Paul Kantner

Any other group would have packed up and gone home, but not this one.

Jefferson Starship, with Paul Kantner now the only remaining link to the airplane, just continued, business as usual.

Welcome to Disco Graffiti, the deep dive podcast for music obsessives that gives maniacs like you and me the chance to connect with a brotherhood obsessed with rating the entire discography of every single artist and band that ever mattered.

I'm your host, Dave Gebro, and when I was a kid, I thought I loved music.

Part 24 of the series, Jefferson Starship Takes Off, covers a wildly eventful five-year period from Baron von Tollbooth and the Chrome Nun's May 1973 release to Jefferson Starship's dissolution in late 1978 in the style of an audiobook.

Here are just a few of the many things discussed in this episode of Discograffiti.

how Grace's first solo album directly led to the formation of Jefferson Starship, the classic fruits of the Starship's first ever session, the process of Marty Balin tiptoeing back into the Jefferson fold, Hot Tuna, The Metal Years, The Marty Miracle That Was Miracles, Paul and Grace Break Up, Hot Tuna Break Up, the show in Germany that precipitated the breakup of Jefferson Starship Mark I, and an overview of the four albums that iteration of the band released, Dragonfly, Red Octopus, Spitfire, and Earth.

And away we go then! Bill Thompson says, that summer, we had all kinds of huge shows that would gross for us a million some dollars through August.

Yeah.

As Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane told Dan Noyes, and I quote, "Us and a whole lot of other people were in this swirling mass of San Francisco.

Nobody knew what was going on other than just we were enjoying it.

I call it the Golden Age of [beep], if you will, after birth control and before disease, where our generation just got away with so much."

Yeah, he was-

...

Paul Kantner's like-

... popping off about that.

During the folk boom of the early 60s, while Johnny Come Lately's Left, Right, and Center were writing train songs, and that includes his future bandmate Dino Valenti, this guy actually worked for the railroad.

For a while, he shared a house in Venice, California with David Crosby and Paul Kantner, and man alive to have been a fly on that wall.

Fancy yourself the outlaw sort? This man's tenure in Quicksilver Messenger service was literally bookended by marijuana bust prison sentences.

He co-founded the aforementioned group with guitarists John Cipollina, Jim Murray, Gary Duncan, and drummer Greg Elmore in 1965.

Born out of the legendary 60s psychedelic counterculture icon Jefferson Airplane, the group morphed into Jefferson Starship in 1974.

Chorus spearheaded by Paul Kantner and Grace Slick.

The band traded the avant-garde folk rock of Woodstock for a more polished FM radio sound.

Across multi-platinum albums like Dragonfly in 74, Red Octopus in 75, and Spitfire in 76, the band established themselves as a legitimate American rock act.

UFO sightings as well, and mysterious atmospheric lights streaking through night skies.

Looking back on the experience, the band members viewed their brief trip to a galaxy far, far away with a mix of bemused detachment, and cynical amusement.

Co-founder Paul Kantner later summarized the performance in a 1984 interview with the Eurodisc Agenda.

That was a long time ago.