Small Busts
Nixon wasn't the only asshole to get busted. Yours Truly and friends have had ample opportunities to enjoy the accommodations offered by police departments from Florida to Hawaii. I don't know why, but any time I saw a badge, something in me would snap and all I could see was some goof who took smelly shits just like everyone else, having the unfair advantage of firepower. All the haphazard violence of nature, illnesses, fires, and accidents never bothered me as much as someone pointing a Magnum at me and telling me to STOP!
Streetlights going red—that kind of stopping was okay. But when cops pulled out guns on my property (Tiburon), on our stage (Ohio), and on my friends (Paul, in San Francisco), I immediately turned into some Wild West character.
The problem with “justice” is that if you have the money and the attorneys, you can very often skip the time behind bars that most people have to serve. Classic case in point: the O.J. double-murder scenario. The members of Airplane went to jail, and relatively often, but never for long. The lawyers would converge, the bail would be paid, and we would walk—usually within twenty-four hours. Sometimes we were at fault, sometimes not.
You decide.
Busted in Florida
All cities have different curfews, and on this night in Florida, we played too long. When the cops turned the power off in the middle of a set, Paul picked up a battery-powered bullhorn and exhorted the audience “not to let the heat take control of the show.” He went to jail, and as usual Thompson arrived with the bail. But while Paul's freedom was being negotiated, he slipped a shitload of LSD into a bottle of bourbon that was sitting on an officer's desk. When the bail was paid and Paul was free, the cops were about to experience the total disintegration of life up to and including the unfortunate decision to bust someone who was holding a lot of acid.
Busted in Dallas
I said the word fuck onstage and the cops got it on tape. I'm sure you would agree that it was a good thing we had uniformed individuals protecting the nation from that sort of insurrection. Inundated by compliments on their live recording techniques, they decided to let it go if I cleaned up my language. Of course, I agreed.
Yeah, that'll happen.
Busted in Ohio
They knew we remembered Kent State and they didn't trust us. All along the front of the stage stood a row of twenty-five officers, arms linked in riot style, creating a barrier. Their heads covered with bulletproof visors, their hips loaded with clubs and guns, they formed a line between the audience and us like a bizarre group of armored, hairy chorus girls. After the show, Chick Casady objected to the cops' overzealous handling of an unruly fan. I saw them mace Chick, so I went over and objected to their treatment of my friend. They maced me. Paul came over to object to their treatment of me. They maced Paul. The three of us were escorted to jail where the bail was set and the attorneys were called in to rectify the situation.
Busted in Ohio, again
They loved us in that state. Paul saw someone in the audience being roughed up by security, so he jumped off the stage to investigate the reason for the pounding. In the ensuing fracas, Paul, who was still carrying his “hard body” guitar, swung around and accidentally (?) jammed the security guy with the business end of the guitar. We went on playing, promising the powers that be that we'd deal with the matter after the show, but as soon as the set was finished, we hid Paul in the bottom of a van and drove him out of state—FAST.
Busted in L.A.
A patrolman saw a ladder on the side of a wall at the Tropicana, aka the Howling Morrison Hotel. What it was doing there, no one ever found out, but it looked suspicious, so they investigated the area closest to the top of the ladder by peeking in the window of a room that happened to be registered to Airplane. The hookahs that had been purchased earlier that day were clearly visible through the thin hotel room curtains, so when Jack Casady came back, he was greeted by patrolmen. He was taken to jail for possession of both hashish and the colorful paraphernalia that went with it.
Busted in L.A., again
Twenty-four years after the hookah incident, Jack ran afoul of the law again. Sitting behind the wheel and acknowledging that he'd had too much to drink, he pulled over for a curbside power nap. When the flashlights lit up the red-eyed bass player smelling of barleycorn, the cops turned on their red lights and took him for a second visit to the West L.A. police department.
Busted, almost, in San Francisco
Paul and I were on our way to play tennis (what?—yes, he swears it's true, although I don't remember ever willfully deciding to do something as physical as playing tennis) and a plainclothes cop with his plain car decided he didn't like the particular speed at which Paul had chosen to drive. When the officer began pursuit, Paul didn't know it was a cop, so he sped up and began to lose the guy. After some harrowing intersection moves, we came to an impasse. Boxed in at a dead end, Paul spotted a black-and-white and went over to tell the “real” cop that there was a screwball following us. While Paul was discussing the chase with the officer, the incognito fuzz jumped out of his car and stuck a gun through the window on my side. Aimed at Paul's head, the weapon got pushed aside by the black-and-white, who told Columbo, “Don't get fancy, it's only Paul Kantner and Grace Slick.” They let us go.
That was before the mere mention of Paul's or my name caused the cops to start putting on the handcuffs as soon as they realized they'd stopped either one of us.
It was good while it lasted.
Busted in Monterey
Owsley, “the people's LSD chemist,” gave Paul and Jack a horse dose of a drug called STP, supposedly a powerful psychedelic, which turned them inside out and backward. Paul got into a car and managed to get home to San Francisco, where a couple of hits of Thorazine brought him down to a semblance of normalcy. But Jack had the misfortune to be found by the local constabulary thrashing around in a mud puddle doing his version of the Jim Morrison wolf howl. He didn't remember anything after that until he came to in a Monterey jail cell, totally nude, clinging to the top of the bars like a monkey.
Better living through chemistry.
Busted in Hawaii
In order to publicize our concert in Honolulu, Paul did an interview with the local newspaper. The reporter came out to our big rented Spanish home and made notes of the location of the house, while Paul smoked weed during the conversation. When our address and Paul's drug use appeared in the newspaper article, the police sent out three large individuals to sneak up over the seawall and come in on the ocean side for a mass arrest. They simply couldn't pass up the opportunity to bust the entire group in one fell swoop. Paul, who was strolling on the sand, saw the cops lurking, they saw him strolling, and the hula began.
While they tried a choke hold on Paul (his formidable chin prevented them from getting a good lock on his neck), he managed to let out a 150-decibel yell to let us know all was not well and we should hide the dope. We got the message in time, they didn't get us, but they did claim that Paul was smoking the joint that they were holding in evidence. Paul was taken to the precinct where he was given a free night's lodging in a holding cell. Paul's cellmate was a black man who had no money for bail, so when the Airplane lawyers showed up the next day, Paul had them pay his new friend's bail and brought him back to the beach house for dinner that evening.
More (or less) busts
I got nailed three times for drunk driving without ever being in a car—I'll explain that later, along with a 1994 shotgun incident. Back in 1969, however, I was actually guilty for driving under the influence—of speed (the velocity, not the drug)—but I avoided getting arrested. I'd taken my Aston Martin up to about 150 mph on the straight road near Soledad Prison, when the black-and-whites started chasing me. Since their engines weren't quite as tweaked as the machine I was driving, they had to radio ahead for a roadblock. When I reached the point where two squad cars were stopped in the middle of the highway, it seemed like a reasonable idea to pull over. The blues got out and came over and, to my surprise, completely ignored me. Unable to take their eyes off the fabulous machine I was driving, one of them said, “We'll give you a ticket for eighty mph if you let us look at the engine.”
No problem.
I popped the hood latch and the CHP stood around pointing and chatting about the James Bond car that had just outrun their Dodge Darts or whatever the copmobile was that year. Amazing what a good movie star car could do for your traffic tickets. Probably not anymore, though—the fuzz have gotten blasè.
So if you're wondering what the Airplane members did (besides getting arrested) with their new fast cars, fast women, fast drugs, gold albums, and gold credit cards, it went like this:
Jack and Jorma took plenty of pharmaceutical speed and went speed skating in Finland.
Marty went off to be an “honest” artist—creating art that suited his muse.
Spencer was fired for incessant complaining.
And Grace and Paul moved to the “one-horse” hippie community of Bolinas, California.