Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,325

This is the grave of Paul Kantner.

Born in 1941 in San Francisco….oh heck, who cares about any of this early bio info here? Kantner was a founding member of Jefferson Airplane and this is all that matters about him. He was already into the burgeoning counterculture by 1963 or so and lived with David Crosby in a communal house in Los Angeles for awhile, where I am sure nothing but the most healthy behaviors took place.

Kantner met Marty Balin in 1965 and they agreed to found a new band, which was Jefferson Airplane of course. It took awhile for the group to really come together, but by late 66, they had Jorma Kaukonen on lead guitar and then after an initial female singer that didn’t really work out, Grace Slick on vocals. Obviously, Slick is the reason they got famous. She was just a great rock singer. Kantner did write a lot of the songs though. He was into sci fi and into drugs and it was the late 60s, so it all kinda worked I guess. In truth, this band was so unstable that I have trouble calling them particularly good most of the time, especially after Surrealistic Pillow, which does deserve its reputation as a classic.

But the drugs, oh god, did Kantner and Slick and the rest of the band like drugs. All of these people developed gigantic egos and started to hate each other. It was a toxic deal, kinda like their livers. The band started to fall apart. Kantner started a little side project called Jefferson Starship that was initially meant to be something totally different. The first album had Jerry Garcia on it for god’s sake! This was Blows Against the Empire. At this point, he and Slick started to have an affair and they had a child together. It included Kantner’s ridiculous sci-fi lyrics and did pretty well commercially.

In any case, Jefferson Starship became the successor to Jefferson Airplane after Jorma and Jack Casady left to form Hot Tuna. In working up this post, I am bit surprised to see how successful the early Jefferson Starship albums were. In the modern consciousness, these albums are completely lost. Maybe people who were around in the mid 70s are still listening to them, but I have literally never even heard of any of these albums. Of all the 70s music that gets talked about today among music fans, I have never seen a single reference to any of this. Red Octopus and Spitfire are among these albums. I await commenters making claims that actually these are extremely important albums in rock and roll history and thus all the dozens of huge music fans my age and younger over the last three decades are obviously wrong.

But let’s just say that Kantner and Slick were not exactly living healthy lives and by the late 70s this seriously started to catch up with them. Slick left Kantner in 1975 for one of their roadies (ouch). He then kicked out of the band a couple of years later because she was such a drunk that she wasn’t able to perform during multiple shows. Then Kantner had a cerebral hemorrhage in 1980 that should have killed him, but he survived. That incidentally had nothing to do with his drug use. Just bad luck. Jefferson Starship managed to sort of stay around during these years, having an occasional album do OK. Kantner, to his credit I suppose, was more open to changing his musical style than a lot of the people of his scene. Mercifully, he had enough before “We Built This City” in the mid-80s, which has a strong argument for the worst song ever recorded. By then, Kantner had left the group saying it was too far away from its countercultural roots and boy that was true. The band continued as Starship for that abomination of a song. Glad Kantner can’t be blamed for that garbage.

Kantner kept playing, even if there was limited commercial success in any of his projects. He had a project called KBC Band with Marty Balin and Cassady and they recorded an album. He also started playing with Hot Tuna again after initially occasionally doing so at the beginning of that band. The Airplane even got back together for a reunion album, though that was it. Most of this work by this time was basically Boomer nostalgia and completely forgettable, but hey, I can’t blame anyone for making a living off people who think that 1967 was the peak of American music because they never listen to bands formed after 1975.

By 2015, Kantner’s health was collapsing. He had heart issues and all those years of drugs most certainly didn’t suggest a long life. Interestingly, he did not become a heavy drinker until later in life and was well known for most avoiding alcohol in the days of his stardom. But other drugs, well……. Plus when he did get into booze, it was vodka, which I mean c’mon man. He died in 2016, at the age of 74, after a heart attack. If anything, his legacy was underrated because most everyone thought of Slick or Jorma as the real movers behind the Jefferson Airplane and while they are most certainly important, so was Kantner.

Paul Kantner is buried in Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery, Colma, California.

If you would like this series to visit more 60s and 70s rockers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Lord knows enough of them died early enough. Jimi Hendrix is in Renton, Washington and Ronnie Van Zant is in Jacksonville, Florida. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.