Paul Kantner, co-founder of 1960s rock band Jefferson Airplane, dead at 74

Paul Kantner This June 20, 2001 file photo shows Jefferson Starship’s Paul Kantner, left, performing in front of Diana Mangano during the ‘Freedom Sings’ benefit concert in New York. Kantner, an original member of the seminal 1960s rock band Jefferson Airplane and the eventual leader of successor group Jefferson Starship, has died at age 74. (AP Photo/Shawn Baldwin, File)

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Paul Kantner, an original member of the 1960s rock group Jefferson Airplane who stayed with the San Francisco-based band through its transformation from hippies to hit makers as the eventual leader of successor group Jefferson Starship, has died at age 74.

Kantner, who drew upon his passion for politics and science fiction to help write seminal favorites such as “Wooden Ships” and “Volunteers,” died on Thursday of organ failure and septic shock at a San Francisco hospital where he was admitted after falling ill earlier in the week, his former girlfriend and publicist Cynthia Bowman, the mother of one of his three children, told The Associated Press.

The guitarist and songwriter had survived close brushes with death as a younger man, including a motorcycle accident during the early 1960s and a 1980 cerebral hemorrhage, and gone on to recover from a heart attack last year. His death first was reported Thursday by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Few bands were so identified with San Francisco or so well-embodied the idealism and hedonism of the late ’60s as Jefferson Airplane, its message boldly stated on buttons and bumper stickers that read “THE JEFFERSON AIRPLANE LOVES YOU.”

The band advocated sex, psychedelic drugs, rebellion and a communal lifestyle, operating out of an eccentric, Colonial Revival house near Haight-Ashbury. Its members supported various political and social causes, tossed out LSD at concerts and played at both the Monterey and Woodstock festivals.

Formed by veterans of the folk circuit in the mid-’60s, the Airplane combined folk, rock, blues and jazz and was the first group from a Bay Area scene that also featured Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead to achieve mainstream success, thanks to the classics “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit.”

Besides Kantner, who played rhythm guitar and added backing vocals, the Airplane’s best-known lineup included singers Grace Slick and Marty Balin; lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen; bassist Jack Casady; and drummer Spencer Dryden. Jefferson Airplane, named in part after blues artist Blind Lemon Jefferson, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 and is scheduled to receive the Recording Academy’s lifetime achievement award this year.

Kantner, who looked as much like a college student as a rock star with his glasses and shaggy blonde hair, did not have the vocal or stage presence of Balin and Slick, or the instrumental power of Kaukonen or Casady.

But he became the conscience of the band and by the end of the ’60s was shaping its increasingly radical direction, whether co-writing the militant “Volunteers” with Balin or inserting a profane taunt into his own incendiary “We Can Be Together,” leading to an extended fight with their record company, RCA.

Meanwhile, Kantner and Slick became one of rock’s most prominent couples. Rolling Stone would note their contrasting styles, labeling Slick “the Acid Queen of outrageousness” and Kantner her “calm, dry, sardonic flip side.” In 1971, Slick gave birth to their daughter, whom the couple originally wanted to call God, but decided to name China. (China Kantner became an actress and MTV VJ.)

Slick and Kantner broke up in the late 1970s and Kantner had a son, Alexander, with Bowman, and another son, Gareth.

Kantner was the Airplane’s only native San Franciscan and its most political and experimental thinker. He had been a science fiction reader since childhood and with friends David Crosby and Jerry Garcia among others recorded a 1970 concept album about space travel, “Blows Against the Empire,” credited to Kantner and “Jefferson Starship.”

Kantner, Crosby and Stephen Stills would collaborate on the escapist, post-apocalypse fantasy “Wooden Ships,” a rock standard which Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills and Nash each recorded and performed at Woodstock.