The story of how Jean-Luc Godard got Jefferson Airplane arrested: “It was really loud”
Rock and roll has always been linked to the silver screen, going right back to the days of Elvis Presley’s multitude of unwatchable film appearances, but the two cultural worlds were perhaps never closer than during the period of French New Wave, when director Jean-Luc Godard adopted a fittingly rebellious approach to filmmaking.
Snatching the means of cinematic production from the bourgeoisie and focusing his camera on the wild lives of ordinary people, Godard’s output was always rooted in revolution, and it was only a matter of time before Godard came face to face with the kind of rock and roll rebellion that his films were inspiring.
In 1968, he spent exhaustive hours within the realm of The Rolling Stones, observing the voices of a generation strike upon their magnum opus, ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, marking a particularly pivotal point in Godard’s filmography. Prior to his time with Mick Jagger and company, though, Godard was focusing his attention on the acid-dripped world of counterculture psychedelia through the lens of Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane.
A band that typified the hippie age like no other, Jefferson Airplane were almost as renowned for their wild off-stage antics as they were for progenitive psychedelic masterpieces like ‘White Rabbit’. Godard, aiming to capture this blossoming counterculture in a project entitled One AM, which was set to feature the Airplane carving out their 1968 masterpiece Crown of Creation. In the end, though, the film came crashing down around a police station, with Grace Slick in cuffs and Godard in tow.
For the film, the band climbed to the dizzying heights of New York’s Schuyler Hotel, where they performed the song ‘The House at Pooneil Corners’ for the bewildered commuters and passers-by below. This was months before The Beatles ascended to the roof of Apple Corps, but the outcome was the same: police intervention.
“I expected somebody to show up, ’cause it was really loud,” Slick joked in a 1970 interview with Rolling Stone. “You know, a knock on the door, ‘I’m trying to sleep, could you turn it down?’”
However, the NYPD weren’t all that accommodating to a group of tripped-out hippies performing rock and roll on a rooftop, and so the band were promptly arrested, having gotten through only one full song before the impromptu gig was shut down.
This was, of course, gold as far as Godard was concerned; how better to exemplify the widening generational divide in American society than with reels of Jefferson Airplane being escorted from a roof by uniformed police. In fact, Slick even theorised that the entire thing was a set-up by the director.
“He goes out and does stuff and then films what happens with it, and he has a certain plan of a beginning of the action, and then he lets the natural event follow through,” she explained.
Whether or not Godard concocted the entire situation to make for a good scene, it was all for nothing in the end. The director left One AM unfinished, diverting his attention to the activities of The Rolling Stones and leaving that infamous footage of Jefferson Airplane unused. In fact, it wasn’t until 1972 that they were eventually repurposed for D A Pennebaker’s One PM, by which time the heyday of Grace Slick’s outfit was well and truly in the past.
Even still, the collision of Jean-Luc Godard, Jefferson Airplane, and the New York Police Department remains one of the most bizarre events of the counterculture years, encapsulating the relationship between Godard’s work and rock and roll in the process.
