casady taped his fingers together to force himself to play more simply. After Hot Tuna split in the late seventies, Casady joined the new wave band SVT. To strip back his busy style, he taped his fingers together while playing.[1]
• Drummer Spencer Dryden was the half nephew of Charlie Chaplin, and kept it quiet for most of his life. Dryden's father was Chaplin's half brother and worked as his assistant director. Spencer hid the connection so he would not be judged by the name, and Jorma Kaukonen only learned of it shortly before Dryden died.[1] [2]
• Spencer Dryden was recommended to the Airplane by the famous session drummer Earl Palmer. When the band needed a replacement for Skip Spence, Dryden was playing drums in a Hollywood strip club. Earl Palmer, one of the great studio drummers of the era, passed his name to the band's manager.[1]
• Grace Slick's contract with the Great Society was bought out for just seven hundred and fifty dollars. When Grace moved to Jefferson Airplane in the autumn of 1966, her old band's contract was bought out for seven hundred and fifty dollars. She brought White Rabbit and Somebody to Love with her.[1]
• Somebody to Love began life with a very different working title, Mind Full of Bread. Darby Slick started the song while writing a novel in 1962 and finished it after a breakup in 1965. He meant it to be about giving love, not just wanting it.[1]
• Grace Slick once kept her gold record for White Rabbit under the lid of her toilet seat. Slick seemed unimpressed by the song's success. In 1971 she told Rolling Stone the gold single was something for the boys to look at when they used the bathroom.[1]
• After a house fire destroyed almost everything Grace Slick owned, the only thing left was a ceramic white rabbit. In 1993 a fire started by welders working nearby burned down her home and her music memorabilia. A ceramic white rabbit survived. Grace, born in the year of the rabbit, says fans still send her rabbits.[1] [2]
• Marty Balin wanted the Surrealistic Pillow cover tinted blue, but RCA made it pink. The cover photo was taken by Herb Greene in his own dining room. Balin designed the back cover collage and wanted a blue tint, but RCA chose pink, and he ended up liking it.[1]
• Balin said the title 3/5 of a Mile in 10 Seconds came from two random phrases in a newspaper sports page. He spotted three fifths of a mile in one place and ten seconds in another, and simply joined them together.[1]
• The Airplane played a rooftop show in Manhattan two months before the Beatles' rooftop concert, and police shut it down too. In November 1968 they played on the roof of the Schuyler Hotel for a film by Jean Luc Godard. With no permit, police stopped the show, and actor Rip Torn and Marty Balin were among those arrested.[1] [2]
• One Airplane song was written about a fourteen year old fan who later married Israeli ambassador Michael Oren. Young Girl Sunday Blues, written by Kantner and Balin for After Bathing at Baxter's, was about Sally Edelstein, a teenager who came to the band's shows. She later married the historian and diplomat Michael Oren.[1]
• The artist who painted the Baxter's cover, Ron Cobb, saw the original sell at auction for twenty four thousand dollars in 2008. Cobb, a political cartoonist for the Los Angeles Free Press, drew the band as a flying Haight Ashbury house above a black and white landscape of billboards. The cover also inspired a John Hartford song.[1]
• The lyric sheet for Crown of Creation featured Robert F. Kennedy's dog, Brumus. The band had dined with Kennedy at his home in February 1968 after playing his telethon. After his assassination they tried to hold a free memorial show with the Grateful Dead, but police prevented it.[1]
• Robert A. Heinlein told Paul Kantner he was the first person ever to ask permission to use his ideas. Blows Against the Empire borrowed its starship hijack from Heinlein's Methuselah's Children. Kantner wrote to ask first, and Heinlein agreed. The album won the most votes for a Hugo Award in 1971, but voters chose to give no award that year.[1]
• Grunt Records got its name from a joke working title for the Volunteers album. The band's own label, launched with Bark in 1971, took its name from Squat on My Grunt, an early title idea for Volunteers.[1]
• Papa John Creach appeared in a Fritz Lang film with Nat King Cole before joining a psychedelic rock band. Born in 1917, Creach played with Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, worked on an ocean liner for five years, and appeared in The Blue Gardenia before joining the Airplane in 1970.[1] [2]
• Joey Covington recorded a song with Little Richard on piano that has never been released. It was due out in 1992, but was held back over its lyrics during the uproar over Ice T's Cop Killer. Jack Casady reportedly felt Little Richard's piano did not fit.[1] [2]
• Paul Kantner's early motorcycle crash may have saved his life two decades later. In the early sixties he hit a tree head first and needed a plate in his skull. When he had a cerebral hemorrhage in 1980, the old hole helped relieve the pressure, and he recovered without surgery.[1] [2]
• In 1984, Marty Balin forgot the words to The Star Spangled Banner at a San Francisco Giants game and was booed. Balin was invited onto the field at Candlestick Park to sing before a Giants game, lost some of the lyrics, and heard the crowd turn on him.[1]
• China Kantner became the youngest MTV VJ ever when she started at fifteen. The daughter of Grace Slick and Paul Kantner first appeared on MTV as a guest VJ in July 1986, later acted on Home Improvement, and later became a chaplain, working in addiction recovery and with people in hospital.[1] [2]
• In 2006 the new airline Virgin America named its first aircraft Jefferson Airplane. Grace Slick gave a speech at the airline's launch. It was a nice full circle for a band whose name began as a joke.[1]
• John Barbata, the Airplane's last drummer, once turned down an invitation to join the Eagles. While playing with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Barbata was approached by David Geffen about a new band called the Eagles. He later admitted he had never heard of them.[1]
• Jorma Kaukonen's first wife can be heard typing on Janis Joplin's famous 1964 home recordings. Before the Airplane, Jorma accompanied Janis Joplin on acoustic guitar in 1964. The tapes became known as the Typewriter Tapes because Margareta Kaukonen was typing in the background.[1]
• Skip Spence is credited with naming the Doobie Brothers. The Airplane's first drummer, later of Moby Grape, was a guiding figure in the Bay Area scene, and his obituary credits him with naming the Doobie Brothers.[1]
• Grace Slick was the oldest woman to top the Billboard Hot 100 for fourteen years. We Built This City hit number one on the sixteenth of November 1985, just after her forty sixth birthday. She broke her own record with Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now in 1987, and Cher overtook her in 1999.[1] [2]
• The Matrix Resurrections trailer sent White Rabbit back up the charts in 2021. After the trailer used the song, it hit Shazam's top fifty within seventy two hours and reached number eight on Billboard's Rock Digital Song Sales chart, matching its 1967 Hot 100 peak.[1]
• The Airplane's live album Bless Its Pointed Little Head opens with a sound clip from the 1933 film King Kong. The track, called Clergy, was used to introduce the band at Fillmore shows. It is the one Airplane album every member later remembered fondly.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.