Paul Kantner and Marty Balin both gone now. I can't imagine how Grace Slick feels tonight.
I remember in Grace's autobiography that she wrote about sleeping with every member of the band except for Marty, but she made love to him every night on stage. That's so obvious in some of these duets. The Slick/Kantner mix has one kind of magic, but the Slick/Balin blend of voices was the early Airplane sound.
Earlier today we heard the news that Signe Anderson, the singer on the first Jefferson Airplane album of 1966, had died at 74 on January 28, the same day the Jefferson Airplane's Paul Kantner had died at 74. On the cover of Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, Paul and Signe are standing on either side of the propellor in the center of the band. I have to admit that it's not the Airplane album I'm most familiar with, so I put the CD in the car and went for a drive on back roads in the hills and listened to it from beginning to end. I was especially struck when the first solo appearance of Signe's voice came with the words "Some will come and some will go | We shall surely pass" in Dino Valenti's "Let's Get Together" (the hit version of this song was recorded a year later than the Airplane version by The Youngbloods).
If there was one album that was my interior soundtrack as I finished high school and moved into college, it was Paul Kantner's Blows Against the Empire. I knew (I know) every note and every word up to and including this final song:
Hearing the unexpected news of Paul Kantner's death tonight is hitting me hard.
According to the results of free non-scientific online tests, TBL found that he was "Existentialist", "Communist", and "A Grammar God," i.e., if he were a short wall-eyed Frenchman rather than a 6'3" blond American, he would be constantly mistaken for Jean-Paul Sartre!
