Somebody to Love? (22 page)
So we go on moving trying to make this image real
Straining every nerve not knowing what we really feel
Straining every nerve and making everybody see
That what they read in the Rolling Stone has really come to be
And trying to avoid a taste of that reality …
All my friends keep telling me that it would be a shame
To break up such a grand success and tear apart a name
But all I know is what I feel whenever I'm not playin'
Emptiness ain't where it's at and neither's feeling pain
It was difficult to avoid the truth. I remembered that in 1970, prior to the two final Airplane studio albums, Paul had made a “solo” record called
Blows against the Empire
that had been a refreshing experience. Jerry Garcia, Graham Nash, Mickey Hart, Jack Casady, David Crosby, and several other musicians from the local bands had joined in on that strange opus about living in a floating space city. Everyone had made suggestions and offered both talent and input to the effort, making it a pleasant process and, I think, a very unique record.
Spillin' out of the steel glass
Gravity gone from the cage
A million pounds gone from your heavy mass
All the years gone from your age …
The light in the night is the sun
And it can carry you around the planetary ground …
And the people you see will leave you be
More than the ones you've known before
Hey—rollin' on
We come and go like a comet
We are wanderers
Are you anymore?
“S
TARSHIP
”
FROM
B
LOWS AGAINST THE
E
MPIRE
The long faces and malaise of the subsequent Airplane albums suffered in comparison. Whether you were talking about Jack and Jorma, or Marty, or Paul and me, whatever we did away from the group was infused with more enthusiasm than anything Airplane was doing. But you don't just ignore a record contract; RCA could have sent pit bulls with law degrees to the West Coast for a dinner of rock stars. But actually, they were almost accommodating. When it was obvious that no one wanted to keep drinking out of the old cup, RCA spent the next few years putting out compilation albums and efforts from the Airplane offshoot groups and pandering to our desire to have our own record label called Grunt.
It was a dark time for us; even the studio in San Francisco that we used for
Bark
and
Long John Silver
was depressing. Located in a San Francisco slum, there were bars on three corners and a methadone clinic on the fourth. Paul once stopped his VW bus to run into the studio and get something (it took him all of about five minutes), and when he got back, his bus was gone.
The fracturing of the group was something over which I had no control, so I jumped into the bottle to hide. I used cocaine to keep the booze going, and after long days and nights in the studio doing very little but drugs, I was getting fat and sloppy. After recording until the early hours, coming out into the sunrise with a hangover compounded the disintegration of both my own integrity and the cohesiveness of the band. I was figuratively what we had predicted—dead at the age of thirty.
One good thing about my body was its refusal to be shit-faced on a regular basis. After a night of drugs and booze, I'd have to (and want to) give it a rest. I've never liked being loaded on a daily basis, but being straight consistently wasn't particularly interesting, either. At that point, I was doing as much drinking as I could without becoming totally nonfunctional. Apparently, I did a fairly successful job of blotting everything out because I don't remember much about the albums or the road trips. My only hope seemed to lie in the possibility of a band being formed from the various musicians who'd performed on Paul's record or our duo albums.
In retrospect, Jefferson Airplane's breakup was not so much any
one's
fault, as it was simply the end of an era. I can see that we were unwilling to make a smooth transition into the next phase, but then I can think of other people who had an even tougher time with crossovers. (Marie Antoinette and Czar Nicholas come to mind.) As individuals, we weren't mortally wounded by the split; we were just a bit trashed around the edges. Each person had to deal with the next rung on the ladder in his or her own way and according to his or her own emotional abilities.
We were all afraid. After all, it was an ending. But my reaction to the dissolution took on more strident and obnoxious proportions than those of the rest of the band members. Some people recognize their own fear immediately and act accordingly. In my case, it happens a little differently. Because of the stoic household in which I was raised, my programmed reaction to fear, pain, or sadness is convoluted; I don't even apply it in the right direction. When I start to feel any of the above emotions, it's as if the moment it registers in my brain, I flip it around and become a half-assed warrior. Then a few days later, I take that repressed fear and get busy ripping up New Zealand, when I'm actually angry at Germany. Miss Directed Anger.
So, in the end, while some people sulk, others retreat, and still others party, I drink a whole lot and run my mouth.
Seacliff
T
he daily two-hour drive along the winding country roads that lie between San Francisco and Bolinas got to be tedious. The distance from the city combined with having a new baby in a one-doctor town made our idyllic ocean house less of a retreat and more of a dangerous and time-consuming extravagance. But Paul had had his eye on this place in the Seacliff area of San Francisco that looked out over the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. So we took our nanny, Pat Dugan, her children, our child, a dog, and two cats and moved into the home that Paul loved.
An impressive structure, it would have made a better home for the Danish embassy than for our family, I thought. From the street, with its plain lines, clean, sparse landscaping, and a spectacular view extending from the bridge all the way out across the Pacific Ocean, the house looked like a one-story wood and stone Scandinavian/ Japanese mix. But it was actually a large five-floor house, resting on fifty-foot pylons that were designed to sway in the event of one of San Francisco's infamous earthquakes.
The house gained a measure of protection as well from the presence of three or four black men who sat all night, fully armed, in a car that was parked in front of the mansion next door. The neighboring dwelling was owned by a Muslim leader, who, though he lived there, rarely showed his face. Sometimes when I came home in the middle of the night from recording or carousing, if I'd had enough liquid or chemical fortification, I'd get up the nerve to talk to the “security guards” for a while. They were nice guys, intelligent and patient with my questions about their artillery and their religion. When I finally went into my own house, they probably “dissed” the screwy drunk honky, but they never let on that my presence was unwanted or annoying.
The living room of our new home became a rehearsal hall for the band that would eventually be called Jefferson Starship. With its twenty-foot windows looking out onto the bay and the bridge, the house served as a perfect working/living space—perfect for everybody but me. It was too big and too busy—there were just too many people passing through. I went out as often as I could, to be alone and to avoid the duties that I imagined fell to me as “Mistress of the Mansion.” I assumed I was expected to play gracious, eccentric hostess to the multitudes. In fact, there were no expectations. Everyone was too wrapped up in their own lives to consider what I should be doing, and the truth is that my presence wasn't a necessity for the carnival to maintain operation. Still, I felt the self-inflicted pressure.
Paul maintained an aerie on the top floor of the house, writing songs, watching TV, talking on the phone, playing with China, and presiding over everything from his favorite spot in the middle of the extra-large California King bed. Occasionally, he and I went out together to have dinner at Vanessi's or to do some aimless clubbing, but for the most part, I went out solo. I'd get in my Aston Martin (the James Bond machine that I'd purchased in 1967) and drive around until I could think of an interesting target for my particular mood. I could never stay still as long as Paul could; I had to be moving in a car, walking around the Japan Center, going to movies, hanging out in Marin County restaurants, or searching out people who'd satisfy my quest for external diversion.
Paul Kantner, China Kantner, … and who's the outsider? (Roger Ressmeyer/© Corbis)
One night, Paul and I took our friend Bad News Brown (an iron wedge of a man who, several months earlier, after being shot in the back, had taken
himself
on foot to a hospital) to North Beach. When Paul got bored with night-clubbing early and decided to go home, he asked Bad News to watch out for me. Anybody who can take that much lead pepper and keep moving was obviously a fine bodyguard, but when I told him “I vant to be alone,” Bad News reluctantly gathered up his iron bulk and left.
We were in some boring bar, and after he exited, I noticed a table full of Oriental men speaking an Asian dialect I'd never heard. Extremely well dressed in the Las-Vegas-silk-suit-with-big-cufflink style, they seemed to be dead serious about whatever they were discussing—no laughing, lots of quiet pauses, and then frantic dialogue. I watched for about fifteen minutes and then decided to crash the party. “What language are you speaking?” I asked.
They smiled, invited me to sit down, asked my name and my age, and then continued to speak in their own dialect, never telling me exactly what it was. Intensely curious, but trying to play the quiet, demure female that I imagined was appealing to Oriental men, I sat for another fifteen minutes, saying nothing but looking pleased at just being allowed to be in the company of men.
Yeah, that's me.
Suddenly they all rose and gestured for me to follow. Since they knew I had no idea what they were talking about, they obviously felt safe having me tag along. A pretty Western trinket is I'm sure how they viewed me. We walked for several blocks until we arrived at a more secluded restaurant. Our group filed into a stark, lime-green back room with a round table piled high with guns, and we all sat with four other men, who looked a bit less charming than my companions.
Arms negotiations, weapons for sale.
I suddenly realized that I was watching a Chinatown gang argue over how much for how many. When they'd concluded the deal, one of the men took my arm, walked me out to his car, and escorted me to a hotel. We checked into a room together, but before anything could happen, I complained of an intestinal disorder. He surprised me by bowing graciously and walking backward out through the door. I stayed at the hotel that night, afraid to go home and tell Paul where I'd been. He wouldn't have believed the story, anyway, or that I hadn't banged one of the guys, so I told everybody that I'd been boozing all night with my friend Sally.
When I wasn't busy helping strange Asian men with their arms negotiations, hanging out at the Japan Center became something of a habit. I loved the food, the cleanliness, and the quiet respect that permeated the Oriental marketplace. I often went to the movies there; I followed a particular series of Japanese films called
The Blind Detective,
starring a stocky middle-aged man who, despite his lack of vision, managed to rout the bad guys with, among other things, a baby carriage equipped with Gatling guns. He'd pretend he was just a nice old man walking his grandchild, then open up on a group of killers, sending a massive spray of bullets from his harmless-looking perambulator. In the same way that Americans would shortly become addicted to
Rocky
sequels, the Japanese were crazy about this continuing saga. For me, part of the appeal was that the Japanese notion of censorship hadn't yet caught up with the Western Puritan ethic. For example, the detective's girlfriend enjoyed sex with him by seating herself naked in an open-weave rattan basket hanging from the ceiling. Our hero would then spin the basket around while she was securely positioned on top of his penis.
These movies were all English subtitled, but I was, more often than not, the only Caucasian in the theater. After the movie, I'd have yaki udon and saki in a small restaurant around the corner. Enjoying my Japanese hosts' absolute respect for privacy, I'd sit for hours, reading or composing lyrics.
One evening, I'd been engaged in approximately the above routine, when I ran into Mickey Hart, drummer for The Grateful Dead, on the street. Unlike Yours Truly, the perpetual dilettante, Mickey is a black belt in karate, and I was asking him about various moves while we were walking along. But when we began to try some of them out on each other, a group of Oriental boys pulled up to see if I was all right. Thinking Mickey was inflicting the deadly martial art on me, they were about to do a community service by showing him what four teenage boys could do to an “old man” of thirty, whom they'd decided was clearly a threat to an innocent “lady.” I smiled and waved so they'd know everything was okay. Japantown was sometimes safer than I wanted it to be; Mickey was one of the men I would like to have “joined,” had the opportunity presented itself. It never did.