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You might remember that back in 1985 when Paul Kantner exited the band he’d founded because somehow it had mutated into a soulless pop-rock entity, he took legal action regarding the name -- leaving the Starship, but taking the Jefferson.
Well, 23 years later he’s making good use of that in the reconstituted version of the group he currently fronts. The namesake -- our third president, the author of the Declaration of Independence, possessor of a complicated private life that was left out of the history books until recent times -- figures centrally in the new album billed as Jefferson Starship Presents Jefferson’s Tree of Liberty.
“Thomas was quite the f***-up in his life, but he certainly contributed a great amount to our lives,” says Kantner during a break between Jefferson Starship tour legs. “And I try to do the same.”
In this case, the effort takes explicit musical form, Jefferson’s message threaded by Bob Dylan (“Chimes of Freedom”), Phil Ochs (“I Ain’t Marching Any More”) and a splicing of John Lennon and Bob Marley (“Imagine” overlaid with great effectiveness on “Redemption Song”). There are rebels (the Irish call to arms “Rising of the Moon”) and peacemakers, tales of social injustice (the Richard Thompson/Fairport Convention underclass account “Genesis Hall”) and social action (the underground railroad account “Follow the Drinking Gourd”). And there is the power of community and camaraderie in both song (the closing version of Richard Farina’s “The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood”) and the singing, the blend of voices with Kantner and Quicksilver/Jefferson Starship veteran David Frieberg (as well as Jefferson Airplane co-founder Marty Balin) joined in the fluid lineup by such more recent partners as singers Cathy Richardson and Darby Gould and former Tubes drummer Prairie Prince. It definitely gives this largely acoustic affair the ambience of a combo hootenanny.
For all those prominent names, though, one could argue that a more accurate title would be The Weavers’ Songs of Liberty. Kantner makes no bones about it: ‘50s folk revival leaders the Weavers and the quartet’s best known member, Pete Seeger, are very much the inspiration for this project -- and pretty much everything he’s ever done. The Weavers’ signature “Wasn’t That a Time” leads off the album, while several other playful selections come from the Weavers’ repertoire, including the proto-“Mighty Wind” romantic tease “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” (a Leadbelly song the Weavers popularized), which serves as a great palette-cleanser along the way.
“It goes back to about 1960 when I first heard the Weavers,” says Kantner, 67, mentioning that in recent years four of the six slots in his car’s CD changer have held Weavers discs. “My whole oeuvre comes from seeing them. When I learned to play music I bought Pete Seeger’s five-string banjo book. He taught me to play an instrument, if not competently and capably then enjoyably. And I give a lot of credit to them for making me want to be in a band. It looked like so much fun, despite their run-ins with the House Un-American Activities Committee. The Weavers also created the template of a band, what a band should be – not just going out and making pop hits and being famous because they have some hits on the radio, but the long-term realization of something that will last and is worth lasting.
That may explain why the new album fits so well with other things he’s done in the course of 40-plus years despite the great changes in his surrounding cast. The vibe isn’t that far off from the very first Jefferson Airplane album Takes Off, before Grace Slick even joined and with Singe Anderson harmonizing alongside Balin and Kantner, an approach Kantner renewed in a space-age context with 1970’s Blows Against the Empire, the first time he used the Jefferson Starship name.
Arguably, though, this recent release is really a 2008 echo of the Airplane’s 1969 album Volunteers, which in its title song in particular captured the cultural change going on at the time with its rousing “got a revolution” cry. The new album even opens with a guitar figure that is almost straight out of “Volunteers.” Kantner, though, cautions about drawing conclusions regarding the intent of this music, as well as the older cousin.
“People have pointed out we’re a political band since Volunteers,” he says. “We’re not. We’re observers and commentators, but we rarely go out and support causes of politicians or movements. We just encourage people to be human and look at their life and enjoy it and question it. We only did one benefit for a politician in our career, and that was for Barry Melton of Country Joe & the Fish when he was running for mayor or something. We looked into McGovern when he was running and visited with Bobby Kennedy’s people when he was running, but never aligned ourselves with a politician. They’re horrible people as a rule. Even worse than music industry people.”
As for the songs mostly being from past eras, Kantner says, “All of the songs speak to now, in that folk music speaks to you all the time.”
“A lot of these are songs we were singing before we even started to be in a band,” he says. “Several were songs we pulled out from nowhere because we liked them. ‘Chimes of Freedom,’ always loved that song and I think we do it in a way different than it’s been done before. Didn’t try to sound like the Weavers or the Byrds, just took the song and started singing, which is all we really do.”
And that takes Kantner right back to where he started with all this, to the place where hearing the Weavers launched him on the flight path he continues to soar.
“One of the reasons I’m still in music is the mysteriousness of how music works on people,” he says. “I don’t know I want a reason or explanation, but it’s a mystery how this combination of notes and melody and harmony effects people. A voluptuous architecture still unexplainable for me. I still get to play with this, understand what’s going on but still not understanding why it works.”
Kind of like Jeffersonian democracy, eh?
