Silver Cup
Think of Jefferson Airplane as a silver cup. By the early seventies the marks of neglect were showing on the cup. But its owners were at once unwilling to give it up and no longer interested in polishing its exterior. Nor did they put it to much use. It waited on a shelf, quietly collecting a streaky tarnish, for someone to restore it to its position at the table of feasts, while each servant in the house thought it was the other's job to tend to the chalice.
Nineteen seventy-two was a good year for cracks in the wall and shredded documents. It was a year that sent Tricky Dick to a second term in office, and G. Gordon Liddy to prison for his stoic G-man tactics on behalf of Tricky Dick. Those of us in the rock-and-roll community had continued to write and sing our political views to a public that just didn't want to believe that a president could stoop to wiretapping. From our point of view, anybody the Democrats came up with to run against Darth Vader would be just fine. One of the hopefuls was George McGovern.
Old George, wanting to bridge the generation gap, contacted us, wondering if we'd meet with him in the lounge of the hotel where we were playing, somewhere in the middle of the country. Most us agreed to hear him out, but Jorma was lukewarm about this political get-together. On the pretext of encouraging his participation in the barstool hustle the following night, I went to his room to practice my cajole. In reality, I wanted to go to bed with him, but killing two birds with one stone didn't seem like a bad idea. I began to talk about McGovern while we loosened up with one drug or the other, but I quickly proceeded to forget about anyone's candidacy … at least for that night. As I recall, though, everyone did eventually come down to the bar to listen to the man-who-would-not-be-king speaking in sincere tones about his hopes for our divided nation.
I slept with Jorma only that one time, but after a long recording session one night, he and I decided to interact in a different way, by racing cars on Doyle Drive. A number of people like me have thought that this straight wide road would be a good place not only to go faster than the speed limit, but to defy its history of brutal accidents. Unfortunately, I found out—the hard way—that it's called Deadly Doyle Drive for a reason.
Race until you land in a hospital, which is precisely what I did.
The combination of the rain and the oil on the street caused my car to slide sideways at 80 mph into a cement wall. The impact threw me over to the passenger's seat, so I was one of the rare exceptions to the seat belt rule: if I'd been wearing one, I'd be dead today, because the driver's side was crushed. It must have scared the shit out of Jorma, having to go up to the crushed car, wondering what kind of a mangled mess he'd find.
At the hospital emergency room with a head concussion and a split lip, I remember asking the nurses for “cocaine, for the pain, of course.” They just shook their heads (some addicts never give up), and knocked me out with something so strong I can't remember the entire next week that I was in their care. They wanted me to be very quiet so they could do tests and allow my head to heal.
Head injuries aside, I enjoyed spending time with Jorma because I loved him. In fact, I loved all the men in Airplane, and I made love to all of them. That is, the ones who were in the original lineup. Except Marty. Exactly why we didn't make that final connection, I don't know. There were times when I thought it would have brought a beautiful truth to the duets we performed onstage, but that sort of fantasy wasn't strong enough to cut through whatever aversion Marty might have had to consummating an artistic partnership. He might have just thought I was a jerk. At any rate, we both maintained enough of a distance that singing together sometimes felt like a competitive sport.
I still enjoyed Marty's presence, though, and his music. I think “Today” and “Comin' Back to Me” are two of the best love songs ever written.
I saw you—comin' back to me,
Through an open window where no curtain hung,
I saw you—comin' back to me
In a way, Marty's capacity for love reached me through his songs. And that was the main attraction—the music. Each member of our band—and probably most bands for that matter—had the exquisite ability to appreciate and produce sound that communicated. Whether an individual likes the sitar or bagpipes, Old English lyrics or “punk shriek,” everybody listens to someone calling on their humanity through music. For some, it's the purest form of expression, for others a brief passing delight, but it exists like no other art form in every culture, in all languages, giving voice to anyone who wants to sing. And when we sing together, everyone becomes perfect for a while.
But only for a while.
The unrest in the group was emerging in a visible way. We were starting to pair off—Jack and Jorma, Grace and Paul—or retreat as individuals: Marty into his own world, and Spencer into relationships with the women in his life.
We were in a new decade where the style of the old cup was being outmoded and replaced by a more physical and material disco sound. Airplane's promise was becoming exhausted. Or perhaps it was just like every other human contract—there's a time when the initial passion and novelty fades and attention turns to that which has not yet been experienced. We want a new game, a new job, a new government, a new husband, a new mistress, a new art form.
Although at this point we didn't discuss it out loud, we were all thinking similar thoughts. Without the constraints of Airplane, the possibilities seemed bright.
For Jack and Jorma, as Hot Tuna, they could …
For Grace and Paul, doing albums together, we could …
For Marty, working solo, he could …
And on and on.
The big chariot was getting cumbersome, and everyone saw some kind of freedom in the solo wild horse.
Marty, Yours Truly, and Paul at a free concert in Golden Gate Park. (People Weekly © 1975 Michael Alexander)
We made our next two albums, Bark and Long John Silver, in this irritated state. Back in 1967, when we were making After Bathing at Baxter's, Jorma had driven a motorcycle right into the studio (while Jack was recording), waving at several people sitting on the floor getting high with a nitrous oxide tank. But now, in the early seventies, even the fun of frivolous mutual excess was missing from the recording sessions. We just couldn't get a good bacchanal going for lack of interest in what we'd become. The desire to give the best performance had been reduced to barely compliant execution. The music was splintered. Each member worked on his or her own material, then put as little time as possible into everybody else's work.
Our new drummer, Joey Covington, was a fresh-faced Oshkosh B'Gosh blond farmboy whose enthusiasm at being in this famous group didn't rub off on the old regulars. We thought he was young, strong, and hopelessly naive. Jorma let not only the band, but the record-buying public as well, know of his dissatisfaction with Airplane, with his song, “Third Week in the Chelsea.”
So we go on moving trying to make this image real
Straining every nerve not knowing what we really feel
Straining every nerve and making everybody see
That what they read in the Rolling Stone has really come to be
And trying to avoid a taste of that reality …
All my friends keep telling me that it would be a shame
To break up such a grand success and tear apart a name
But all I know is what I feel whenever I'm not playin'
Emptiness ain't where it's at and neither's feeling pain
It was difficult to avoid the truth. I remembered that in 1970, prior to the two final Airplane studio albums, Paul had made a “solo” record called Blows against the Empire that had been a refreshing experience. Jerry Garcia, Graham Nash, Mickey Hart, Jack Casady, David Crosby, and several other musicians from the local bands had joined in on that strange opus about living in a floating space city. Everyone had made suggestions and offered both talent and input to the effort, making it a pleasant process and, I think, a very unique record.
Spillin' out of the steel glass
Gravity gone from the cage
A million pounds gone from your heavy mass
All the years gone from your age …
The light in the night is the sun
And it can carry you around the planetary ground …
And the people you see will leave you be
More than the ones you've known before
Hey—rollin' on
We come and go like a comet
We are wanderers
Are you anymore?
“STARSHIP” FROM BLOWS AGAINST THE EMPIRE
The long faces and malaise of the subsequent Airplane albums suffered in comparison. Whether you were talking about Jack and Jorma, or Marty, or Paul and me, whatever we did away from the group was infused with more enthusiasm than anything Airplane was doing. But you don't just ignore a record contract; RCA could have sent pit bulls with law degrees to the West Coast for a dinner of rock stars. But actually, they were almost accommodating. When it was obvious that no one wanted to keep drinking out of the old cup, RCA spent the next few years putting out compilation albums and efforts from the Airplane offshoot groups and pandering to our desire to have our own record label called Grunt.
It was a dark time for us; even the studio in San Francisco that we used for Bark and Long John Silver was depressing. Located in a San Francisco slum, there were bars on three corners and a methadone clinic on the fourth. Paul once stopped his VW bus to run into the studio and get something (it took him all of about five minutes), and when he got back, his bus was gone.
The fracturing of the group was something over which I had no control, so I jumped into the bottle to hide. I used cocaine to keep the booze going, and after long days and nights in the studio doing very little but drugs, I was getting fat and sloppy. After recording until the early hours, coming out into the sunrise with a hangover compounded the disintegration of both my own integrity and the cohesiveness of the band. I was figuratively what we had predicted—dead at the age of thirty.
One good thing about my body was its refusal to be shit-faced on a regular basis. After a night of drugs and booze, I'd have to (and want to) give it a rest. I've never liked being loaded on a daily basis, but being straight consistently wasn't particularly interesting, either. At that point, I was doing as much drinking as I could without becoming totally nonfunctional. Apparently, I did a fairly successful job of blotting everything out because I don't remember much about the albums or the road trips. My only hope seemed to lie in the possibility of a band being formed from the various musicians who'd performed on Paul's record or our duo albums.
In retrospect, Jefferson Airplane's breakup was not so much any one's fault, as it was simply the end of an era. I can see that we were unwilling to make a smooth transition into the next phase, but then I can think of other people who had an even tougher time with crossovers. (Marie Antoinette and Czar Nicholas come to mind.) As individuals, we weren't mortally wounded by the split; we were just a bit trashed around the edges. Each person had to deal with the next rung on the ladder in his or her own way and according to his or her own emotional abilities.
We were all afraid. After all, it was an ending. But my reaction to the dissolution took on more strident and obnoxious proportions than those of the rest of the band members. Some people recognize their own fear immediately and act accordingly. In my case, it happens a little differently. Because of the stoic household in which I was raised, my programmed reaction to fear, pain, or sadness is convoluted; I don't even apply it in the right direction. When I start to feel any of the above emotions, it's as if the moment it registers in my brain, I flip it around and become a half-assed warrior. Then a few days later, I take that repressed fear and get busy ripping up New Zealand, when I'm actually angry at Germany. Miss Directed Anger.
So, in the end, while some people sulk, others retreat, and still others party, I drink a whole lot and run my mouth.