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Winter 2021

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Jefferson Airplane Concert Pushed the 1970 Limits of TCU

The band rocked on campus and caused a stir. But maybe that was the point.

Got a revolution. Got to revolution. One generation got old. One generation got soul.

Jefferson Airplane, with hits including “Volunteers,” “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit,” played alongside The Who, Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin at 1969’s Woodstock festival.

A key player in the psychedelic rock music movement of the 1960s and ’70s, Jefferson Airplane was a leading voice in the counterculture zeitgeist.

Meanwhile, hippie vibes had wafted over to TCU. Sideburns and miniskirts speckled campus, and student activists were gaining a voice. They started questioning the in loco parentis stance of the university’s administration, meaning they challenged the idea that TCU should assume a parental role and determine proper student decorum.

Dee Simpson ’71 (MS ’74), a self-proclaimed provocateur, made it his mission to bring influential performers to campus. He was chair of the entertainment committee that landed the on-campus Jefferson Airplane concert in 1970.

Simpson, then a senior history and political science major, didn’t elaborate on the band’s political leanings with the administration. “I imagine I was careful with how much I revealed,” he said.

The band’s 1969 Volunteers album “was pretty out there,” said Simpson, a lobbyist who recently worked in his 22nd session with the Texas Legislature. With anti-war lyrics and ample profanity, the LP went gold. “They were essentially, in their way, writing anthems for armed revolution,” he said.

Posters advertised the concert, helping to draw a crowd of more than 6,500. Dee Simpson, the entertainment committee chair, kept low-key about the rock group in dealings with the administration. Courtesy of Dee Simpson

Though the university did an excellent job with formal cultural events such as dance and theatre performances, Simpson said, TCU “didn’t know what to do with the emerging youth culture issues.”

Simpson said he wanted to shake things up.

A Fort Worth-based music promotion group, Middle Earth, had won the bid to host a Jefferson Airplane concert. The company just needed a venue. Will Rogers Auditorium and the Tarrant County Convention Center were off the table, leaving TCU’s Daniel-Meyer Coliseum as the only available venue with the size and acoustics to satisfy the Airplane.

Middle Earth forged a deal with TCU and Simpson.

On Sunday, Nov. 1, 1970, Space Opera warmed up the crowd of 6,500-plus, which included about 1,000 students, according to The Skiff . Simpson said he remembers more students in attendance than the number reported by the student newspaper.

Simpson and the entertainment committee hired a dozen students, including Harry Paul Ally ’72, then a junior painting major, to help manage crowd control.

“I remember people throwing candy at us,” Ally said, recalling a playful mood. “Then the Airplane came on stage and it didn’t matter — everyone just rushed up to the front of the stage. There was nothing we could do.”

At one point during the show, Simpson said, a Dallas-Fort Worth radio disc jockey took the stage and announced that police were not at the concert. He pointed to the silver and purple TCU-branded ashtrays.

“You can smoke your joints, but leave some for the maintenance staff,” Simpson recalled him saying.

For more than three hours the audience rocked with Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna, the band’s side project that gave pregnant vocalist Grace Slick a break. Shifting psychedelic scenes were projected onto the basketball arena’s walls.

“I remember it being fun and peaceful,” said Ally, now an artist in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

But by the end of the week, buzz around campus grew, and Simpson had resigned from the student chair position. Rumor was marijuana smokers and underage drinkers (all alleged to be non-TCU students) quashed the possibility of future university-sponsored rock concerts.

The Nov. 10 issue of The Skiff featured a picture of Jefferson Airplane guitarist Paul Kantner, swastika around his neck, and bassist Jack Casady above the headline “Question: Is This ‘Wholesome’ Entertainment?”

Shirley Farrell ’71, the student paper’s editor in chief, detailed the concert complaints. “The very enthusiasm begged for in the past may bring a veritable shutdown of certain shows,” she wrote.

The Nov. 10, 1970, cover of The Skiff featured a nearly full-page image of Jefferson Airplane and the deadline “Question: Is This ‘Wholesome’ Entertainment?” Courtesy of TCU Special Collections

On the same page as the article: a National Bible Week advertisement featuring Sonny and Cher and the words, “Look who reads the Bible.”

TCU athletic director Abe Martin ’32 (MEd ’45) told The Skiff he worried about Daniel-Meyer Coliseum, where the Horned Frogs played basketball. He noted chewing gum, beer cans and liquor bottles left behind by concertgoers.

Numerous students, including Ally, wrote letters to the editor expressing their views and definitions of “wholesome.”

“It is also my conviction that for a university to provide its students with a sound, well-rounded education, social functions such as rock concerts are an essential facet of education,” Ally wrote.

Administrators indeed restricted entertainment funds, but TCU students wanted more rock. A year after the Airplane show, the Grateful Dead played at Daniel-Meyer. The only hiccup in the latter event was a minor change in the start time so the first-semester women could be home by midnight curfew.

Simpson said the Jefferson Airplane concert served its purpose. “Yes, we were trying to have some fun. Yes, we made a couple mistakes — we didn’t know what the hell we were doing,” he said. “But it was a good thing. Those kids got to hear some good music, and they got to see a different world through music.”

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Nice rock blast from the past–thanks. But it’s Jorma Kaukonen on guitar in the photo with Jack Casady, not Paul Kantner.

The picture above from the Nov. 10, 1970 cover of The Skiff is not Paul Kantner and Jack Cassidy but rather of Jorma Kaukonen, lead guitar player, and Jack Cassidy. Paul Kantner typically played rhythm guitar. The “swastika” looks to be something printed on his t-shirt rather than “around his neck”.

I attended this show as a 13 year old 8th grader from Arlington. Local boys Space Opera were just flat mesmerizing. Grace Slick sang just a few songs because she was 7 months pregnant. Jorma, Jack, and Papa John were able to show off their talent with extended jams because of that.

That’s a Hindu swastika around Jorma’s neck. He also wore it at Woodstock. He has clarified that it represented Hinduism, not Nazism, but still apologized for it.

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The epic true story of Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane

Say hello to Grace Slick: Lover to Morrison. Friend of Joplin. Arrested more times than Lemmy. Took more drugs than Winehouse. Mouth like a trucker

Psych-rock legend Grace Slick is in the middle of telling us a story. It's Chicago Auditorium, 1973. Jefferson Airplane are tuning up. Slick, better known as their singer, exchanges banter with her home-town crowd. “I’m getting ready to sing. Some guy in the audience shouts: ‘Hey Gracie! Take off your chastity belt!’ I look directly at him and say: ‘Hey, I don’t even wear underpants.’ I pull my skirt up for a beaver shot, and the audience explodes with laughter. I can hear the guys in the band behind me muttering: ‘Oh, Jesus.’”

The story, like most of the tales that surround the legendary pin-up girl for the Summer of Love, isn’t apocryphal. Slick used it to open her autobiography Somebody To Love? A Rock And Roll Memoir , one of the funniest accounts of the whole West Coast psychedelic extravaganza ever written. “I shaved my legs, but I talked like a truck driver,” she said. She was the bohemian who defined a generation in the USA. And she had, as Patti Smith has noted, dark violet eyes like Elizabeth Taylor.

Four decades later, the poster girl for the Monterey and Woodstock kids is as candid as ever. Unrepentant for the most part, this is a woman who survived years of drug and alcohol abuse, has been arrested on numerous occasions (mostly for drunk driving, but once for pointing an unloaded gun at a police officer answering a domestic disturbance call), and has done her best to uphold her end for the baby-booming permissive society’s war against The Man. 

She once turned up at the White House for an informal party hosted by Tricia Nixon, hippie-loving daughter of then president Richard Nixon (Grace and Tricia were alumnae of the prestigious Finch College finishing school in New York). Grace had a gift in her bag – she was carrying a stash of powdered LSD, which she intended to slip into Tricky Dicky’s vodka martini. Unfortunately, she was turned away at the gates by security once they realised she’d brought along Abbie Hoffman, who was co-founder of the anarchic Yippies, as well as being high on the CIA’s Most Wanted list.

Luckily for the authorities, Grace Slick has left the music business, although she appeared at a post-9/11 benefit for NYC firemen – wearing a burqa – and wrote a song for victims of the New Orleans oil spill. Today she leads a relatively quiet life in Malibu, a paradise for well-heeled rockers of a certain age. “There’s a fuzz on the ocean today so I can’t see my neighbours,” she says. “Most of them are famous, but my friends aren’t. My best friends are a former air stewardess and a caterer. The only famous person I know is David Crosby . We’ve rescued each other numerous times for drug-related problems but we’ve been sober for a long time now.”

Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane: The beginning

Grace Slick had been earmarked to join Jefferson Airplane in 1966 as the replacement for the band’s original female singer, Signe Anderson, who had just given birth to daughter Lilith. The former model’s foghorn vocals, enormous charisma and drop-dead beauty aside, Slick gave the Airplane their biggest hit songs. Somebody To Love , written by her brother-in-law Darby (she was married to drummer Jerry Slick) and sung by Grace in her previous band the Great! Society, was already a Bay Area smash. Adopted by the Airplane, it became the West Coast anthem. Grace’s own White Rabbit , a strident combination of bastardised Spanish bolero rhythm and psychedelic lyrics paraphrased from Lewis Carroll’s book Alice In Wonderland , confirmed her position as the Acid Queen of Haight Ashbury.

“I wrote that after taking LSD and listening to Miles Davis ’s Sketches Of Spain album for 24 hours. It was going to be called Feed Your Head . [Airplane guitarist/singer] Paul Kantner said: ‘Sing that Arabic jamming thing you do.’”

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Marty Balin was ambivalent towards his new fellow singer – he was firmly in the ‘keep Anderson’ camp. Despite Jefferson Airplane’s string of classic albums – Surrealistic Pillow , After Bathing At Baxter’s , Crown Of Creation , the live Bless Its Pointed Little Head and the ‘up against the wall, motherfuckers’ epic Volunteers – the pair prowled around each other, on stage and off.

“Marty was never very communicative, which is odd when you’re singing duets. Maybe he was jealous of me ‘cos I was so fabulous,” she laughs. “He’s the only one [of the band] I never speak to anymore. Jack Casady, Jorma Kaukonen, Paul Kantner – anyone who’s alive is fine. Not Marty. His wife calls me once a year – when she’s drunk.”

Slick made her live debut with the Airplane at the Fillmore auditorium in San Francisco on October 16, the day after Signe’s farewell speech to her fans at the same venue: “I want you all to wear smiles and daisies and box balloons. I love you all. Thank you and goodbye.”

Marty Balin gave Anderson flowers. The band’s manager and promoter, Bill Graham, led a standing ovation. Many in the audience wept.

Rather than make an anonymous backstage entrance, Slick toughed it out and queued up with the San Franciscan faithful. They marvelled at her attire – she was modelling at the time – a chic striped silk vest and a hip-hugging mod herringbone skirt. “Clothes were fun and I had some good stuff. I wore the same clothes on the street as on the stage. I got a lot from thrift shops in the Haight.”

Undoubtedly stylish, Slick provided a fashion template, especially when she started sporting a Girl Scout uniform. “Most of the bands looked pretty sharp, apart from the Grateful Dead who walked around in jeans and T-shirts,” she says. “The Charlatans were the best. They wore Western riverboat gambler suits. The Brits were different. I was invited with Kantner to meet Mick Jagger at his Chelsea home to discuss the Altamont concert. I was scared because I thought we were going to walk into an orgy. I’m not against orgies, but I’m not a good multi-tasker. I like one man, one child, one house and one car. Everything else is too confusing. There was no orgy. Jagger’s house was like my parents’. He had oriental rugs, Louis XIV furniture. He was in a three-piece suit. He gave us tea; didn’t offer liquor, didn’t proffer drugs. This was disappointing. We had a formal chat and Altamont was arranged – we would support the Rolling Stones.”

The now infamous Altamont concert was a disaster. Slick knew it was starting to get ugly when the Hells Angels invaded the stage during the Airplane’s set: “Marty Balin told ’em to fuck off and they backed down a bit.”

Not much, though. According to Balin, he was rushed by several Angels with pool cues. “Boom! I got knocked out and woke up with boot tattoos all over my body. The only person who said anything to me was Jorma Kaukonen: ‘You’re a crazy motherfucker.’ And here’s a guy who travels with machineguns, knives, macho bullshit lead guitarist crap.”

Back to Grace: “We started watching the Stones but decided to leave in a hurry. We were in our helicopter, looking down, and Kantner says: ‘I think they’re beating a man to death down there.’”

Paul Kantner would become Grace’s third Airplane sleeping partner, and father of her daughter China. Grace had joined the band initially “because I wanted to have an affair with bassist Jack Casady. I love bass players, and he’s the best.”

After Jack, she began a relationship with drummer Spencer Dryden. Guitarist Jorma Kaukonen was more like a brother. He once pulled her from the smouldering wreckage of a sports car after she’d crashed it into the Golden Gate Bridge. Marty was less chivalrous. “Did I sleep with her? I wouldn’t even let her give me head.”

Grace Slick: "The Airplane let me sing. God bless America for that"

In a male-dominated environment, Grace stood out. She was the poster girl for the Monterey and Woodstock era but never saw herself as an icon. “Women have always been singers. Female Supreme Court judges, that’s impressive. I just thought I was a singer – not Bach or Mozart or Handel. ‘Course, if we were all singers we’d be in terrible shape. Where would the farmers be? The Airplane let me sing. God bless America for that.”

Sexism wasn’t on her agenda – she had just as much fun as the guys. “I pretty much nailed anybody that was handy,” she once claimed. “My only regret is that I didn’t get Jimi Hendrix or Peter O’Toole.”

Jim Morrison was another matter, though. During the legendary Doors /Airplane European tour of 1968, she ended up in Morrison’s bedroom at the Belgravia Hotel, where they romped around and covered each other with strawberries and other courtesy hotel fruit. “Jim was a well-built boy,” Grace remembered. “Larger than average.” But it was just the once, she sighs. “When I left I said: ‘Call me if you want.’ And he never did. So apparently I’m a terrible lay.”

Grace got her own back. Before the concert in Amsterdam, the Airplane purchased a slab of Lebanese Gold hashish, which they offered to Morrison to nibble. Greedily, he ate a huge chunk. Ray Manzarek remembers him stumbling on stage during the Airplane’s set. “Jim started singing with Grace and hugging her. Then he danced off the stage, went back into the dressing room and passed out.”

Slick chuckles. “I liked Jim. Most women did. He was gorgeous, but he was so screwy – half the time you couldn’t talk to him. He used himself as a human guinea pig, see how far you can push the human brain. I remember coming back from an Airplane gig in 1967 and going to the Tropicana Motel with Kantner, and Morrison was in the hallway, goofy on acid, stark naked and barking like a dog. Paul just stepped over him and went into his room.”

Befitting the times, the Airplane took prodigious amounts of drugs of all sorts. “Absolutely,” Slick says. “Personally I never freaked out on acid. I didn’t think it could affect you unless you had psychological problems to begin with, and I didn’t.”

She can recall most of her drug episodes. “When I want my drugs, I want them now. Alcohol was a downfall because it was easier to get. My favourite drug was Quaaludes [depressants] but you had to beg to get those. Sometimes they gave you Valium, but it took days to get off those. They took Quaaludes off the market. Stupid. They’re great if you’re a speed freak or an alcohol and coke user. Everybody loved ’em. I did because they didn’t make me angry like alcohol does. I didn’t drive funny and get arrested. I felt invincible and good but they didn’t turn me into a complete jerk. I’ve got a strong constitution, apparently. For example, it takes a lot of hospital morphine to make me pass out. Not me, doc. Give me Quaaludes and I’m feelin’ fine.”

Evidently a force of nature, Slick regularly performed live with the Airplane while under the influence. “Not sure I’d recommend that to everyone,” she says, “because taking drugs and working is gnarly. The band played in Fargo, North Dakota, once and our tour manager had a plastic box full of drugs in various compartments – powders and pills. We all took a nail full of what we thought was cocaine but turned out to be acid. After 15 minutes I was so tripped out I stopped singing and playing piano and listened to Jack Casady’s bass.

“The way I saw it was this: I’m young, healthy, I’m not miserable, I can take all the drugs I want, screw whoever I want, ‘cos they don’t have Aids yet, and I’m being paid to travel all over the world and dress any way I want. Come on! We were rock’n’rollers, not bankers.”

Those who saw Grace Slick in her pomp still put her on a pedestal. Writer and scenester Eve Babitz – the Dorothy Parker of the West Coast scene – recalls: “Grace had a Napoleon complex because she’s kind of short, which pissed her off. But she was certainly gorgeous and she expanded to fill a stage. You couldn’t escape her. She got on the cover of Life magazine wearing her Girl Scout uniform, which seemed amazing at the time. She could still get into it because, like everyone else on the West Coast rock scene in 1966, she was snorting acid, doing speed and uppers, so she didn’t eat. That’s how Jim Morrison stayed so skinny. People only got fat when they discovered cocaine.

“Grace always thought she was ugly,” says Babitz. “I remember she wore a white Native American Indian outfit at Woodstock, and she hated the photos so much she tried to stop the Airplane footage being used in the film.”

In fact, the Airplane’s Woodstock performance was almost up there with Hendrix’s version of The Star Spangled Banner . They came on at daybreak on the Sunday, August 17, just after The Who . Slick looked at the huge crowd in awe before telling them: “You’ve heard the heavy groups, now you will see morning maniac music. Believe me. Yeah, it’s a new dawn.”

As epic as such moments were, she prefers her more mundane account. “I was wearing feathers and shells and this white dress. Took ages to get it looking right. So while the rest of the band were playing pool and getting fucked up in the hotel, I was trying on my accessories. I wanted to look good. I thought I was hot. But then later someone says: ‘Damn. Why didn’t she look into a mirror before she went on?’”

Why worry? The Airplane had released five gold albums in three years. Grace Slick was a superstar. West Coast archivist Alec Palao wrote: “More than anyone else, she was the most original and unique talent to emerge from the whole San Francisco 1960s milieu.”

For Grace, “it was all a hoot. The first LP I did with the Airplane, Surrealistic Pillow , was easy. We went into RCA’s Hollywood studios, where they’d recorded Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones . It had a wooden floor. We put up our four huge Altec speakers and rocked. We had complete artistic control. RCA never told us what to do because we put arses on seats, and the producer, Rick Jarrard, was always drunk, so he didn’t interfere. We ended up producing with the engineer, Dave Hassinger, and tripped through it all with Jerry Garcia as our ‘spiritual adviser’. Ha!” In the late summer of 1968, the Airplane toured Europe, amazing audiences with their brutal PA and psychedelic light show. On August Bank Holiday, they were paid £1,000 to headline the first Isle of Wight Festival . “I am frozen to the bone!” Grace shouted.

The festival date was followed a few days later by a free concert for a few hundred curious folk in the dilapidated bandstand on Parliament Hill Fields in North London. Sponsored by Camden Council (and publicised only the day before by John Peel on his radio show), it wasn’t exactly a triumph. The weather was so bad that Slick’s first words were: “What’s wrong with you people? It’s raining. Go home.”

After Europe, the Airplane paid $73,000 for an outrageously palatial mansion at 24000 Fulton Street, San Francisco. They painted their new HQ black, moved in their personal coke dealer and installed a medieval-style torture rack in the basement, which was first tried out on David Crosby. Slick bought a shotgun and amused herself by firing it from her window over the trees of Golden Gate Park.

In 1969, the Airplane were the wealthiest band on the West Coast. But that didn’t stop them making Volunteers , a radical, revolutionary, call-to-arms album.

“We had the most fun making Volunteers ,” Slick recalls. “Jorma used to drive into the studio on his motorcycle. And we spent a lot of time sucking on a gigantic canister of nitrous oxide in the corner of the room, laughing like idiots.”

And the revolution? “That didn’t happen. I thought you could change people with media blitzing, books and knowledge, but you can’t. The only person I can change is me.”

Indeed, as their music became more bombastic, the Airplane’s record sales started to slide. Volunteers flopped as a single. So did the follow-up, Mexico, a savage repudiation of Richard Nixon’s Operation Intercept, which effectively closed the US/Mexico border to stop marijuana smuggling.

Within the year, rock’s relationship with hardcore drug abuse saw off Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Morrison, all aged just 27. Even Grace was shocked. “Janis had been a friend for a short period when we were younger. Before things got ugly. It’s the luck of the draw. I saw how heroin affected people. My own alcoholism was a slow decline. It’s stunning I’m still alive. I’m glad I didn’t do heroin. It killed all of them. Hendrix died because heroin makes you puke. It is also very illegal.”

The 70s were increasingly a blur for Slick and the Airplane. Drummer Spencer Dryden quit in 1970, still shattered by Altamont. Marty Balin made a more protracted exit before deciding he’d had enough of “playing that messed-up cocaine music”. Kaukonen and Casady stuck around but poured their energies into their emerging other band, Hot Tuna, effectively leaving the Airplane in Kantner and Slick’s care. Slick persevered with Kantner’s new venture, Jefferson Starship, but she grimaces at the memories. “That was a sell-out band. The Airplane was a smorgasbord, but the Starship I hated. Our big hit single, We Built This City , was awful. What are you talking about? What city? LA was built on oranges, film and oil. San Francisco was built on the gold rush. The Romans built London. It sounded like we were bragging, even though Bernie Taupin, an Englishman, wrote the lyric. I could sing it – and the others – because I can fake enthusiasm. You have to act to get on stage. I felt like I’d throw up on the front row but I smiled and did it anyway. The show must go on.”

While Kantner was obsessed with creating what Grace calls “let’s all go outer space, science-fiction shit”, she fell back on sarcasm, fuelled by boozy bravado. “I had no filter. When I was drunk, if someone was an arsehole I’d say so. I’ve got very little gate between what I think and what I say. It isn’t a syndrome, I’ve just got a lack of discretion. I became a jail-arrested, rock’n’roll, foul-mouth bad girl.”

Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane: The beginning of the end

In 1978, Slick’s antics, her no-show behaviour and total lack of self-control came to a head at a show in Hamburg. She bought a child’s Heidi outfit, then got so smashed she decided that dressing like a Nazi, goose-stepping and giving the ‘heil Hitler’ salute – while asking: “Who won the fucking war? It was all your fucking fault” – was a good idea. What might have been a hoot in California didn’t go down well in Germany. The audience rioted, stormed the stage and set fire to the band’s equipment, before chucking it into the river. Quite an evening. Paul Kantner sacked her on the spot, which meant she missed playing the Knebworth Festival a few days later.

Eventually, Slick faced her known demons, and she became the first high-profile rock star to admit to attending AA.

“It wasn’t easy. Being sober is weird. People magazine broke my anonymity about AA but it wasn’t a surprise. My behaviour made that obvious. Everybody knew I was a big drunk. Plus, booze and cocaine is an ugly combination. I loved it. I lived on it, because the two things even each other out. Then you do more. I could afford it. Coke was so cheap and we were rock’n’rollers. Who cares? I only stopped when you couldn’t get the uncut stuff from German pharmaceutical chemists. I was a snob.”

Her last husband, former Airplane lighting man Skip Johnson, told her she was becoming too Jekyll and Hyde for comfort. “When I was sober I was calm. Otherwise, a pain in the ass. I was having a great time and everyone else was like, ‘Oh, Jesus. Shut her up.’ If I saw anyone in a uniform, it was over for me. I went to jail a lot for drunk mouth – verbal assault.”

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On the road to sobriety, Slick decided to quit the stage. “I don’t like seeing people my age leaping around, singing about their feelings when they were 23,” she says. “If you’re comfortable with it, go ahead. I’m easily embarrassed for people. ‘Oh my God, honey, get off the stage. Become a producer or something.’”

Kantner still does it. “Well, if you’ve squandered your money and you have to play, be my guests. I haven’t, so I don’t. My dad, who was a merchant banker, always told me: put one third into savings, one third for bills and screw around with the rest.”

These days, Grace rises at 4am every day and starts painting. She paints what she knows: white rabbits, portraits of dead rock stars, wine labels, marijuana plants, ice-cream- guzzling kids as metaphors for the obesity epidemic.

“They used to sell well. Me and Ronnie Wood have the same agent and we sell to the class of people who don’t really need art or drugs, all the stuff I like. Corporate people. I don’t live off my art though. If I did, I’d be starving. Royalty cheques are great. I always knew once the Airplane became famous that it would be around until I drop dead.”

“Anyway,” she laughs, “I deserve it. I wrote a few good songs. And I’ve never bounced a cheque in my life.”

Max Bell worked for the  NME  during the golden 70s era before running up and down London’s Fleet Street for  The Times  and all the other hot-metal dailies. A long stint at the  Standard  and mags like  The Face  and  GQ  kept him honest. Later, Record Collector  and  Classic Rock  called.

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Jefferson Airplane: 1970

Jefferson Airplane played at the Minneapolis Auditorium on Friday, May 15, 1970, with local – now national – band Crow playing warmup.

Jayme Kleinbaum remembers:

I was there. When Grace saw the size of the crowd she said, “Wow, Minneapolis, welcome to San Francisco.” We said, “San Francisco, welcome to Minneapolis.”

Songs mentioned in Will Shapira’s review were:

•  Volunteers
• Somebody to Love
• The Other Side of This Life
• We Can be Together

Photo of Jefferson Airplane courtesy Paul Pash

Local reports are that Crow was really tight and the Airplane came off really sloppy.

Dodd Lamberton, reviewing for the Minneapolis Star , noted that Crow, formerly the South Forty, had a successful national reputation and much of its repertoire was original.  The lead singer sounded quite a bit like John Fogerty, he though, and the gyrations and facial contortions of the drummer (Denny Craswell?) made him afraid that a heart attack was soon to follow.

Then came the chaos.  During “Slow Down,” the crowd rushed the foot of the stage, making it impossible of the fans seated on the main floor.  The band and the management begged them to move, they didn’t, and the band played on.

Photo copyright Mike Barich

When the Airplane arrived, the crowd went even wilder, which didn’t set well with the reviewer.  No middle-aged stiff himself, Lamberton was a music major at the U.  Nevertheless, he wrote, “It is unfortunate that whenever Minneapolis rock fans get a first-rate group to perform, they make fools of themselves by clustering around the stage, dancing and cheering every movement the performers make.”  (May 16, 1970)

The Minneapolis Tribune recruited Will Shapira, a writer for Connie’s Insider, to review the show.  Shapira reported that 8,000 “young heads” had turned out for the performance.  He, too, noted that the crowd surged to the edge of the stage, but that there was “no trouble.”  (May 17, 1970)

BALIN BUSTED IN BLOOMINGTON

It all started with a phone call by an irate parent who called the police and complained about a pot party his daughter had attended at the Thunderbird Motel with two soundmen with the group, Graydon C. Odell and Terry D. Cost.  The two were originally arrested at 6 am Saturday, May 16, for contributing to the delinquency of minors, but while they were being transported to the Bloomington Police Department, they “attempted to conceal containers containing narcotics.”  They were they charged with unlawful possession of marijuana and cocaine.

This resulted in a search warrant, which turned up marijuana and a cube of hashish in the possession of Martyn J. Buchwald, who performed under the name of Marty Balin.  Bloomington police arrested Balin shortly before noon on Saturday, May 16.  It is unclear whether he spent Sunday, May 17 in Jail.  ( Minneapolis Star , May 19, 1970)

On Monday May 18, the three appeared in Hennepin County Municipal Court on charges of possessing marijuana.  They all demanded a pretrial hearing and were released on $5,000 each.   ( Minneapolis Tribune , May 19, 1970)

Below is the iconic photo of Marty Balin – Probably taken on May 18, 1970, on the way to the Hennepin County Courthouse for arraignment after a weekend in the Bloomington Jail?

Although the pretrial hearing was scheduled for June 16, the two soundmen (now referred to as stagehands) pleaded guilty to two counts of unlawful possession of narcotics on May 27.  They were fined $1,000 each, and given suspended one-year workhouse sentences and put on five years unsupervised probation.  ( Minneapolis Star , May 29, 1970)

At Balin’s two-day hearing (May 28 and June 1, 1970), the judge found him guilty of one of the two counts against him of unlawful possession of marijuana.  Balin did not deny the charge, and insisted that the real issue was illegal search and seizure.  The policeman who found the marijuana in Balin’s motel room entered the room under the pretext of looking for one of the soundmen, who he knew was already in jail.  The verdict of guilty was given by the judge, who sentenced Balin to one year in the workhouse and a $1,000 fine, stayed.   ( Minneapolis Star , June 2, 1970)

Marty Balin died on September 27, 2018, in Tampa at the age of 76.

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Jefferson Airplane 1969 Golden Gate Park KSAN

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• VOLUNTEERS AT 50
• DISCOGRAPHY

• January – Marty Balin becomes roommate with Bill Thompson, who eventually becomes the band manager. They live in an apartment at 16th and Clement in San Francisco, CA.  Marty starts auditioning people for the band.
• July – Balin has persuaded three investors to contribute $3,000 each, with his newly-formed group to retain a 25% interest, to purchase and renovate a failing pizza restaurant. His first recruit is guitarist Paul Kantner, whom Balin meets at local club the Drinking Gourd.  Kantner, in turn, recommends Jorma Kaukonen, whom he has met at Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA, and who is about to head for Europe when he is approached.
• Upright bass player Bob Harvey and drummer Jerry Peloquin round out the new band’s rhythm section. Signe Anderson, who had sung in Portland, WA, as the girl of Two Guys & A Girl, is heard by Balin at the Drinking  Gourd, where her brother is tending bar, and completes the line-up. They adopt their moniker after local blues musician Steve Talbot gives Kaukonen the name of a fictitious blues singer, Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane, a parody of Blind Lemon Jefferson.
• August – The group makes its debut on the opening night of the Matrix club, a gig reviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle’s John Wasserman, which along with a later review from Ralph Gleason (who is convinced to see the band by Thompson, who worked as a copy boy at the Chronicle), leads to Airplane receiving contract offers from several major companies. Thompson, who worked as a copy boy at the San Francisco Chronicle, convinces Gleason to see the show at the Matrix. Peloquin is soon replaced by Skip Spence, who Balin thinks looks right for the part despite the fact that he has had little experience playing drums.
• October – A Tribute to Dr. Strange — an evening of music, dance and light shows — is organized by the Family Dog, a pioneering group of hippie promoters. Performing at the event are Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society’s singer. Kantner is much taken with Grace Slick, who is singing with another band on the bill, the Great Society.
• November – Also, in October, Harvey is replaced by Jack Casady, with whom Kaukonen played in Washington rock ‘n’ roll band, the Triumphs, in the late ’50s. He is about to start a new term at Montgomery Junior College in Maryland, when he receives the call from Kaukonen to join.  The band participates in the first San Francisco Mime Troupe benefit, organized by Bill Graham, also featuring Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg and John Handy.
• December – Jefferson Airplane performs at the inaugural concert held at Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium with the Great Society, the John Handy Quintet, the Mystery Trend and Sam Thomas & the Gentlemen’s band.
• With a $25,000 deal signed by newly-appointed manager Matthew Katz and RCA’s West Coast A&R man Neely Plumb, the group cuts its first tracks (It’s No Secret, Runnin’ Round The World, High Flyin’ Bird, It’s Alright and Run Around) for the label in Los Angeles, with Tommy Oliver producing.
• February – Following the release of its debut single, It’s No Secret, in January, the band plays at the Fillmore Auditorium on a bill with Big Brother & the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Grass Roots and the Great Society. Throughout the year, the band will play the Fillmore over 10 times, sharing the bill on most of those occasions with either the Grateful Dead or Paul Butterfield.
• May – Spence parts with the band and heads to Mexico, before returning to the Bay Area to form Moby Grape. His replacement is jazz-schooled drummer Spencer Dryden, who is currently drumming with the Ashes (who later evolved to become the Peanut Butter Conspiracy).
• June – The group takes part in the “KFRC Presents The Beach Boys Summer Spectacular” at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, sharing the bill with the Beach Boys, Lovin’ Spoonful, Chad & Jeremy, Percy Sledge, The Byrds and Sir Douglas Quintet, among others. It was there that a group of fans handed out bumper stickers and buttons that read, “Jefferson Airplane Loves You”.
• August – Just prior to the release of its debut album, the band fires manager Katz, replacing him with the interim Bill Thompson.
• September – The band appears at the “Monterey Jazz Festival”, Monterey, CA, the first rock group to do so.
• October – Anderson, unable to cope with the demands of being a new mother and playing in a band, makes her final appearance with the Airplane at a 3-day stint at the Fillmore Auditorium.
• Slick makes her debut with the group, bringing with her two songs she has performed with the Great Society, White Rabbit and Somebody to Love.
• November – A Press party is held for the band at the Whisky a Go-Go, Hollywood, CA.
• January – The band plays at the first “Human Be-In”, in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, before embarking on their first east coast tour.
• February – Performed for two weeks at the Cafe au Go-Go, with supporting act Richie Havens. They also perform at the Stony Brook College on Long Island, NY.
• March – Somebody to Love is released as a single with a six page spread on the Airplane in Look Magazine. The band is credited as one of the main influences on the Summer of Love.
• May – The group guests on CBS-TV’s “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.”
• June – Surrealistic Pillow, the first album to feature Slick’s vocals, and produced by Rick Jarrard, with the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia as a musical adviser, hits the US charts at #3, earning a gold record.The band is the sixth act to appear on the second evening of the “Monterey International Pop Festival” at the County Fairgrounds, Monterey, CA.
• Somebody to Love hits #5 on the US charts.The Airplane plays at the Fillmore with supporting act The Jimi Hendrix Experience, fresh from wowing the audience at Monterey.
• July – White Rabbit hits #8 on the US charts, also becoming a million seller.
• September – Surrealistic Pillow is released in the UK, in an edited form which excludes major tracks, such as White Rabbit and Plastic Fantastic Lover, and substitutes tracks from unissued in the UK first album.The band plays with the Grateful Dead at the Hollywood Bowl, Hollywood, CA.
• The Ballad Of You And Me And Pooneil hits #42 on the US charts.
• December – Watch Her Ride reaches #61 on the US charts.Jefferson Airplane performs a New Year’s Eve concert, with Big Brother & The Holding Company, at the Fillmore Auditorium.
• February – After Bathing at Baxter’s reaches #17 on the US charts.  Jack Casady is featured on Jimi Hendrix’s album, Electric Ladyland, and Country Joe & The Fish’s Together.  The Airplane and the Grateful Dead each take a 10% interest in a partnership to administer the Carousel Ballroom in San Francisco.
• April – Greasy Heart stops at #98 on the US charts.
• The band opens the Kaleidoscope club on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles with Canned Heat.
• June – The Group appears on the cover of Life Magazine, which features articles on Cream, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Mothers of Invention and The Who, under the caption of “Jefferson Airplane, Top Rock Group, With Music That’s Hooked The Whole Vibrating World.”
• 2400 Fulton St, in San Francisco is bought as the band’s headquarters for $73,000 (later sold in 1985 for $700,000).
• August – The group performs at the “Newport Pop Festival” in Costa Mesa, CA, alongside The Byrds, Canned Heat, The Grateful Dead, Sonny & Cher, Steppenwolf and others.
• September – Band plays two nights at London’s Roundhouse, on a bill with The Doors.
• October – Returned home, they perform at the Fillmore West.
• November – Crown Of Creation hits #6 on the US charts.
• December – The extracted title track, Crown of Creation, makes it to #64 in the US.
• French movie director Jean-Luc Godard films the band playing on a rooftop in Midtown Manhattan, for his projected “One American Movie” film. After Godard drops his plans, the footage is picked up by documentary film-maker D.A. Pennebaker, and is used in “One P.M.”
• Kaukonen and Casady form a splinter group, Hot Tuna
• January – Slick is hospitalized with a suspected throat growth, undergoing a csecond operation for nodes on her vocal cords.
• April – Live album, Bless Its Pointed Little Head, recorded at the Fillmore West on October 24-26th, 1968, and the Fillmore East, November 28-30th, 1968, makes #17 in the US.
• May – Casady is arrested for possession of marijuana, in New Orleans, and will receive a 2 1/2 year suspended sentence.
• June – Bless Its Pointed Little Head becomes the group’s first UK chart entry, spending a week at #38.
• August – The band performs at the “Atlantic City Pop Festival”, Atlantic City, NJ, before an audience of 110,000.The group headlines a concert in Tanglewood, Lenox, MA with B.B. King and The Who.
• Airplane headlines the second day, by now early Sunday morning, of the “Woodstock Music & Art Fair”, Bethel, NY.
• October – Kantner is busted for marijuana possession in Honolulu, HI, found guilty of a misdemeanor and fined $350.
• November – The group plays at the Fillmore East, with Slick dressed as Hitler and actor Rip Torn making an appearance as Richard Nixon. Also performs the  “First (and last) Annual Palm Beach International Music and Arts Festival in late November, 1969.”
• December – Volunteers, the band’s most overtly political work, reaches #13 in the US.
• The band takes part in the Rolling Stones’ ill-fated concert at Altamont Speedway, CA. Balin is attacked halfway through a song, by one of the Hell’s Angels “handling” security.
• The extracted title track, Volunteers, makes #65 in the US.
• The group plays a New Year’s Eve show at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco.
• February – Dryden parts with the band and joins New Riders of the Purple Sage in 1971. He is replaced by Joey Covington, who has been drumming with Hot Tuna.
• March – Volunteers reaches #34 in the UK.
• May – Balin is arrested for drug possession in a Bloomington, Minnesota hotel room. He will be sentenced to one year’s hard labor and a $100 fine, reduced on appeal to just the fine.
• June – The group co-headlines the “Bath Festival of Blues & Progressive Music” at the Royal Country Fairgrounds, Shepton Mallet, Somerset, England, with Led Zeppelin.
• October – Slick, now pregnant by Kantner, is unable to make live appearances.
• Casady and Kaukonen, who have, for some time been playing occasional support gigs to Jefferson Airplane as Hot Tuna, either with other musicians or an acoustic duo, formalize the offshoot group. They recruit violinist Papa John Creach, who also becomes a member of Jefferson Airplane, making his debut with the band at Winterland on October 5th (Balin refuses to play the show in a tribute to Janis Joplin, who had died the previous day).
• A Hot Tuna gig at the New Orleans House, Berkeley, is recorded and given a low-key album release.
• December – Hot Tuna plays US dates with Covington as drummer and Papa John Creach on violin.

January – Slick gives birth to a daughter, who she and paul name China.

February – Compilation album, The Worst of The Jefferson Airplane, reaches #12 in the US.

April – Balin leaves the group, taking a year off before returning to produce the band Grootna for Columbia records in 1972, before becoming lead vocalist for Bodacious D.F. the following year.

May – Slick crashes her Mercedes into a wall near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. She is hospitalized briefly, causing Jefferson Airplane recording sessions to be cancelled.

July – Hot Tuna’s second album, First Pull Up Then Pull Down, makes #43 on the US charts.

August – Jefferson Airplane launches its own RCA distributed label, Grunt Records.

October – The first Grunt release, Jefferson Airplane’s Bark, climbs to #11 in the US, eventually earning a gold record. Bark makes #42 in the UK.

April – Jefferson Airplane members regroup for a fresh recording session, during which Covington leaves to join Black Kangaroo, and is replaced by ex-Turtles drummer, John Barbata.

May – Hot Tuna’s Burgers makes #68 on the US charts.

August – Airplane plays at the Roosevelt Raceway, Long Island, NY, as a part of the “Festival of Hope” benefit for the Nassau Society For Crippled Children And Adults. Slick is maced and Kantner slightly injured when a scuffle ensues, after the group’s equipment manager, Jack Casady’s brother Chick, calls police “pigs” during a show at the Rubber Bowl, Akron, OH. Police arrest Chick and drag him offstage.

September – Long John Silver reaches #20 in the US. Long John Silver charts for one week at #30 in the UK. US tour, which has included guitarist David Freiberg, fresh from Quicksilver Messenger Service, ends at Winterland, with Balin guesting. It will prove to be the last Jefferson Airplane gig.

The Hot Tuna members make a final break and resist any attempts to woo them back.

April – Jefferson Airplane release a live album, Thirty Seconds Over Winterland, which will be their swan song.

August – The core members of Jefferson Airplane reunite for an album and tour. Following a series of partial reunions, Grace Slick, Marty Balin, Paul Kantner, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady release Jefferson Airplane, their first new recording together in 17 years. Grace had recently left Starship, the band that had evolved out of Jefferson Starship, which itself had emerged from the wreckage of the Airplane. Paul, Marty and Jack had performed and recorded together for a brief while as the KBC Band. Paul had also joined Jorma and Jack’s band Hot Tuna onstage during a recent tour, setting the scene for the full Airplane to make music again. Rather than recall any of the drummers from their original run, the group recruits Kenny Aronoff, who had worked for many years with John Mellencamp. Ron Nevison, who had produced some of Grace’s and the Starship’s records, is hired to produce the album, which peaks at a disappointing number 85. Critics largely dismiss the album, but the tour receives mostly positive reviews, despite the fact that the Airplane are augmented by several other musicians onstage.

September – Following the tour, which encompasses more than 25 dates, concluding with a free show in Golden Gate Park, Jefferson Airplane breaks up again, this time apparently for good, as Grace and Spencer both head into retirement. Rolling Stone Magazine calls the Airplane’s tour “most unwelcome” comeback of the year.

January – Jefferson Airplane is inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the eleventh annual induction dinner. Mickey Hart and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead are their presenters.

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