Jefferson Airplane/Starship

Formed in 1965, Jefferson Airplane was the most commercially successful band to come out of San Francisco in the mid-to late 1960s. Along with contemporaries like the Grateful Dead, they pioneered a blend of folk, blues, and psychedelia to play what became known as West Coast Rock. Their presence at some of the 1960s' defining cultural moments attests to their status as one of the key bands of this era.

While Jefferson Airplane's eclectic sound could be traced to folk music and the blues, it also signaled significant departures from such generic origins, with its distorted, extended guitar improvisations and lyrics which referred to altered states of consciousness and counter-cultural concerns. As Time pointed out in June 1967, what became known as the San Francisco sound "encompasses everything from blue-grass to Indian ragas, from Bach to jug-band music—often within the framework of a single song."

Bay Area artists like Jefferson Airplane only could have flourished in historically tolerant San Francisco and in close proximity to the University of California campus at Berkeley. Living communally in the hippie epicenter of Haight-Ashbury, the band drew much of its support and attitude from this politically active and culturally experimental milieu. Sharing in their audience's background, values, and choice of chemical stimulants, the symbiosis between the group and their fans was typical of an initially democratic musical scene. As Airplane guitarist Paul Kantner himself acknowledged, "it was like a party. The audience often far overshadowed any of the bands, and the distance between the two was not that great. Grace [Slick] used to say that the stage was just the least crowded place to stand."

Jefferson Airplane was the first of the San Francisco bands to sign for a major record label. Their debut album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off (1966) was moderately successful. However, it was not until original vocalist Signe Anderson departed and was replaced by Grace Slick that the band achieved wider acclaim and commercial success. Slick left rival band The Great Society to join the Airplane, and significantly brought two of their songs with her—the anti-romantic love song "Somebody to Love" and the trippy "White Rabbit." These tracks subsequently became the first of the group's top ten hits and featured on the breakthrough album Surrealistic Pillow (1967), which stayed in the Billboard top ten for most of what became known as the "Summer of Love."

The counterculture was built around rock music, which expressed its values and acted as a powerful recruiting vehicle for the movement. In January 1967, Jefferson Airplane had played at a counter-cultural gathering christened the "Human Be-In" alongside the poets Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Later in the same year they appeared at the nation's first national rock festival in Monterey, which drew an audience in excess of 200,000. While this event also was billed as a counter-cultural happening—"three days of music, love, and flowers"—it was also undeniably a shop-window for profit-making talent. As Jon Landau wrote, Monterey witnessed an "underground culture at [the] point of transformation into mass culture."

Subsequent late 1960s recordings consolidated the band's commercial appeal. In 1969, they appeared at Woodstock, an event which confirmed that rock music was now big business and that any counter-cultural politics it might espouse had taken a backseat to hippie chic. In December of that same year Jefferson Airplane performed at Altamont—an event mythologized as symbolic of the death of the decade's youthful optimism. While the Rolling Stones played "Sympathy for the Devil," a number of Hells Angels murdered a black spectator, Meredith Hunter, and later attacked Airplane member Marty Balin when he tried to help another black youth. For Jon Landau, "Altamont showed that something had been lost that could not be regained."

In recognition of this shift in mood, the band released the angrier, more explicitly political album Volunteers (1969). Its lyrical and musical aggression channeled the frustration and outbursts of violence that characterized the tail end of the 1960s. In "We Can Be Together" the group called on listeners to unite and overthrow the "dangerous, dirty and dumb" policies of the Establishment, and screamed "Up against the wall, motherfuckers." Volunteerswas a powerful statement about post-Chicago 1968, Vietnam-embroiled America.

By the early 1970s any lingering idealism in both the Bay Area music scene and the counter-cultural movement that it fed and served had evaporated. During this period, founder member Marty Balin left and the band released two more studio albums and a live set, the last release to bear the Jefferson Airplane name.

The 1970s and 1980s were marked by personnel changes and shifts in musical style. Under the creative control of Kantner and Slick the band evolved into Jefferson Starship. Balin's return in 1975 coincided with a revival in the band's commercial fortunes. However, both Slick and Balin (again) left in 1978, and 1979's album Freedom from Point Zero saw the band move towards a hard rock formula suited to the lucrative stadium market. Detoxed and dried-out, Grace Slick returned to the lineup in the early 1980s, and a now Kantner-less Starship emerged with a series of MTV-friendly hits such as the self-mythologizing "We Built This City" and the anodyne "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now." Things turned full circle in 1989, when Grace Slick left Starship and joined up with the rest of the original lineup to resurrect Jefferson Airplane.

It has become impossible to separate West Coast Rock from the counter-culture. This was ably demonstrated when "White Rabbit" was memorably featured in Oliver Stone's Vietnam movie Platoon (1986), in which it functioned as audio shorthand for a specific cultural moment. As rock critic Robert Palmer has pointed out, "behind the media-friendly facade of peace, love, and flowers, the sixties were a period of violence, conflict, and paranoia." The story of Jefferson Airplane demonstrates this tension.

—Simon Philo

Further Reading:

Friedlander, Paul. Rock and Roll: A Social History. Boulder, Westview, 1996.

Gillett, Charlie. The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll, London, Souvenir Press, 1983.

Gleason, Ralph. The Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound. New York, Ballantine, 1969.

Landau, Jon. "It's Too Late to Stop Now." The Penguin Book of Rock and Roll Writing, edited by Clinton Heylin. London, Penguin, 1993.

Palmer, Robert. Dancing in the Street: A Rock and Roll History. London, BBC Books, 1996.

Storey, John. "Rockin' Hegemony: West Coast Rock and Amerika's War in Vietnam." Tell Me Lies about Vietnam, edited by Jeffrey Walsh and Alf Louvre. Open University Press, 1988.