Marty Balin

You

know, when it comes to White Rabbit, I want Marty Balin and Paul Cantor and...

Not quite the same.

And Grace Slick.

How Mickey Thomas wound up replacing two legendary singers in Jefferson Starship.

Marty Balin stages a wildly obscure rock opera about being prosecuted for not having hits.

With Hot Tuna on hiatus, Jack and Jorma gleefully confuse their fans with punk band SVT and New Wave outfit White Gland.

An overview of Gray Slick's entire solo career, including the one release he created without any performative armor.

Mickey signed with the band in April 1979, agreeing to stay on for two albums to see how things went.

He was in the unenviable position of replacing not one, but two legendary singers, Grace Slick and Marty Ballin, and if audiences didn't accept him, he wanted the opportunity to get the hell out.

Speaking of audience rejection, a large part of Marty Balin's 1979 was given over to producing a rock opera called Rock Justice.

Probably the oddest and most obscure episode of Balin's long up-and-down career, Balin wrote and directed it for the stage, and it premiered at the Old Waldorf Club in San Francisco, where it promptly flopped, for reasons apparent enough to the chosen few blessed enough to get to hear the 1980 cast album.

Lesh would call it a weird start.

During Jefferson Airplane's set, Marty Balin saw Angels beating a man with pool cues.

He dove off the stage to intervene.

An angel named Animal knocked him unconscious.

From the late '70s to the mid-1980s, it's the wild and crazy story of Jefferson Airplane Mark II.

Plus, Hot Tuna Goes Punk, and Marty Balin writes and stages a rock opera.

There will be a very short sneak peek running publicly for free on Tuesday morning, but the entirety of the show will only be accessible on the major tier of our Patreon.

A heartfelt Discography thanks goes out to my beautiful son Mason, Lenny K, David Freiberg, Rudy Fishman, Becky Boyd, my mom, my dad, my incredibly loyal fans, and especially the entire Patreon community, the Soldiers of Sound.

It's like, it's a bad scene.

And Marty Balin getting, you know, beat up by the lead singer of the Jefferson Airplane, getting beat up by the Hells Angels and knocked out.

You know, it was just, ooh, it's just, it's one of those things that's interesting to watch, but you're glad you weren't there.

Yeah.

Yeah

... and beating people up, beating up Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane.

So horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible thing that happened.

But anyway, but things were starting to splinter.

Because what happened is like, uh, they didn't have a strict backstage list, so we were letting all these beautiful women backstage.

And then finally, Bill Thompson, manager of The Airplane, and Marty Balin, who was, uh, the lead singer.

Marty was a sweetheart guy.

God, I miss him.

Here are just a few of the many things that David discusses with Disco Graffiti in this podcast.

David's attempts to keep Jefferson Airplane together, his favorite of the two Starship eras, what happened at that 1978 gig in Germany, his favorite Marty Balin moment ever, how his classic song Jane was born, and an overview of Blows Against the Empire, Baron Von Tolbooth and the Chrome Nun, Manhole, and the four albums released by the 1970s iteration of Jefferson Starship, Dragonfly, Red Octopus, Spitfire, and Earth.

And away we go then! How much of the sound from that period, from the 74 to 78 period, was actually your handiwork behind the scenes away from the spotlight? Did you have a lot to do with the construction of that sonic identity? I never thought about it.

I feel like

Yeah, it's a cool song.

And he had a lot to do with making it cool.

What are your favorite records from that period in descending order? So what's your favorite of Dragonfly, Red Octopus, Spitfire, and Earth, then second, third, and fourth?

You have

The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now, here and after officially called superintelligence, changing the name.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the passing away of the founder of Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship, Marty Balin, who passed away in 2018, the 27th of September, 76 years old.

This, of course, White Rabbit.

Jefferson Airplane.

I mean, I definitely want to hear about the George Clinton and the P-Funk days.

Also spent time making music with Jay Lane, Peter Tork, Marty Friedman, Martin Balin, Bill Spooner, and locally, Riz and the Believers.

We've done some gigs together.

Riz and the Believers, yeah.