Jefferson Airplane: 12 Essential Songs

“Crown of Creation” (1968)

In 1968, Kantner got a call from someone with the Democratic Party. “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,” he recalled in 2012. “I just put it all together as a joke, knowing that if they read the lyrics, they’d never use it.” Well, someone must have read those lyrics. The Democrats didn’t use “Crown of Creation” ”” Hubert Humphrey had enough problems in ’68 without selecting a campaign song based on a novel about telepathic mutants struggling to escape religious persecution in post-apocalyptic Labrador. But as one of the first of Kantner’s songs to be directly influenced by science fiction, “Crown of Creation” indicated the direction his songwriting was headed.

“We Can Be Together” (1969)

Just a few months after the MC5 battled with Elektra over the utterance of “motherfucker” on Kick Out the Jams, Paul Kantner threw the same word into “We Can Be Together.” One of the Jefferson Airplane’s most savage, incendiary statements, the song embraces every negative stereotype of the counterculture ”” “We are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent and young” ”” before dropping the M-bomb and proclaiming, “We are the forces of chaos and anarchy.” Never Mind the Bollocks was still eight years away.

“Wooden Ships” (1969)

One weekend in 1968, Paul Kantner and Stephen Stills found themselves hanging out in Fort Lauderdale on David Crosby’s boat ”” a 59-foot schooner that the king of folk-rock harmony had christened the Mayan. “I had been unceremoniously tossed out of the Byrds, and I had some time on my hands,” Crosby would later recall. “I was down there just goofing off.”

Once Stills and Kantner were there, it was only a matter of time before the guitars came out. “I had this set of changes that I’d been playing for a long time, that I really, really loved,” Crosby recalled. “We were sitting around in the main cabin of the boat, and we started fooling around, as we would naturally do.” Kantner and Stills contributed a few verses each, sketching an allegorical tale about the seafaring survivors of a future apocalypse; the image of “wooden ships on the water, very free and easy” was Kantner’s.

“Wooden Ships” ended up becoming a spacey highlight of Crosby, Stills and Nash’s self-titled debut in 1969. It reappeared the following year in a darker, edgier rendition on the Airplane’s Volunteers. In his original Rolling Stone review of the album, critic Ed Ward wrote that “Wooden Ships” had “been given new life by Paul Kantner. … The song comes off as more of a scream of desperation than does the Crosby-Stills-Nash version. … It is an epic performance, and one of the best the Airplane has ever done.”

“Volunteers” (1969)

Months before they played Woodstock, Jefferson Airplane headed into a San Francisco studio and cut their long-awaited fifth album, Volunteers. The title track, written by Paul Kantner and Marty Balin, seemed like an unambiguous call for a new American revolution, even though the inspiration came from an unlikely source. “It became political but it didn’t start out that way,” Marty Balin said in 1993. “I had woken up to the sound of garbage cans crashing outside the mansion and looked out, and there was this Volunteers of America truck, so I wrote that down and gave it to Paul and he wrote the song. Bang. People put all kinds of meaning into it.”

“Mexico” (1970)

Not longer after taking the Oath of Office in January of 1969, President Richard Nixon set his sights on sealing the border between America and Mexico to stop the steady flow of marijuana into the states. He called it Operation Intercept, and it did not sit well with Jefferson Airplane. Grace Slick made her feelings on the matter very clear in the lyrics of “Mexico.” “But Mexico is under the thumb,” she wrote. “Of a man we call Richard/And he’s come to call himself king/But he’s a small-headed man.” Crazily enough, Slick attended the same New York finishing school as Nixon’s daughter Tricia, and not long after the song came out she was invited to a ten-year reunion at the White House. Slick showed up with Abbie Hoffman. “I had planned to spike Richard Nixon’s tea with acid,” she said in 2011. “But when Abbie and I were on line, a security guard wouldn’t let me in. He said, ‘We checked and you’re a security risk.'”