The Paul Kanter song about “stealing a starship” with Jerry Garcia and David Crosby
The advent of the hippie generation and counterculture boom during the 1960s brought with it a complete reassessment of rock and roll. In the years prior, most rock tracks had focused on love, heartbreak and, if you were lucky, dancing. During the counterculture age, however, groups started to discuss some truly groundbreaking topics, ranging from anti-war politics to the joys of mind-altering drugs. At the forefront of this scene were the psychedelia-fuelled groups of San Francisco, like The Grateful Dead and, of course, Jefferson Airplane.
Jefferson Airplane were a particularly original outfit. Throughout their celebrated discography, the Grace Slick-fronted psych rockers explored countless revolutionary themes within their songwriting. From their stunning indictment of the conflict in Vietnam on tracks like ‘Volunteers’ to the incredible exploration of acid trips and psychedelia on ‘White Rabbit’, the Airplane were a band like no other. However, as the band members became more and more immersed in the hippie scene, their material became increasingly spaced out.
While the material of Jefferson Airplane never really declined in quality, as shown by the groundbreaking nature of their later releases, the group began to explore different themes within their songwriting. Perhaps their most far-out effort came in 1970 after Paul Kanter had embarked upon a particularly psychedelic solo project, entitled ‘Paul Kanter and Jefferson Starship’ (a name that would later be co-opted by Grace Slick when she founded Jefferson Starship four years later).
Kanter’s stunning 1970 concept record Blows Against the Empire was his first solo project away from Jefferson Airplane. The album features some intensely bizarre yet captivating songwriting, owing largely to Kanter’s penchant for psychedelic drugs. The stand-out track, ‘Hijack’, written in collaboration with his Jefferson Airplane bandmates, is especially drug-fuelled, arising from an unbelievable acid trip the songwriter had experienced with David Crosby and the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia.
During an interview with Rolling Stone back in 1970, Kanter said of the track, “It’s about us — me and Jerry Garcia and David Crosby stealing a starship — hijacking a spaceship, going where whoever comes along wants to go”.
Expanding upon this unlikely inspiration, he explained, “It’s my answer to the ecology problem. It’s the only way it’s all going to get together and work. Unless we have a war or a big disease or a famine, there’s just too many people, and they’re gonna have to get off the planet,” adding, “This is my way of starting to get off a little earlier”.
It seems as though Kanter had thought long and hard about the idea of this hypothetical, probably hallucinatory, starship. He spoke in detail to the magazine about the ship, sharing, “We don’t have to stay anywhere, we’ll land wherever we want and then take off again. The sun is only one solar system out of millions of solar systems. The orbit of Pluto is probably a speck of tiny dust in the whole universe”.
In case you had any doubts about just how much acid was present in the San Francisco scene during the 1960s, Kanter continued, “There’s millions of other whole planetary systems. It would be interesting to just keep going till you stop, to see what stops you, until you run into the side of the bowl or something and see this guy out there looking at you”.
Seemingly, Kanter channelled all this extraterrestrial energy into the grooves of Blows Against the Empire; a record which is far too often overlooked within the history of Jefferson Airplane.
