Jefferson Airplane Grunts: ‘Gotta Evolution’
For Jefferson Airplane, here in the fall of 1971, six years and a month since that first gig at the Matrix, it’s like the title of the new Hedge & Donna album: Revolution, with a black-felt “X” over the “R.” But in two thin strokes, so that the original whole word is clear — if not more obvious for the masking job.
Manager Bill Thompson is talking evolution, here in the second-floor office of the Jefferson Airplane mansion, about the only room in the house that’s the same, since Grunt Records came into existence — and into 2400 Fulton — to help push Airplane members into yet another era. It is big business now, with Grunt Records — and even a sub-label being thought around, to be called Snort — and a roster of artists headed by Jefferson Airplane and Airplane members as so-called “solo artists” and a lot of ideas on revolutionizing the record industry. And if you can get all six of them together for a group shot these days, you still see a lot of strength, muscle to back up the ideas. Viking-browed Jorma and mum’s-the-mouth Casady — Hot Tuna! Grace and Paul and a Sumo-kicker of a baby girl now named China. Fiddling Papa John Creach, black, bent over and spryer than ever with even an album of his own now cutting. Surfer boy drummer Joey, who still doesn’t seem to fit, yet brought Papa John into the scene and turned a Santana-Tuna jam into one of the most-played tracks on Bark, the new Airplane album, “Pretty As You Feel,” sounding so pretty you’d think Marty Balin was still around.
“August 13th, 1965,” muses Bill Thompson, stroking at his Buffalo Bill-whiskers and flashbacking through his round, wine-tinted glasses. “They had a stand-up bass. It was all acoustic except for Jorma, who had a small amp. Then Paul got a bigger amp, then Jorma got a bigger one than that. Then Paul got a bigger one than that. And then Jack came into the group, and he had two amps …”
Thompson was 24 then, veteran of three years at the San Francisco Chronicle as a copy boy, and he was living with Marty out in the fog (called Sunset) district, on 16th Avenue. “Marty was always an incredible dreamer, ‘I’m gonna start this group,’ he said. ‘It’ll be — five guys and one chick, we’ll do folk music and have electric instruments with it — and we’ll call it folk-rock.'”
From the beginning, the copy boy was the hustler. Even before the Airplane had opened at the Matrix, Thompson got a story into the Sunday Chronicle — by John Wasserman, then second in line behind Ralph J. Gleason — complete with a photo of Balin. Then, “I got Ralph to go down and hear them, and he did a review, a fantastic story. … Then we got mentions in Herb Caen [the most popular gossipist in town], the sports page and the society page. The society editor Frances Moffat knew Grace — Grace was married in Grace Cathedral, did you know that? — and the Airplane played a fol de rol — a society thing MC’d by Danny Thomas. They booed us, but the Chronicle did a big story.”
Thompson soon enough quit the paper to join the band. “They’d just fired their first manager, and they wanted me to talk to the straight press.” Bill did promotion work at an ad agency before the Chronicle. “I’d go to the airport and get their tickets, and the guys and Grace would be carrying their own guitars and stuff.” And between his “Jefferson Airplane Loves You” bumper strips and the group’s breakthrough appearances at the Monterey Jazz and Berkeley Folk festivals, the dream came true. Marty designing one of the first ballroom posters; the Airplane being the first out of the pack with a big record contract, the first to run their own national tour, the first to say this and that on their records, and now the first San Francisco group to have their own major independent record label, backed by a lot of money from RCA and a lot of energy and muscle — the group shot, flex-flex.
Now Bill Thompson, former roadie, is Head of Business Affairs for the new dream machine. And Marty Balin, the founder, is gone. And Signe Toly Anderson, their first chick singer, is in Oregon with her baby. And Grace Slick is a mother for the first time, living with father Paul and seven-month-old China in Marin County by the ocean, in a house with a studio in the basement for Kantner and Slick’s solo and duet grunts, with a swimming pool whose redwood perimeter will take another six months to polish, lay down and finish; with a geodesic dome for meditation and vocals; with Japanese GBC Mini TV cameras watching the crib and the garage; with a beaming living room where Paul — who’s off coke now, by the way — is reworking the dividing wall between the front area and the house proper, and … tear down what wall? Mother-what?
Bill Thompson is talking about how the Airplane and San Francisco have affected music and the business, and it’s difficult, of course, to just sum it all up in one sentence. But, he tries, “Since the Beatles, people started listening to the music, and there are people all over the world whose consciousness is changing. And you keep learning. For one thing, you learn that you can’t change people by beating them over the head, or bombing, or whatever. That’s the old style of revolution. You try it, it fails, you move on to something else.”
Up against the wa-all, muther-FUC-ker …
“For a while, I thought that was the way …” Thompson tries to fish back a little farther, for an analogy. “Like in Animal Farm … wasn’t it … when the pigs took over the farm … and after a while you couldn’t tell the difference between how the pigs ran it and the old rulers.”
Couple of weeks ago, Public Broadcast Service reran the Airplane/Dead/Santana night at the Family Dog on the Great Highway, one of two TV specials on San Francisco rock. The other, also featuring the Airplane, was called Go Ride the Music.
“Well, music,” says Thompson. “Music’s still the thing …”