From Doug Draper
Posted January 29th, 2016 on Niagara At Large
“If you believe in forever, and not just in a one night stand, if there’s a rock and roll heaven, you know they’ve got a hell of a band.”
There was no doubt about it when that song was written in the early 1970s to eulogies the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison of The Doors and Otis Redding.
Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane – Jefferson Starship fame.
If there was a rock and roll heaven, they sure already had one hell of a band. And if its still around, they’ve got a super group by now that’s like one we’ve never seen down here on terra firma.
On day one of this January, 2016 alone, the news broke that Natalie Cole had joined the heavenly ensemble. Then there was David Bowie, then Glenn Frey, co-founder and lead singer and songwriter of The Eagles, and as the last days of this month play out – Paul Kantner, lead guitarist, songwriter and co-founder of one of the most iconic bands of the 1960s, Jefferson Airplane.
With the haunting notes from Kantner’s guitar backing the equally haunting voice of Grace Slick, crying out the opening line; “When the truth is found to be lies…” Jefferson Airplane’s epic first hit “Somebody To Love,” released in April, 1967, was one of the songs that ushered in that year’s ‘Summer of Love’ and a San Francisco sound pioneered by Slick, Kantner and the Airplane and fellow counterculture hipsters Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Jerry Carcia and The Grateful Dead.
One of the hippest albums to own in the late 1960s
Upon breaking the news of Paul Kantner’s death from a heart attack this January 28th at age 74 (still hard to believe that young hippie on the cover Jefferson Airplane’s first album Surrealistic Pillow could ever be 74), Joe Scarborough, athe co-host of MSNBC’s news program ‘Morning Joe’ and quite a music buff himself, put it this way, and I paraphrase – Of all the bands that seemed most dangerous to parents during the rebel years of the 1960s, Jefferson Airplane with songs like ‘White Rabbit’, a opus to the drug culture, and ‘Volunteers’, a call for social and political revolution, was right up there, at or near the top of the list.
Slick and Kantner and company went on to transform the Airplane into the Jefferson Starship in the 1970s and had another run of success with hits like ‘Miracles’ and ‘Count on Me’.
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