Paul Kantner & Grace Slick - Sunfighter

Paul Kantner & Grace Slick
Sunfighter (1971)
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AMG Biography: This is something of a family album, co-credited to Paul Kantner and his wife, Grace Slick, and featuring on its cover a photograph of their infant daughter, China. It also features the family of San Francisco Bay Area musicians, including David Crosby, Graham Nash, Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, and other current members of Jefferson Airplane and future members of Jefferson Starship. Its style of loosely arranged acid rock music and radical left political lyrics is similar to such recent albums as the Kantner/Starship Blows Against the Empire (December 1970) and the Airplane's Bark (August 1971), which were made by most of the same players. But Kantner and Slick's usual stridency is not counterbalanced by substance as much as on earlier efforts, perhaps because they were making too many albums too quickly to keep up the quality of their songwriting. Still, anyone who enjoys the sweet-and-sour unison singing of X's John Doe and Exene Cervenka should listen to Sunfighter to see where they got it from.

Paul Kantner captained the band through various successor incarnations of Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship. In all incarnations of the band, his primary instrument was the rhythm guitar, though he did sing lead or backup vocals on most songs.
During the summer of 1965 singer Marty Balin recruited folk musician Kantner as part of the original Jefferson Airplane.
During the transitional period of the early 1970s, as the band started to disintegrate, Kantner recorded Blows Against The Empire, a concept album featuring an ad-hoc group of musicians whom he dubbed Jefferson Starship, marking the first-ever use of that name. This edition of Jefferson Starship (such as it was) included members of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (David Crosby and Graham Nash) and members of the Grateful Dead (Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann, and Mickey Hart), as well as some of the remaining members of Jefferson Airplane (Grace Slick, Joey Covington, and Jack Casady). In Blows Against the Empire, Kantner (and Slick) sang about a group of people escaping earth in a hijacked starship. The album was nominated in 1971 for a prestigious science fiction prize, the Hugo Award, a rare honor for a musical recording. It was while that album was made that Kantner sealed his love affair with Grace Slick; their daughter China Kantner (who made a name for herself as an MTV veejay in the 1980s) was born shortly thereafter.

Kantner and Slick (with a similar group of musicians, but without a "Jefferson Starship" artist credit) released two follow-up albums: Sunfighter, an environmentalism-tinged album released in 1971 to celebrate China's birth, and 1973's Baron von Tollbooth and the Chrome Nun, titled after the nicknames David Crosby had given to the couple. The artist credit on Baron von Tollboth gave ex-Quicksilver Messenger Service bassist-keyboard player-vocalist David Freiberg equal billing with Kantner and Slick. (Freiberg, who had also appeared on Blows Against the Empire, had joined Jefferson Airplane in time to appear on Thirty Seconds over Winterland.)

Kantner is also credited with discovering teen-age guitarist Craig Chaquico during this time, who first appeared on Sunfighter and would play with Kantner, Slick, and their bands and then with Starship through 1991. He later embarked on a successful solo career as a smooth jazz artist.

By 1973, with Kaukonen and Casady now devoting their full attention to Hot Tuna, the musicians on Baron von Tollbooth formed the core of a new Airplane lineup that was formally reborn as Jefferson Starship in 1974. Kantner, Slick, and Freiberg were charter members. The line-up also included late-Airplane holdovers drummer John Barbata, and fiddler Papa John Creach (who also played with Hot Tuna), along with Pete Sears (who, like Freiberg, played bass and keyboards), and twenty-year-old guitarist Craig Chaquico. Although Balin was originally not among the re-christened Jefferson Starship, he joined the band while their first album, Dragonfly, was still in the works.

In 1984, Kantner (the last founding member of Jefferson Airplane remaining) left the group, but not before taking legal action against his former bandmates over the Jefferson name (the rest of the band wanted to continue as Jefferson Starship). Kantner won his suit, and the group name was reduced to simply Starship, marking the third incarnation of the band.
In 1985, following his departure from Jefferson Starship, Paul Kantner rejoined with Balin and Jack Casady to form the KBC Band, releasing their only album, KBC Band (which included Kantner's hit, "America"), in 1987 on Arista Records.

With Kantner reunited with Balin and Casady, the KBC Band opened the door to a full-blown Jefferson Airplane reunion. In 1989, during a solo San Francisco gig, Paul Kantner found himself joined by former bandmate (and lover) Grace Slick and two other ex-Airplane members for a cameo appearance. This led to a formal reunion of the original Jefferson Airplane (featuring nearly all the main members, including founder Marty Balin, but without Spencer Dryden, who had been kicked out of the band years earlier). A self-titled album was released by Columbia Records. The accompanying tour was a success, but their revival was short-lived, and thus Jefferson Airplane was officially disbanded for good. In 1991 Kantner and Balin formed a new version of Jefferson Starship , Kantner continues to tour with the band as of 2007 and former Jefferson Airplane/Jefferson Starship bassist David Frieberg rejoined the group in 2005.wp.



Grace Slick was born in the Chicago area (Evanston, IL) to Ivan W. Wing (of Norwegian-Swedish extraction) and his wife Virginia Barnett (a direct descendant of Mayflower passengers). In 1949, a month before her tenth birthday, her brother Chris Wing was born. Her father was transferred several times when she was a child and, in addition to the Chicago area, she lived in Los Angeles and San Francisco before her family finally settled in Palo Alto, California, south of San Francisco, in the early fifties. She attended Palo Alto Senior High School before switching to Castilleja High School, a private, all-girls school in Palo Alto. Following graduation, she attended Finch College in New York from 1956-1957 and the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida from 1957-1958.

Before entering the music scene, Slick was a model for I. Magnin for a short time in the early sixties.

Slick maintained a friendship with Janis Joplin that began early in her music career and lasted until Joplin's death by drug overdose on October 4, 1970. She also had a friendship, as well as a one-time sexual relationship, with Jim Morrison. According to her biography, the sexual relationship occurred during their 1968 European tour but no real romance was involved. Jeff Tamarkin's Jefferson Airplane biography, however, makes no mention of such a relationship. She was also good friends with The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia.

Slick was married twice, to cinematographer Gerald "Jerry" Slick from 1961 - 1971, and then to Skip Johnson, a Jefferson Starship lighting designer, from 1976 - 1994. She has one daughter, China Wing Kantner (born January 25, 1971). China's father is former Jefferson Airplane guitarist Paul Kantner, with whom Grace had a relationship from 1969 through 1975. During her stay in the hospital after the baby's birth, Grace sarcastically told one of the attending nurses (who Grace thought to be annoyingly sanctimonious) that she intended to name the child "god", with a small g as she wished for the child to be 'humble'. The nurse took Grace seriously, and her reports of the incident caused both a minor stir and the birth of a rock-and-roll urban legend.



Personnel & Tracks

Silver Spoon

* Grace Slick - Piano / Vocals
* Papa John Creach - Violin
* Jack Casady - Bass
* Joey Covington - Drums
* The Spanish Sexuals - Flute

Diana

* Paul Kantner - Rhythm Guitar / Vocals
* Grace Slick - Piano / Vocals

Sunfighter

* Paul Kantner - Rhythm Guitar / Vocals
* Grace Slick - Piano / Vocals
* Joey Covington - Drums
* Peter Kaukonen - Guitar
* Greg Adams - Trumpet / Flugelhorn
* Mic Gillette - Trombone
* Steven Schuster - Horn Arrangement / Sax / Flute
* Edwin Hawkins Singers - Vocals

Titanic

* Phil Sawyer - Sound Effects

Look at the Wood

* Grace Slick - Vocals
* Paul Kantner - Rhythm Guitar / Vocals
* David Crosby - Vocals / Tambourine
* Graham Nash - Arp
* Jorma Kaukonen - Lead Guitar

When I Was a Boy I Watched the Wolves

* Paul Kantner - Rhythm Guitar / Vocals
* Grace Slick - Vocals
* Peter Kaukonen - Mandolin
* Shelley Silverman - Drums
* Jerry Garcia - Guitar
* David Crosby - Vocals
* Graham Nash - Vocals

Million

* Paul Kantner - Rhythm Guitar / Vocals
* Grace Slick - Piano / Vocals
* Jerry Garcia - Guitar
* Bill Laudner - Vocals

China

* Grace Slick - Piano / Vocals
* Paul Kantner - Rhythm Guitar
* Jack Casady - Bass
* Chris Wing - Drums
* Joey Covington - Drums
* Greg Adams - Trumpet
* Mic Gillette - Trombone
* Steven Schuster - Horn Arrangement / Sax

Earth Mother

* Grace Slick - Piano / Vocals
* Paul Kantner - Vocals
* Jack Traylor - Guitar / Vocals
* Spencer Dryden - Drums
* Craig Chaquico - Lead Guitar
* Papa John Creach - Violin

Diana 2

* Paul Kantner - Rhythm Guitar / Vocals
* Grace Slick - Arp / Vocals
* David Crosby - Vocals
* Graham Nash - Vocals

Universal Copernican Mumbles

* Paul Kantner - Vocals
* Pat Gleeson - Moog / Piano
* John Vierra - Synthesizer Keyboard

Holding Together

* Paul Kantner - Vocals
* Grace Slick - Piano
* Jerry Garcia - Guitar
* Joey Covington - Drums