“So childish”: When Grace Slick chastised Paul Kantner for his comic bid to sabotage Jefferson Starship
Longevity is the marker which separates a revolution from a fleeting uprising.
While the counterculture age of the 1960s might have revolutionised the musical landscape of the United States, it didn’t take long for the music industry to revert back to profit margins and middle-of-the-road slop, and nothing represented that depressing shift quite like the downfall of Jefferson Airplane and their 1980s incarnation, Starship.
Back in the inarguably rose-tinted age of flower power, peace and love, Jefferson Airplane were the harbingers of the hippie revolution. From acid-soaked origins in the San Francisco psychedelic scene, the incomparable tones of Grace Slick and the musical mastery of Paul Kantner saw the band strike upon masterpiece albums like Surrealistic Pillow, capturing the zeitgeist of the counterculture age in the process. In fact, if one song is capable of capturing the entirety of the 1960s, ‘White Rabbit’ is certainly up there.
Even so, nothing lasts forever. Particularly when you spend multiple years on a constant, sleep-deprived acid trip around the world, things are bound to fall apart eventually, and that is just what happened to Jefferson Airplane. The end was nigh, and despite creating a few incredible but ultimately underrated records during the early 1970s, like Thirty Seconds Over Winterland, the glory days were clearly over.
Rather than throwing in the towel, though, Jefferson Airplane morphed into Jefferson Starship, a new name for a group with newfound motivation and sonic inspiration, away from the expectations of ‘White Rabbit’. That particular spin-off largely revolved around the minds of Paul Kantner and his former partner Grace Slick, who had both been essential to the driving force of the Airplane. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, though, the former lovers didn’t often see eye-to-eye and – to cut a long story short – Kantner left the group in 1984, immediately launching a legal battle over the use of the ‘Jefferson’ name.
So, Slick regrouped the band as Starship, losing the essence of what had made Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship so fantastic both in sound and name. The Starship era is one that many people, including Slick, would rather forget, but it did foster the creation of one of the most successful (and subsequently hated) tracks of the 1980s: ‘We Built This City’, a Baudrillard-esque travesty which showed just how far American culture had deteriorated in less than two decades.
With the unimaginable success of that single, though, came a fresh angle on the relationship between Kantner and Slick, the former band leader presumably being quite miffed about the band’s all-time biggest hit coming immediately after his departure. “Trouble with Paul is that he wanted to run the band,” Slick once explained, in a circa-1986 interview.
“He thinks that because he’s gone, the group should stop…he still has the key to our office, and he sometimes comes in at night and pokes the eyes out of our pictures on the posters.” Adding, “He’s so childish for a man of 45, I feel sorry for him.”
All’s well that ends well, I suppose. In the years that followed the disgusting bubblegum bollockery of ‘We Built This City’, Kantner reformed Jefferson Starship during the early 1990s and performed with his former band until his ultimate death in 2016. Meanwhile, Grace Slick has repeatedly denounced ‘We Built This City’ and retired from the music industry altogether shortly thereafter, having rebuilt some bridges with Kantner along the way.
