Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons
My friend Dale sent me a link to an old TV show, a show we watched when we were teenagers. Dale is often sending me stuff like this. Like so many of us now in what used to be called the “Golden Years,” he has discovered the seemingly bottomless archive of antique media now available online.
What used to live on as figments of memory and imagination — three-minute performances of pop songs, stand-up comedy, talkshow banter — are now routinely retrieved, barely worse for wear, as if from an eternal nirvana of entertainment. Point, click and feel like you’re 17 again.
What Dale shared on this particular springtime afternoon was what has come to be known as Dick Cavett’s “Woodstock Show.” Staged in New York City immediately after the close of the Woodstock rock music festival in upstate New York, talkshow host Cavett — thought in those days to be a slightly hipper, more literate and deadpan Johnny Carson — scored a counter-cultural coup by inviting a gaggle of rock stars to come directly from the festival to the stage of his studio theater.
Cavett was an expat Midwesterner, the kind of striver who made no secret — in fact was proud — that his boyhood Nebraska dream had been to trade one-liners with the famous wits that once clustered around the Algonquin Roundtable. This made him a slightly off-kilter, if determinedly intrepid, master of ceremonies for a program aimed squarely (!) at the other side of what people in those days called “the generation gap.”
The show’s director tried hard to evoke a mod vibe. Cavett’s performance space was reconfigured into a kind of sunken thrust affair with a circular seating arrangement composed of what looked like vinyl stumps. Cavett himself eschewed, for once, his typical blazer and tie in favor of some middle-aged art director’s idea of leisure-wear: a safari-style shirt with a brightly patterned scarf, knotted incongruously at the throat. Cavett couldn’t get through his opening monologue without complaining about that scarf; he received an ovation when he yanked it off.
Joni Mitchell (whose manager, like a helicopter parent, wouldn’t let her play at Woodstock) was a guest on the show, as were David Crosby and Stephen Stills (with mud, like a merit badge, still smeared on his jeans). Jimi Hendrix, whose version of “The Star Spangled Banner,” performed that very morning, would take its place as part of America’s musical canon, was supposed to be there, but somehow got lost in transit.
The only full band to appear on Cavett’s show was the Jefferson Airplane. The Airplane, at that time, was arguably the most influential band to emerge from San Francisco, considered by many to be the wellspring of America’s counter-culture. It was a sextet, with three singers who, unlike the Beach Boys, or the Byrds, sang over, under and even against one another, finding occasional harmonies but, more often, using their voices to create a theatrically dynamic tension.
When he came across this video of Cavett’s show my friend Dale must have remembered my connection to the Jefferson Airplane. How I met them in San Francisco less than six months after the Woodstock broadcast, a brief span that also included the violent debacle at Altamont, another music festival that effectively slammed shut whatever notions of counter-cultural community Woodstock had seemingly opened up.
Watching the Airplane perform on Cavett — but now, in Trump’s America — came as a jolt. That the Airplane’s music, their art, was original was never in question. They didn’t write or sound like anyone else of their generation. But it was also apparent the dimensions of the band’s achievement had been obscured by its being so in the thick of an extraordinarily hectic era.
I loved the Airplane in 1969. I looked forward to and bought their records, beginning with Surrealistic Pillow and then, in close succession, After Bathing at Baxter’s, Crown of Creation, Bless Its Pointed Little Head, and Volunteers. I listened intently to each, went back and listened again. This band never sat still. After falling in love with the meticulously crafted songs on Pillow, the first commercially successful album to come out of the San Francisco scene, Baxter’s, with its careening instrumentals and bipolar mood swings, almost bucked me off. It demanded a kind of attention, even surrender, unique in my listening experience. It took a while to hook me, made me shake off my consumerist demands for more of the same in favor of new and unexplored territory.
Grace Slick, the only woman in the Airplane, was possessed by a bewildering penchant for defying expectations. No hippie, she looked and dressed like a model in a fashion magazine. Her dark hair and violet-blue eyes invited comparison with Elizabeth Taylor. It was easy for her to appear demure, a trick of the eye she turned into a strategy for creative ambush. Grace cultivated an inner harpy, the half woman, half bird wind spirit found in ancient Greek and Roman mythology. Harpies were pissed-off guardians of the underworld, pretty faces with sharp claws.
On Dick Cavett’s show, Grace appears stylishly dressed and deeply tanned. Her eyes are piercing. Cavett wants her to talk about her time at Finch College, a New York finishing school famous for social register alumni such as game show contestant Arlene Francis, resort-wear designer Lilly Pulitzer and Tricky Dick’s daughter, Tricia Nixon. Grace brushes him off; complains that the stools they’re sitting on are uncomfortable and insists on calling him “Jim.” She’s a subversive brat.
Later, when the Airplane performs, she will also be the first person to sing the word “motherfucker” on national television. Amazingly, this is not bleeped or censored. Nor, for that matter, is the verse leading up to it, with words lifted from an anarchists’ handbill rhythm guitarist Paul Kantner found stapled to a light pole in New York’s East Village:
We are forces of chaos and anarchy
Everything they say we are, we are
And we are very
Proud of ourselves…
Seeing Jefferson Airplane perform again, 50 years after the fact, stirred me. Although the band wasn’t at the top of its game on Cavett’s show, they were still capable of spreading the news. More, perhaps, than any other band of their era, they embraced the proposition that the personal in America had necessarily turned political. If this choice was reckless artistically, it was also brave. It felt like the band was meeting its time head-on.
Dark as that time might have seemed, the country in which I clicked an online link to reconnect with the Jefferson Airplane felt darker still. Having held the children of would-be immigrants hostage, my government found itself unable to account for where those children were or how to reunite them with their parents. School shootings were almost routine occurrences. A staggering portion of the country’s population was addicted to opioids which, some observers thought, helped account for the implacable loyalty many disgruntled white voters held for Donald Trump, a shamelessly mendacious idiot whose presidency signified a national nervous breakdown.
Against this backdrop the Airplane sounded alive as ever. I slept fitfully that night, tossing and turning to the band’s thunderous rhythm section. I dreamt we were all in an enormous aircraft hangar where the music never stopped and everybody danced.
Woodstock was like a sonic boom — a big, unanticipated noise in the summer sky. It came at the end of August 1969, the summer after I graduated from high school. So much was happening — 25,000 more troops going to Vietnam, Muhammad Ali’s refusing to be drafted, the Manson murders, men walking on the Moon. Woodstock, for those of us not on the east coast, was almost an afterthought.
The news traveled quickly, though. Hundreds of thousands of people had been there. The traffic was so heavy, fans ditched their cars alongside roads leading to the site in upstate New York and hiked for miles, crashed fences, got in for free. It rained and a meadow turned into a muddy bog; boys and girls stripped and skinny dipped in nearby ponds. A baby was born. Some liked saying an alternative city had sprung up in the middle of a farmer’s field. Rumor had it that everyone made it through all three days without anything really bad happening —proof positive a new society was in the offing.
The Jefferson Airplane certainly seemed to think so. If their latest album, Crown of Creation failed to produce a hit single, the album was still a commercial and critical success, going gold and finishing sixth in sales for 1968. It was deceptively accessible, its melodically rocking songs dealing with the fear of aging, sexual experimentation and power trips, emotional isolation, the trap of empire and the end of the world. How shared hypocrisies and mythmaking were degrading the most powerful nation on Earth.
In May 1969, the Airplane played a free concert in Chicago’s Grant Park, honoring the protestors who had been pummeled there by police during the Democratic Convention the previous summer. Fifty-thousand people showed up for the afternoon event, which took place across Michigan Avenue from the Conrad Hilton Hotel, site of the “police riot.” Fans crowded up to the edge of the bandstand, draping themselves over the Airplane’s sound equipment. From a distance, distinguishing between performers and audience was all but impossible.
1969’s approaching holiday season was amped by what many believed would be the west coast’s version of Woodstock. The Rolling Stones wanted to close their American tour in the Bay Area with a concert they hoped would align them more closely with that scene. In keeping with the local counter-culture, the event would be free and feature the Airplane and Grateful Dead among supporting acts.
Scant attention was paid to logistics. The Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang was offered $500 worth of beer to police the stage, which was located at the bottom of a sloping hill. As with the Airplane’s free concert in Grant Park, there was no buffer between performers and audience. Almost everyone involved appeared to believe that music itself was the only governing principle required.
Altamont, as this event came to be known, exposed the counter-culture’s lack of self-awareness as not merely naïve but dangerous. Drug-addled fans hurt themselves and each other; three people died in accidents and one, an all but anomalous Black man in the audience named Meredith Hunter, was stabbed to death in front of the bandstand during the Rolling Stones’ set.
People were still recovering from Altamont when I traveled with a fellow student, Brad Stengel, to San Francisco in early January 1970 for a research project dealing with rock music and community. It was, as they say, a different time. Our first stop was Bill Graham’s Fillmore West, located at what had been the Carousel Ballroom, on the corner of Market and South Van Ness. The ballroom was on the second floor of a former car dealership. At the top of the stairs was a barrel full of apples, free for the taking.
Our plan was to interview Graham for an overview of the scene, but he was on the phone, too busy to talk. He hollered at his secretary, a mystically patient blonde with a kindly smile, to “give ‘em whatever they need.” She matter-of-factly opened her boss’s rolodex. In a matter of minutes, we were back on the street, with the names and phone numbers for every band in town, the Jefferson Airplane included.
Most of these bands, I soon learned, were taking January off. Trying to arrange interviews in the time we had was going to be impossible. Almost. On my last call I got through to Bill Thompson, the Airplane’s manager. He suggested we meet at the band’s mansion on Fulton Street, across from Golden Gate Park.
The mansion could have passed for a Midwestern county courthouse. It was three stories tall, with imposing Greek-style columns standing guard across the front. Built by a robber baron in 1904, it was so solid it had survived the 1906 earthquake while the rest of San Francisco burned. Most of the Airplane took up residence there. They installed a four-track recording studio in the basement and, in a pre-punk gesture, painted the exterior black.
“Yeah?”
A voice called down to us from the second floor. Bill Thompson’s curly head, accessorized with rose-colored glasses, craned from an open window. He told us to wait outside the big front door and, sure enough, in barely a moment it was cracked and we were waved in by a trollish looking guy with a wispy beard and red-rimmed eyes.
He led us to a landing on the second floor, where Bill Thompson greeted us. Thompson was dressed in the latest boutique style — a brightly colored shirt with a spread collar and striped bellbottoms. I was barely finished thanking him for meeting us when he cut me off: “I don’t see why you want to talk to me when most of the band’s right here…”
I saw drummer Spencer Dryden first. He was leaning against a windowsill, smoking a cigarette. Jack Casady, the bass player, hid his eyes behind circular granny-style shades; his blonde hair, braced by a bandanna, hung past his shoulders. And there was Jorma Kaukonen, the band’s lead guitarist, looking death’s head thin in skin-tight black. He paused just long enough to shake hands before unceremoniously splitting, carrying Jack and Spencer in his wake. Singer Marty Balin wasn’t there. “He’s sick,” Thompson told us.
That left Paul Kantner and Grace Slick.
I expected to be intimidated by Grace Slick. The way she wrote about men made it clear she was wise to the full spectrum of male insecurity and contemptuous of the ways we used power to mask our intimate failings. Her obvious beauty sheathed a tensile strength. Yet there was probably no woman on the planet I was keener to meet — not that I dreamt that could ever happen.
But here she was, locking her ultramarine eyes on mine, smiling like I was her favorite cousin. Where was I from? What was I doing? How did I like the city? Her questions were unfeigned and eager and she listened in a way that made me feel as if my answers were not entirely lame.
Paul Kantner looked like he’d just come from a beach; sandy bangs swept his forehead, a faded blue work shirt was untucked over well-worn jeans. I think he was barefoot. “What’s happening with the movement in Minnesota?” He took a neatly rolled joint from his breast pocket, lit up and passed it to me as if we were lodge brothers.
There was so much Brad and I didn’t know. Although we were aware Altamont had been a mess, there was only superficial press coverage to go by. We didn’t know that Marty Balin had been knocked unconscious by a Hell’s Angel; that what some thought was a lingering flu may have been the residual effects of a concussion. Or that perhaps Balin was coming to terms with having lost his band — that Altamont may have helped precipitate an existential crisis in the Airplane and that, in less than a month, both Balin and Spencer Dryden would no longer be members of the group. Slick and Kantner’s outgoing hospitality was indicative of a new reality: The Jefferson Airplane was definitely their band now.
Grace told me the band was going into the studio to record a new single and rehearse for a concert — its first since Altamont. She invited Brad and I to join them and told me how to find Pacific High Recording ( “down an alley near the Fillmore West”). Sessions, she said, took place at night.
We rode a bus to get there. It was raining that night, slanting down from the ocean in bone-freezing sheets. Neither of us had proper raingear; we were both wearing corduroy. Water pooled around our feet on the rubber-ribbed floor. We were pelted again as we hustled past the Fillmore West in search of the Brady Street alley where we hoped — a little desperately now — to find the Pacific High studio.
It may be difficult for anyone born after, say, 1980 to understand how worn American cities used to feel. Most of the building stock dated back to before World War II. The alley we were looking for was an ill lit asphalt gully intended to serve the backsides of what were once manufacturing plants — the kinds of buildings that, in a couple more decades, would make way for redevelopers.
If there was a sign, I don’t remember it. What we found was a steel- plated door. We pressed a buzzer, pounded with our fists as rivulets of rain streamed down our faces.
That troll again. He cracked the door just enough to peer out and look at who was there. He was about to slam it in our faces when I managed to sputter Grace’s name. A small bubble seemed to form in his consciousness. He looked down, as if suppressing a burp, then Grace’s smiling face appeared over his shoulder. Brad and I, sopping, crossed the threshold.
“You guys look like a couple of drowned rats!” Grace looked us up and down. She was like a den mother: “Have you eaten? Do you want a pizza?”
Pacific High, as it was called, felt handmade. Heavy fabric was tacked to the walls of a spacious studio on the other side of a large picture window. Behind that window was a cozy control room with a couple rows of padded, bleacher-style benches topped by a console and control board. Knowing it was raining mercilessly outside only heightened our sense of being swaddled in a tripped-out cocoon.
Joints appeared in assembly-line fashion, were passed from hand to hand, starting with the guys behind the controls and moving down to each and every one of us. The only person I saw actually rolling one was Jack Casady who, while playing his bass, dexterously managed the feat one-handed.
The Airplane was, for the first time in its career, producing a record on its own. The songs, “Mexico,” by Grace Slick and Paul Kantner’s “Have You Seen the Saucers,” represented the band’s regime change. Both tunes were musical bumperstickers. They were recorded on the fly, as if topical urgency was more important than craft.
“Mexico” was a celebration of good dope and a diatribe about Nixon’s making it harder to get. Slick, wishfully ignoring Altamont, sang that ready access to “gold and green” might provide the basis for a new kind of community. References to Woodstock, counter culture kids, even Black Panthers, are patched together with righteously mounting indignation until the song peters out, crumpled like an empty paper sack. Kantner’s “Saucers” is even more flimsy — a jenga stack of slogans about environmental degradation, space junk and government lies. There’s another Woodstock reference and plenty of generational tub-thumping: “First-born atomic generation/ Open the door, don't you know that's what it's for/ Hey, come and join us on the other side of the sun.”
Today, to the extent the Airplane is played at all, most listeners know it from the early Surrealistic Pillow hits, “White Rabbit” and “Somebody To Love.” This has frozen general perception of the group in amber, as an artifact from the Summer of Love.
In the broad scheme of things, laying claim to even a scrap of history like this one counts as an accomplishment. A something that’s better than nothing. But reducing what the Jefferson Airplane did to time capsule material trivializes the band’s real, if fleeting, art as well as the still unresolved issues that inspired it.
If Americans believe in anything, it’s progress. What is the American Dream, if not faith that the lives of our children will be better — with more money, a bigger house, longer life and greater respect — than our own? In the 1960s, manifestations of this faith were on constant display. People bought homes and cars, and sent their kids to college. But it didn’t add up. Assassinations, riots and war dogged the nation, kept penetrating its unresolved soft spots and burrowed deep. Progress began to seem like a story we told ourselves to keep our fears at bay.
The Jefferson Airplane may have understood this better than they knew. In their best work, on After Bathing at Baxter’s and, especially, Crown of Creation, they braided tension, hope, conflict and exhilaration to describe the condition of their place and time. Chance and opportunity brought these precocious artists together. Commercial success provided a platform. They were not seers — the band had no apparent interest in speaking to any audience other than the one it was facing at the moment. But the best art outruns the intent of those who make it. After Trump, George Floyd, wildfires, floods and insurrection, the country they wrote about is more itself than ever. Fifty years on, the Jefferson Airplane still matters.
David Hoppe is an author, essayist and playwright living in the Indiana Dunes on the southern shore of Lake Michigan. His books include the memoir Midcentury Boy: My Suburban Childhood from Ike to the Beatles (available through Amazon); his blog, Letters from Michiana, can be found via NUVO.net.