CODA (noun): 1. a concluding musical passage typically forming an addition to the basic structure; 2. a concluding event, remark, or section.
Fleetwood Mac looks like the Brady Bunch compared to Jefferson Airplane’s decades of fighting and fucking. They loved and hated each other into becoming and re-becoming seemingly endless incarnations of themselves, only some of which I have the patience to figure out and the space to recount. One family tree I found online lists a dozen incarnations of just Jefferson Airplane just from the years 1965-1972, with no less than 16 different musicians filtering in and out. And several more separate bands were destined to spin off from the original. What follows is a highly abridged Annotated Jefferson Airplane, sans the footnotes.
In 1969, Grace Slick began having an affair with band mate Paul Kantner. She finally divorced husband Jerry Slick in 1971; by then she was pregnant with Kantner’s child. Now an established artist, she kept the surname Slick, but named her daughter China Wing-Kantner.
The group took a hiatus in 1970, but many members continued to work with each other on various side projects. That year, Kantner teamed with several studio musicians and select members of Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Crosby, Stills and Nash. The collective was later dubbed the Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra. Its long, joint sessions would eventually result in several albums by several artists. The first record to come from it was 1970’s Blows Against the Empire, attributed to Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship. It went gold and, interestingly, was nominated for a Hugo Award, the premier prize in science fiction literature.
The next year, Kantner and Slick released Sunfighter, which featured a picture of their new baby daughter on the cover, although the title song was actually dedicated to Jefferson Airplane band mate Marty Balin. The already sprawling roster of players now expanded to include the Tower of Power horn section and the Edwin Hawkins Singers of African American gospel fame.
Meanwhile, Jefferson Airplane’s Jorma Kaukonen (guitar) and Jack Cassady (bass) had teamed up to do their own thing. Childhood friends from Washington, D.C., they now formed a band called Hot Tuna. Initially, other Airplane members played with them. However, by 1972 Hot Tuna was established as their independent project, and largely devoid of other Airplaners. Over the next four-plus decades, Kaukonen and Cassady played and recorded as Hot Tuna, sometimes just the two of them, but mostly with a periodically shifting cast of musicians.
Jefferson Airplane put out its final album in 1972. The following year, Slick and Kantner released Baron von Tollbooth & the Chrome Nun, which were the nicknames David Crosby had bestowed upon them. In addition to again featuring the Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra musicians, all of the now-former members of Jefferson Airplane also contributed, and the Pointer Sisters sang backup.
In 1974, Grace Slick released her first solo album, Manhole (this title alone is enough to make her my personal hero), which included the ribald “Better Lying Down.” That same year, Kantner and Slick firmed up a new permanent band and resuscitated the name Jefferson Starship.
At first, Jefferson Starship was essentially Jefferson Airplane minus Cassady and Kaukonen, and rounded out by a few newcomers. They angled for, and found, commercial success by forsaking Airplane’s psychedelia for more current, mainstream sounds. “(If Only You Believe in) Miracles” was an early pop hit. However, in the decades to come, the band’s roster would morph incessantly amid the tumult of drug abuse, tortured personal relationships, corporate pressures, and legal actions.
No longer with Kantner, in 1976 Grace Slick married the band’s lighting designer. By 1978, her raging alcoholism had become unmanageable. She got too inebriated to perform a concert in Germany. The following night at the makeup show, she incited a riot by drunkenly cursing and taunting the audience about World War II. She was out, and singer Mickey Thomas took over lead vocals.
Towards the end of that year, Jefferson Starship, undoubtedly chosen for their name alone, contributed a song to the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special television show. It’s hard to explain just how bad the show was. It’s enough to make you pine for Jar Jar Binks. For the Jefferson Starship number, Mickey Thomas sang into a microphone that looks like a purple light saber, while Art Carney pantomimed and danced. The show aired only once, on my 11th birthday. It was so universally reviled that a disgraced George Lucas tried to bury it; the special was never rebroadcast, or released for sale or rent. But of course nothing can hide from the internet. Uploaded in 2015, it has now been viewed millions of times.
Around this time, Jefferson Starship remade itself to get in line with the arena rock sound that dominated rock radio stations during the late 70s. It worked. In 1979 they scored a hit with “Jane.” But the band was increasingly unstable. Slick returned in 1981 and they unapologetically pivoted back to Top 40 pop. They had another hit, “Find Your Way Back,” but soon she was gone again.
The shakeups continued. By 1984, Marty Balin had left, and Kantner was the last remaining member from the original Jefferson Airplane. Fed up with Jefferson Starship’s increasingly poppy sound, he stole the master tapes for their next album, and held them hostage in the trunk of his car. Shortly thereafter, he quit and sued the band to get control of its name. An out of court settlement decreed that the no one could use “Jefferson” or “Airplane” in a band name without the unanimous consent of five original core members.
What was left then? A group called simply Starship, which had no original members of Jefferson Airplane or Jefferson Starship. A product of the corporate music industry, they brought in a high powered producer and purchased songs from professional writers (including Michael Bolton and Elton John’s longtime lyricist Bernie Taupin). Continually tinkering with the lineup, none other than Grace Slick was again soon back in the fold.
Starship’s first album, Knee Deep in Hoopla (1985), was a monster. It went platinum and
spawned two #1 hits: the decidedly non-rockin’ “We Built this City (On Rock and Roll)” and the knee deep in 80s synth-pop ballad “Sara.” You could practically smell the cocaine. In 1987 they issued another chart topper with Slick, “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” for the soundtrack to the film Mannequin. Then the hits dried up.
Grace Slick left Starship in 1989, and joined her old fellow alums for a Jefferson Airplane reunion album and tour. Afterwards, Slick largely retired from music, and turned her attention to drawing and painting, decreeing that “all rock and rollers over the age of 50 look stupid and should retire.” I can never forgive her for “We Built this City” (God help me if that ever gets stuck in my head), but she’s probably right about that last bit.
The following year, guitarist Craig Chaquico, the last remaining holdover from Jefferson Starship, quit Starship. But the bastard descendant of Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship, Starship was still being nurtured at the music industry’s teat. As of this writing, 26 different people have been official members of Starship at one time or another
Meanwhile, in 1992, Kantner and Chaquico reformed Jefferson Starship. Original Jefferson Airplane members filtered in and out of it for a while. Kantner continued to lead them until his death in 2016. Undeterred, Jefferson Starship followed Starship’s corporate zombie model, continuing to tour with no original members from either Jefferson Airplane or Jefferson Starship. In 2017, Chaquico sued Jefferson Starship. He lost. To date, 27 different musicians have been, at one time or another, officially listed as members of Jefferson Starship.
Nothing remains of Jefferson Airplane save for records and memories. But some of the many things it became, at least for now, still live on. Cassady and Kaukonen, now pushing 80, still tour with ever changing incarnations of Hot Tuna. And after being many things, Jefferson Starship and Starship are both still something. Certainly not Jefferson Airplane, and not even really themselves anymore, they exist, at least in name, as lingering reminders of the many things that Jefferson Airplane once became, even as it is no more.
