Showing posts with label paul kantner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label paul kantner. Show all posts

Tuesday, 19 February 2013

LINK: Jefferson Starship still flies unplugged

Paul Kantner, second from left, will perform an acoustic show with Jefferson Starship on Feb. 16 at the Mount Dora Music Festival.
As part of Jefferson Airplane, singer-guitarist Paul Kantner helped create the acid-tinged, heavy rock sound that defined psychedelic San Francisco in the 1960s.
Yet Kantner's role in that band and its signature hits such as "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit" was influenced by his first musical love, the folk sound of Pete Seeger and the Weavers.
"I'm in awe of the Weavers because of what they did, how they did it and how it influenced us," Kantner said in a recent phone interview from his San Francisco home. "A lot of the three-part harmonies in our band came from my infatuation with the Weavers. The reason we had a girl singer in the Jefferson Airplane was because of [Weavers' female vocalist] Ronnie Gilbert."
Kantner will revisit his folk roots in an acoustic concert by Airplane-spinoff Jefferson Starship on Saturday as part of the Mount Dora Music Festival. The four-day event, which starts Thursday, will feature concerts by pop, classical, folk and rock acts, including free outdoor performances in Donnelly Park.
Kantner's current incarnation of Jefferson Starship, a four-piece ensemble featuring founding member David Freiberg, multi-instrumentalist Chris Smith and lead vocalist Cathy Richardson, focuses on the band's roots in the early 1970s. The group plays about 100 concerts a year.
In its early days, Jefferson Starship was a freewheeling outfit that enlisted contributions from members of Crosby, Stills & Nash and the Grateful Dead. (Kantner's band shouldn't be confused with Starship featuring Mickey Thomas, a group that performs Starship's 1980s hits.)
Kantner, 71, discovered Richardson, who fills the role of iconic vocalist Grace Slick, after watching her in the lead role of whiskey-voiced rocker Janis Joplin in the theatrical production "Love, Janis."
"She sang like Janis," Kantner said. "I heard her voice and asked her, 'Hey, do you want a job?' It turns out she had been fond of our band since she was a teenager. So now, she's delightfully singing in her own way all the songs that we do."
CURRENTLY AVAILABLE AT GONZO


Posted by at No comments:
Labels: ,

Saturday, 16 February 2013

PAUL KANTNER HAS 'FLU


Jefferson Starship co-founder Paul Kantner was forced to miss last night's gig at Skipper's Smokehouse in Tampa. The venue sent out an email stating that the 71-year-old guitarist was home in San Francisco with the flu. Jude Gold, a regular guitarist for the band during their electric shows, took Kantner's place. Skipper's said the band is planning a make-up date featuring Kantner for later in the year, and tickets for tonight's show will be good for that future concert as well.
Corinna and I both had swine fun a couple of years ago and it was a horrible experience. Our love and best wishes go out to Paul and hope that he recovers soon.
In the meantime if you need a fix of this remarkable band:
CURRENTLY AVAILABLE AT GONZO
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: ,

Friday, 8 February 2013

LINK: A Conversation With Jefferson Starship's Paul Kantner

2012-08-24-jeffersonstarshiptalesfromthemothershippromocoverpic.jpg
A Conversation With Jefferson Starship's Paul Kantner
Mike Ragogna: Paul, you played a concert at Roswell, and your new album is called Tales From The Mothership. Of course, "Roswell" has a certain connotation, it being the at the heart of many "aliens among us" stories and the ultimate conspiracy theory. Is there any particular thing about Roswell that resonates with you?
Paul Kantner: No, Roswell is just that spirit of the unknown, and it's become quite a thing in itself because of the situation around it. We decided to play there because of that science fiction connection. "Crown Of Creation" was probably my first science fiction song that I can think of off the top of my head. At the time, I was at our house on Fulton Street and the Democratic convention of 1968 called us, the way they do--famous musicians, when they're having their conventions. They wanted us to write a song for them and I was reading a book called Rebirth by John Wyndham and I was playing a little blues lick that I had stolen from Jorma [Kaukonen]. Sort of a shuffle. There was just a good collection of song lyrics that popped out of that book that became most the lyrics of "Crown Of Creation." I just put it all together as a joke, knowing that if they read the lyrics, they'd never use it. I've never been very political in terms of dealing face-to-face with political people and we've never done a benefit except for Barry Milton from Country Joe & The Fish when he ran for judge or something in San Francisco; another sort of joke. I sent "Crown Of Creation" to them and, to their credit, somebody read the lyrics and knew that it was not what they wanted to say for their convention. So they turned it down, but it became one of our most popular songs in the aftermath.
MR: Since we're talking about sci-fi, there's your solo album Blows Against The Empire that had a pretty large musicians roster. You use the term "Jefferson Starship," a creative choice, maybe inferring it had a bigger vision than the Airplane's?
PK: Well, it wasn't, but pretty much what you said is what is. I was in the studio making an album and other bands and people were in the same studio. We would wander back and forth between each other's studios and see what they were doing, and we'd sometimes sit in on each other's songs or they'd come and sit in on some of our songs. That's how it happened, that all the people who are on that album came to be on that album.
MR: And over the years, hasn't it come close to being turned into other media events?
CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM GONZO

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: ,

Wednesday, 27 June 2012

LINK: Starship enterprise - Music is still a frontier for Paul Kantner and Co

The time was 1970. Jefferson Airplane, one of the most successful 1960s rock bands to merge folk-rock and psychedelia, was in the process of crashing to the ground.

Paul Kantner, one of the group’s principal songwriters and guitarists, had already begun crafting a set of songs for what was supposed to be the next Jefferson Airplane album. Instead, he recruited a number of other musicians (including friends David Crosby and Graham Nash, as well as his partner, Grace Slick, the Airplane’s female singer) to record the songs.

Read on

...and check out the Gonzo Artist Page for Jefferson Starship you know it makes sense.

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)
...BECAUSE SOME OF US THINK THAT THIS STUFF IS IMPORTANT
What happens when you mix what is - arguably - the world's most interesting record company, with an anarchist manic-depressive rock music historian polymath, and a method of dissemination which means that a daily rock-music magazine can be almost instantaneous?

Most of this blog is related in some way to the music, books and films produced by Gonzo Multimedia, but the editor has a grasshopper mind and so also writes about all sorts of cultural issues which interest him, and which he hopes will interest you as well.