I

On 10 November 1968, five days after Richard Nixon's victory in the hotly contested US presidential election, the CBS television network broadcast the latest episode of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a variety show well known for controversial political satire. The episode, which had been taped in late October, featured Jefferson Airplane, one of the best-known bands to arise from San Francisco's much-publicised rock scene. The band performed ‘Crown of Creation’, the title track from their recently released fourth album. Astute listeners at the time might have been impressed by the song's unusual formal structure, its brief foray into a 5/4 metre, or its obscure, apocalyptic text. No viewer, however, could have missed the most unsettling aspect of the performance – white singer Grace Slick appeared covered in dark brown makeup, and gave the Black Power salute at the song's end.Footnote ¹

Slick's gesture is difficult to interpret. Because her appearance evokes, first and foremost, the ugly spectre of blackface minstrelsy, the first reaction of many observers today, as then, might be offence. Slick's gesture was, on one level, an insensitive attempt to shock square viewers, comparable to her appearance in an Adolf Hitler costume for a 1969 show at New York's Fillmore East (Tamarkin Reference Tamarkin2003, p. 210). Slick's biographer Barbara Rowes downplays the significance of the incident by implying that Slick was simply drinking too much at this point in her career and thus wasn't thinking clearly (Rowes Reference Rowes1980, p. 123). According to this reading, Slick's performance was not intentionally racist, but was simply another Dadaist provocation typical of the freewheeling 1960s. Historian Peter Doggett similarly minimises the performance's racial implications, arguing that ‘though [Slick's] appearance has passed into rock myth as “blackface”, it actually resembled a street urchin who had recently rolled through mud’ (Doggett Reference Doggett2007, p. 209).Footnote ²

Slick's own explanations of the blackface performance, however, reflect engagement with minstrelsy's controversial history as well as a desire to distance herself from it. Shortly after the incident, Slick told an interviewer that ‘there weren't any Negroes on the show and I thought the quota needed adjustment’, but she went on to contradict this racial interpretation, saying that ‘women wear makeup all the time, so why not black? Next time I might wear green’ (‘Random Notes’ 1968, p. 8). In more recent accounts, Slick explicitly distinguishes her gesture from minstrelsy while implicitly acknowledging its influence, speculating: ‘I think if I'd done a regular Al Jolson with the lips that might've made people even more furious’ (Tamarkin Reference Tamarkin2003, pp. 177–8), or ‘I wasn't interested in some funny Al Jolson look, though. I wanted to get it as real as possible’ (Slick Reference Slick and Cagan1998, p. 152).

Indeed, interpreting Slick's gesture as nothing more than a simple replication of earlier minstrelsy is unconvincing for several reasons. For one thing, as the substantial body of recent scholarship on minstrelsy has demonstrated, this cultural form was dominated from its beginnings by male spectators and performers, who, as Eric Lott puts it, sought to access ‘black culture in the guise of an attractive masculinity’ (Lott Reference Lott1993, p. 53). William J. Mahar demonstrates the prevalence in minstrelsy of stereotypes of both black and white women that were ‘generated as much by misogyny as by racism’ (Mahar Reference Mahar1999, p. 268). Slick, as an outspoken, self-possessed female performer, seems to stand outside the minstrel tradition. Moreover, as Lott argues, ‘structurally [minstrelsy] was a working-class form, firmly grounded in the institutional spaces and cultural predispositions of workers’ (Lott Reference Lott1993, p. 68). For working-class European immigrants and their descendants, blackface was a way of demonstrating a shared whiteness: as David Roediger puts it, ‘the simple physical disguise – and elaborate cultural disguise – of blacking up served to emphasize that those on stage were really white and that whiteness really mattered’ (Roediger Reference Roediger2007, p. 117). Slick, who by her own account had been raised ‘right in the middle of the WASP caricature of family life’ in Palo Alto, California, and had attended Finch College, a New York ‘finishing school for girls from wealthy or prominent families’ (Slick Reference Slick and Cagan1998, pp. 41, 53), hardly needed to stand up for her whiteness in the way that immigrant labourers had. Finally, minstrelsy is typically pitted against ‘high’ culture and seen as defiantly resisting the gentility and pretension of ‘serious’ art. Lott writes that ‘by the early 1840s minstrelsy … was ranged explicitly against the opera, the “legitimate” theater, and the concert hall, the American beginnings of what Andreas Huyssen has called the “great divide”’ (Lott Reference Lott1993, p. 64). Slick, in contrast, was unabashedly influenced by the canon of high modernism, as for example in her 1967 composition ‘reJoyce’, which draws on James Joyce's Ulysses (Zimmerman Reference Zimmerman2008, p. 143). Rather than uncritically invoking the populist energy of minstrelsy, Slick was acting from a comparatively privileged position to make a self-consciously obscure artistic statement, one that seems to comment on minstrelsy rather than simply perpetuate it.

In this respect, Slick's performance reflects a broader cultural trend in 1960s San Francisco that Sumanth Gopinath terms ‘radical minstrelsy’, in which countercultural artists such as the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Lenny Bruce, and R. Crumb presented racist stereotypes ironically in order to confront and deconstruct them (Gopinath).Footnote ³ The Smothers Brothers, widely regarded as hip fellow travellers of the counterculture, slyly employed this strategy during Slick's performance: as he introduced the band, Dick Smothers briefly lapsed into minstrel dialect, announcing ‘right now we're gwine [sic] to move right along to the Jefferson Airplane!’ while his brother Tom looked on in mock confusion. Slick's Black Power salute suggests that she was trying to defamiliarise blackface by linking it to an assertive black political movement. More specifically, her salute evokes an iconic event of 1968 in which African American Olympic track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos achieved international attention by raising black-gloved fists as they received their medals. This incident took place on 16 October 1968, only days before the Jefferson Airplane performance was taped.Footnote ⁴

Here, I'll argue that Slick's gesture was emblematic of a larger tendency in 1960s rock: white musicians casting themselves as political revolutionaries by enacting a romanticised vision of African American identity. The notion of the ‘rock revolution’ of the 1960s has by now become a commonplace. Peter Doggett argues that during the late 1960s, ‘“revolution” entered the rock lexicon – rarely defined or explained, but a catch-all refrain that symbolised a generation's quest to overturn the old order and replace it with a new climate of liberation, that would free body, mind, and soul’ (Doggett Reference Doggett2007, p. 4). Rock's historians and critics have kept revolutionary rhetoric alive in works dating from Arnold Shaw's The Rock Revolution (Reference Shaw1969) to David A. Carson's Grit, Noise and Revolution: The Birth of Detroit Rock ‘n’ Roll (Reference Carson2005). The racial implications of this supposed revolution, however, have rarely been examined. Rock, a form dominated by white musicians and audiences but pervasively influenced by African American music and style, conveyed deeply felt but inconsistent notions of black identity in which African Americans were simultaneously subjected to insensitive stereotypes and upheld as examples of moral authority and revolutionary authenticity. By looking closely at 1960s rock, we can find new ways to think about both the relationship of rock to African American musical traditions and the broader ways in which popular music and political movements inform one another.

Critics and historians who describe rock as revolutionary clearly reflect the subjective experience of many participants in the 1960s rock scene, who often recall feeling that the musical landscape was shifting rapidly and unpredictably under their feet. In many accounts, however, the concept of revolution is only loosely defined, so that some writers present any aspect of rock that seemed new, unusual or rebellious as revolutionary. In You Say You Want a Revolution: Rock Music in American Culture, Robert G. Pielke aggressively asserts that ‘there's simply no possible conclusion other than to see rock music as revolutionary’, but his model of rock's revolutionary potential is applied so broadly that it allows him to describe the 1984 teenage dance movie Footloose, musicians from Dire Straits to Stevie Wonder, and the Kingsmen's Louie Louie all as revolutionary (Pielke Reference Pielke1986, pp. 14–15, 45–8, 77). In Closing the Circle: A Cultural History of the Rock Revolution, Herbert I. London describes the rock era portentously as the ‘Second American Revolution’, but his all-inclusive argument that revolution encompasses ‘sincere, cynical, and neutral advocates of radical change’ leads him to grant ‘revolutionary’ status to unlikely candidates such as Fats Domino (London Reference London1984, pp. 59, 66, 183). While these authors winningly convey their sincere affection for rock, their generalised enthusiasm at times reminds one of critic Robert Christgau's tongue-in-cheek assessment: ‘Q.: Why is rock like the revolution? A.: Because they're both groovy’ (Christgau Reference Christgau2000, p. 94).

Many scholars, however, assert a more direct link between the rock revolution of the 1960s and those broader political and social movements whose participants described themselves explicitly as ‘revolutionary’. As Terry H. Anderson points out in his detailed survey, The Movement and the Sixties, while ‘revolution’ became a kind of rallying cry for disparate radical groups during the 1960s, the term was typically used imprecisely to express a sense of outrage rather than a concrete strategy (Anderson Reference Anderson1995, p. 202). Like the notion of revolution itself, the connection between rock music and revolutionary politics is defined variously in discussions of the 1960s. Some accounts focus on the ways in which rock helped to create a sense of community among young radicals. Anderson, for example, writes that rock ‘forge[d] a hip community … challenged the establishment and liberated freaks from the older generation’ (ibid., p. 246). Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison argue that ‘within the youth movement … it was in the music that the utopian images of a multicultural society gained coherence and form’, and assert that during the 1960s ‘music could, for a brief period of time, provide a basis of common understanding and common experience for a generation in revolt’ (Eyerman and Jamison Reference Eyerman and Jamison1998, pp. 113, 138). Simon Frith contends that ‘young people in the 1960s had experiences (experiences of war and politics) that intensified the conflict between public and private obligations, between freedom and responsibility, and it was these problems that rock, more than any other form of expression, addressed and made plain’ (Frith Reference Frith1981, p. 194). These scholars tend to emphasise rock's broad significance to generational solidarity and political struggle rather than its more specific effects on individual subjectivity.

A contrasting approach involves examining rock's role as a signifier of, or metaphor for, countercultural values. Scholars who take this approach focus less on community than on the impact of rock on individual consciousness, and often question rock's connection to politics as normally defined. Peter Wicke, for example, argues that the notion that rock created a ‘community’ of youth ‘was just as much of an illusion as the political aspirations with which it was linked’. For Wicke, rock actually represents the ‘horrifyingly naive’ idea that ‘the problems of the world [are] a result of the problems of the individual’ (Wicke Reference Wicke1990, pp. 105, 109). Sheila Whiteley argues similarly, if more approvingly, that rock was ‘recognised as a symbolic act of self-liberation and self-realisation in which reality and musical experience were fused’ (Whiteley Reference Whiteley1992, p. 3). Nick Bromell describes a 1960s generation for whom ‘living to music was present as a crucial energy that flowed into and powerfully invigorated political ideas and movements’, but at the same time he argues that the culture of rock ‘understood itself as going beyond the terms of political debate and discourse’ (Bromell Reference Bromell2000, pp. 5, 86). For these observers, rock was more significant as a catalyst for a new way of thinking than as a force for social change.

While each of these approaches has yielded valuable insights, they sometimes lead to broad, reductive conclusions about the complex relationship of rock and politics. Alan Durant, in a perceptive essay on this issue, points out that rock is too often viewed simplistically as part of a transient, cyclical phase of ‘adolescent rebellion’. Durant argues that we need to focus instead on rock's particular significance in specific places and at specific moments, rather than make sweeping statements about its role in an ‘abstract process of change’ (Durant Reference Durant1985, pp. 117–18). Some recent scholarship has begun to take a more historically informed approach. Ian MacDonald's subtle analysis of the Beatles' significance within 1960s discourses of ‘individualistic materialism’ and ‘Euro-Maoism’ (MacDonald Reference MacDonald1994, pp. 23–7) and John Platoff's (2005) detailed reception history of the band's song ‘Revolution’, for example, each shed light on changes and contradictions within the counterculture. Peter Doggett's historical survey, There's a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars, and the Rise and Fall of the '60s, takes a refreshingly critical approach to rock's political ambitions and addresses convoluted, shifting affiliations among various radical movements and musical genres in great detail (Doggett Reference Doggett2007). Stuart P. Mitchell examines the divergent political significance of popular music in France, the United States and Britain during this era (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2005). In Counterculture Kaleidoscope: Musical and Cultural Perspectives on Late Sixties San Francisco, Nadya Zimmerman similarly argues against easy generalisations, contending that the San Francisco counterculture was ‘pluralistic, not oppositional’ and that its participants rejected ‘any single goal-oriented agenda’ (Zimmerman Reference Zimmerman2008, pp. 5, 29).Footnote ⁵ Zimmerman's emphasis on pluralism leads her to look closely at various political and social nuances of rock rather than engage in broad arguments about the overall success or failure of ‘the movement’. Here, I follow the lead of these scholars to argue that we should view the 1960s not as a romantic epoch during which a unified counterculture fought an unfeeling power structure, but rather as a complex moment in which various cultural and political factions came together and pulled apart in ever-changing ways. Moreover, we need to examine music as an expressive form with the potential to evoke multiple, sometimes conflicting meanings, rather than regarding it merely as a vessel for unambiguous political messages.

Jefferson Airplane are an especially appropriate subject for this kind of analysis because the band's fame and (at times) openly political music have made them a ubiquitous symbol of the rock revolution. Jeff Tamarkin's comprehensive history of the band, for example, is entitled Got a Revolution!, a quotation from their 1969 song ‘Volunteers’ (Tamarkin Reference Tamarkin2003). The website of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, into which Jefferson Airplane were inducted in 1996, asserts that the group ‘espoused boldly anarchistic political views and served as a force for social change, challenging the prevailing conservative mind set in “White Rabbit” and issuing a call to arms in “Volunteers”’ (‘Jefferson Airplane’). More skeptical commentators recall the Airplane's powerlessness in the face of mass hysteria and violence at the disastrous 1969 Altamont concert (at which Airplane singer Marty Balin was punched unconscious during his band's own set by a Hell's Angel serving as ‘security’), an event often mythologised as the ‘death of innocence’ for 1960s rock culture (Eisen Reference Eisen1970, p. 112; Coates Reference Coates and Inglis2006, p. 58). Others cite the band's eventual transformation into Starship, one of the most maligned “corporate rock” bands of the 1980s, as evidence that rock's revolutionary potential is inevitably co-opted and destroyed by big business.Footnote ⁶ Even critics of the ‘rock revolution’, then, see Jefferson Airplane as having played a central role in it. In examining this role more closely, I hope to shed new light not simply on the band's complicated relationship to political radicalism but also on the often oversimplified notion of the ‘rock revolution’ itself. While this project at times leads me to a critical view of Jefferson Airplane's political aspirations and rhetoric, my point is not to denigrate musicians whom I regard as among the most innovative and compelling performers of their era, but rather to show that their music was informed by a cultural and social context that encompassed both earnest political commitment and more frivolous forms of ‘radical chic’. In particular, I will argue that the Airplane's references to black culture and politics were multifaceted and involved both condescending or naïve radical posturing and sincere respect for African American music.

II

Understanding Slick's blackface performance in its historical context requires us to examine rapid changes occurring within the counterculture in 1968, a year when such events as police violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and student-led uprisings from New York to Mexico City to Paris signalled a new mood of militant protest.Footnote ⁷ Jefferson Airplane had been founded in San Francisco in 1965, and became an integral part of the burgeoning hippie scene in Haight-Ashbury, helping to publicise that scene far beyond San Francisco with their 1967 hit singles ‘Somebody to Love’ and the psychedelic anthem ‘White Rabbit’. Historians often draw a line between Haight-Ashbury's ‘cultural radicals’, who sought individual liberation through changes in consciousness and lifestyle, and the ‘political radicals’ of nearby Berkeley, whose activism stressed more pragmatic and organised means of protesting such concrete political issues as racial discrimination and America's policies in Vietnam (Cavallo Reference Cavallo1999, pp. 186–8). These categories were never hard and fast, and the two factions often encountered one another at such events as 1967's Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park (Anderson Reference Anderson1995, p. 172; Perry Reference Perry2005, p. 117). A fundamental tension, however, persisted between them, with political radicals often viewing hippies as self-indulgent and ineffective, and hippies dismissing political protesters as intolerably preachy, earnest and dogmatic (Anderson Reference Anderson1995, p. 253; Perry Reference Perry2005, p. 254). Jefferson Airplane's guitarist, singer and songwriter Paul Kantner recalled that ‘there was a difference between Berkeley and us … We didn't give a shit about politics … So people in Berkeley were disdainful of us in San Francisco. We would support them, but we didn't want to live the way they did’ (Doggett Reference Doggett2007, p. 87). During and after 1968, however, these lines increasingly blurred as part of what Terry Anderson terms the ‘second wave’ of the 1960s (Anderson Reference Anderson1995, p. 241). As political radicals explored the new freedoms of the so-called ‘cultural revolution’ of the hippies, cultural radicals shocked by the virulence of official crackdowns on their communities began to take a more hard-headed approach to political issues. Perhaps the most famous US group to fuse cultural and political radicalism were the Yippies, self-proclaimed ‘political hippies’ who employed surreal humour and outrageous stunts to further what they called the ‘youth revolution’ (ibid., pp. 217–19).

Synthesising cultural and political radicalism required both sides to reconcile differing ideas about African American identity. Political radicals in the US, despite their disparate agendas and viewpoints, derived much of their language, tactics and values from the African American civil rights movement. By 1968, US radical groups included predominantly or exclusively black organisations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (or SNCC) and the Black Panther Party, but even white radicals continued to draw on the rhetoric of black leaders and to grant them particular moral authority (ibid., p. 248). Hippies like those in Haight-Ashbury, in contrast, were predominantly white middle-class dropouts who lived in what historian Charles Perry calls a ‘segregated Bohemia’ and fetishised the cultures of India and of Native Americans rather than that of African Americans (Perry Reference Perry2005, pp. 133, 241). The fusion of cultural and political radicalism, then, did not mean simply that countercultural musicians such as Jefferson Airplane found themselves reassessing the value of political engagement; it also meant that they were revisiting the notion of African Americans as hip, respected role models.

Jefferson Airplane's political trajectory during Reference Airplane1968 mirrored that of the counterculture at large. At a press conference early that year, they claimed to be apolitical and requested ‘don't ask us anything about politics’, and in the spring they even appeared on a radio show promoting the United States Army, hardly a conventionally radical gesture (Tamarkin Reference Tamarkin2003, pp. 169, 173). When Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman asked the band to perform in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention in August, they refused. In a recent interview, Paul Kantner asserted: ‘I appreciate the fact that some people did bother to go there and get their heads kicked in on our behalf, but I couldn't see any reason for us to go and get beaten up’ (Doggett Reference Doggett2007, p. 140–1). In September, however, the band released a more militant statement: Crown of Creation, an album whose cover featured a double-exposed image of the Airplane superimposed on a photograph of the atomic bomb blast at Hiroshima. Kantner recalled in 1996 that ‘Crown of Creation [was] just a beginning political reaction to the forces around us as the Haight-Ashbury got darker and the jackboots and the anti-dope and the crushing forces came in to squelch Communism and God knows what else is going on here’ (Kantner 1996, disc 1, track 9). The title track featured an atypically aggressive, hostile text lifted almost verbatim by Kantner from John Wyndham's 1955 science fiction novel The Chrysalids, in which the lines are spoken by post-apocalyptic mutants who wage a war of rebellion against an oppressive race of genetically ‘pure’ humans (Tamarkin Reference Tamarkin2003, p. 168).Footnote ⁸ Critic Craig Morrison argues that ‘the enforced conformity of the survivors [in the novel] and the persecution of those with the deformity of being able to communicate through mental telepathy paralleled the “us and them” thinking that pitted the freaks (hippies) against the straights (ordinary citizens)’ (Morrison Reference Morrison2000, p. 224). Kantner recalled with amusement that he sent this song to Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic presidential nominee, when his staff asked the Airplane for a ‘hip’ ‘campaign anthem’: it was promptly and predictably rejected (Doggett Reference Doggett2007, p. 158). The final song on Crown of Creation, ‘The House at Pooneil Corners’, alluded somewhat cryptically to the devastation following a nuclear holocaust. Both songs featured unsettling melodies emphasising the flatted second degree of the scale, a musical trademark of the band since their 1967 ‘White Rabbit’, which evoked an exoticised conception of Spanish music (Zimmerman Reference Zimmerman2008, pp. 66–70). Both also highlighted dissonant vocal harmonies and strained singing timbres, jarring tempo changes, and thick instrumental textures marked by distortion and feedback. These had also been prominent aspects of the Airplane's previous album, After Bathing at Baxter's (1967). While the band's musical style resembled that of their earlier recordings, the apocalyptic thrust of some of Crown of Creation's lyrics seemed to link that style to muted political protest as well as psychedelic inner exploration. In October 1968, the band taped their Smothers Brothers appearance, and in November they were filmed playing an illegal show on a Manhattan rooftop for Jean-Luc Godard's film One A.M. (One American Movie), which also featured interviews with well-known radicals including Eldridge Cleaver and Amiri Baraka.Footnote ⁹ While they did not advance a concrete political platform, Jefferson Airplane nonetheless played a highly visible role in the trend toward radical rhetoric in rock in Reference Airplane1968, the year that produced such well-known recordings as the MC5's Kick Out the Jams and the Rolling Stones' more ambivalent ‘Street Fighting Man’.Footnote ¹⁰

Jefferson Airplane's next album, Reference Airplane1969's Volunteers, made their revolutionary stance explicit. Its cover depicted the band, wearing grotesque masks, superimposed on an image of the American flag, while an insert in the form of a mock newspaper included such surreal, irreverent headlines as ‘How to Tell Your Self from Richard Milhaus [sic] Nixon’ and ‘Feed and Water Your Flag’. The album's first track, ‘We Can Be Together’, ‘incorporated snippets of political graffiti spotted on walls’ by Kantner into a romantic, stirring proclamation of solidarity with and among the young ‘outlaws’ of the counterculture (Tamarkin Reference Tamarkin2003, p. 193). Kantner remembered in 1996 that, with Volunteers, he wanted to assert that ‘in a sort of utopian way … yes, even though we are sharded amongst ourselves, we can all be together in fighting this common enemy, or this common force, that is not doing things in our best interest’ (Kantner 1996, disc 1, track 10). The song's most controversial line, ‘Up against the wall, motherfucker’, resulted in a censorship battle with RCA (‘Airplane Puts RCA Up Against Wall’ 1969, p. 10; Tamarkin Reference Tamarkin2003, p. 195). (While the line eventually remained on the record, the accompanying lyric sheet read ‘Up against the wall fred’.) The album's last song, ‘Volunteers’, featured the refrain ‘Got a revolution / Got to revolution’ and suggested that the current generation of youth represented the revolutionary vanguard. In these songs, the band adopted comparatively accessible formal structures and chord changes – both are based around the standard I–bVII progression ubiquitous in 1960s rock (Hicks Reference Hicks1999, pp. 33–5). The songs thus seem designed to attract listeners to their message rather than to evoke social turmoil through dissonance or formal complexity. Other songs address political and social issues with varying degrees of precision. Tamarkin describes ‘The Farm’, an affectionate satire of country music featuring pedal steel guitar by the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia, as a ‘commentary on the back-to-the-land movement finding favor with many hippies at the time’ (Tamarkin Reference Tamarkin2003, p. 199). ‘Wooden Ships’, composed by Kantner, David Crosby and Steven Stills (and recorded earlier in 1969 by Crosby, Stills & Nash), tells the story of a wandering band of nuclear survivors over lulling minor ninth chords that evoke the sound of modal jazz. Probably the album's most unusual track is ‘Meadowlands’, a sixty-second organ solo, played by Slick, that Tamarkin explains ‘had its origin as a hymn of the Soviet Red Army Chorus’ (ibid., p. 204). While not overtly political, the piece might have signalled leftist sympathies to listeners in the know.

The Airplane's notorious use of the phrase ‘up against the wall, motherfucker’ deserves special attention because of its direct link to both radical movements and racial representation. ‘Motherfucker’ had been a word emblematic of African American slang in the imagination of many whites since at least the 1940s. Kurt Vonnegut Jr., remembering World War II in his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, recalled that the word ‘was still a novelty in the speech of white people in 1944’ (Vonnegut Reference Vonnegut1969, p. 29). Mezz Mezzrow's 1946 glossary of Harlem jive presents it in bowdlerised form as ‘motherferyer’, defined as an ‘incestuous obscenity’ (Mezzrow and Wolfe Reference Mezzrow and Wolfe1990 [1946], p. 376). The San Francisco Mime Troupe used ‘motherfucker’ several times in their controversial 1965 play A Minstrel Show, or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel, some of whose cast were prosecuted (unsuccessfully) on obscenity charges after a 1966 performance in Denver (Davis Reference Davis1975, pp. 72–3; Mason Reference Mason2005, pp. 36, 39, 49).Footnote ¹¹

The full phrase sung by the Airplane had become prominent in radical parlance after the publication of ‘Black People!’, a poem by LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka) that appeared in the December 1967 issue of Evergreen Review. In it, Baraka exhorts black readers to loot white-owned businesses: ‘All the stores will open if you say the magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall mother fucker this is a stick up!’ (Jones Reference Jones1967, p. 49). ‘Black People!’ attracted wider attention when, at Baraka's trial for illegal weapon possession in January 1968, the judge read it aloud in court (substituting ‘mother blank’ for the offending words) and cited the poem's content as reason for imposing a maximum sentence of two-and-one-half to three years (later overturned on appeal.)Footnote ¹² On 22 April 1968, shortly before a student occupation of campus buildings shut down Columbia University for a week, Columbia's Students for a Democratic Society chairman (and future founder of the radical Weatherman organisation) Mark Rudd wrote an open letter to university president Grayson Kirk, describing the protests as a ‘war of liberation’ and adding ‘I'll use the words of LeRoi Jones, whom I'm sure you don't like a whole lot: “Up against the wall, mother fucker, this is a stick-up”.’ (Anderson Reference Anderson1995, p. 195). Protester Dotson Rader recalled that, shortly before they were finally routed by police on 30 April, Columbia's student strikers chanted ‘UP AGAINST THE WALL MOTHERFUCKERS’ as a ‘defiant slogan’ (Rader Reference Rader, Hamaliam and Karl1970, p. 199). Also in New York, an East Village ‘affinity group’ named Up Against the Wall/Motherfucker (UAW/MF or the Motherfuckers for short) after Baraka's poem engaged in such provocations during 1968 as hauling piles of trash to Lincoln Center during a garbage strike (Hahne et al. Reference Hahne1993; Kurlansky Reference Kurlansky2004, p. 132).

Besides the Airplane's, the best known utterance of the word in rock was in the introduction to the avowedly revolutionary Detroit band MC5's ‘Kick Out the Jams’, recorded live in October 1968, during which lead singer Rob Tyner yells ‘Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!’.Footnote ¹³ While such rhetoric might seem to have been merely obscene attention-grabbing, it had the power to rile up commentators on both sides of the political divide. Yippie founder Abbie Hoffman, for example, praised ‘rock folks’ by claiming that ‘if you get into digging the music it's all “tear down the walls, motherfucker” and “kick out the jams, ‘motherfucker’”… That's good enough politics for me’ (Hoffman Reference Hoffman1969, p. 120). From the other side of the political spectrum, right-wing anti-Communist columnist Susan L.M. Huck sardonically cited ‘the Airplane's repeated use of the compound revolutionary noun, “mother******”’, and claimed sarcastically that ‘teaching Grace Slick, or Paul Kantner, or others of the Jefferson Airplane not to hurl obscene insults at anyone within earshot would, at best, be a repressive thing to do’ (Huck Reference Huck1970, p. 18).

Despite the controversy surrounding the line, the Airplane's utterance of it is ambiguous. In one of the few contemporaneous reviews of Volunteers to devote close attention to the music as well as the political implications of the lyrics, Miller Francis, Jr. of the Los Angeles Free Press noted:

Francis seems to suggest that the band's use of the revolutionary catchphrase is ironic, an evocation of radical sentiment rather than an endorsement of it. Indeed, the line in question is sung in soaring three-part harmony, crowned by Slick's warm alto, over a consonant I–V–IV progression that evokes a sense of warmth and coherence rather than revolutionary rage or violence. The line that follows, ‘tear down the walls’, is set similarly. While ‘tear down the walls’ was another of the rallying cries of striking students at Columbia, Tamarkin reports that Kantner actually took the line from the Reference Martin and Neil1964 album of the same name by folk singers Vince Martin and Fred Neil, the latter one of Kantner's most important early influences (Anderson Reference Anderson1995, p. 197; Tamarkin Reference Tamarkin2003, p. 194). Unlike ‘We Can Be Together’, Martin and Neil's song ‘Tear Down the Walls’, with its references to church bells and freedom songs, is squarely in the tradition of earnest liberal protest associated with the 1960s folk revival. The Airplane's intended meaning is thus more ambivalent than the text alone might suggest. As Tamarkin asks rhetorically, ‘was this a literal call for rampant and random violence in the streets, or a symbolic plea to eliminate all barriers?’ (Tamarkin Reference Tamarkin2003, p. 194).

Like those they made on their records, Jefferson Airplane's public statements demonstrated an ambiguous view of revolution. Those comments that might have been interpreted as radical or revolutionary were generally spontaneous rants against local authority. Slick, for example, began a 1968 performance for a ‘socially prominent’ audience at New York's Whitney Museum by ‘riff[ing] on for about ten minutes on socialites and their strang [sic] habits and quaint attire’ and referring to the ‘assembled rich’ as ‘“filthy jewels”, which some misheard as “filthy Jews”’ (Kennely Reference Kennely1968, p. 34; Tamarkin Reference Tamarkin2003, p. 176). At a 1969 concert in Miami, when the band's power was turned off after a ‘designated curfew’, Kantner ‘cursed out the police and pressed the crowd … into action. “Wait till we burn down your society!” he shouted, as the audience of 10,000 cheered him on’ (Tamarkin Reference Tamarkin2003, p. 200). Such outbursts reflected genuine frustration with ‘the Establishment’, but in hindsight they look like petulant explosions of annoyance and contempt rather than effective political gestures.

A more revealing glimpse of the Airplane's conflicted politics is a conversation between Slick, Kantner, and Yippies Abbie and Anita Hoffman, published in the East Village Other, a New York underground paper, in 1971 but conducted around April 1970.Footnote ¹⁴ During the conversation, Slick and Kantner sometimes try to match the militant fervour of the Hoffmans. Kantner, for example, claims that he has ordered an AR-18 assault rifle for self-defence, while Slick explains glibly that ‘I prefer not to kill people, but I'd like to destroy as much property as possible’ (‘Abbie and Anita Rap’ Reference Katzman1972, pp. 204–5). More often, however, they express a vision of cultural revolution that reveals their continued engagement with the dropout ideology associated with Haight-Ashbury. While Kantner praises the ‘good old revolutionary crazies’ that attend the band's shows, he describes them as ‘just stoned, dancing and having a really good time’ in contrast to ‘up against the wall’ radicals such as the Weathermen (ibid., p. 199). He also draws the familiar distinction between ‘Dionysian’ San Francisco and ‘uptight’ Berkeley, and argues that ‘instead of protesting about the war with twenty people I'd rather take those same twenty people out into the woods and get ’em high and swimming in a stream. And just doing that shows them a much better way to live and will convert them a lot faster than yelling in their faces at a rally’ (ibid., p. 204). When questioned about their ‘model for revolution’, Kantner and Slick retreat into utopian fantasy, with Slick asking ‘why kill something that's already dead?’ and Kantner claiming that ‘the government's already been overthrown. It just has to realize it’ (ibid., pp. 203, 206). Kantner in particular is often critical of the Hoffmans' comparatively pragmatic approach to revolutionary politics. Pressed by the Hoffmans on whether Mick Jagger's performances are ‘more dashing as gesture than meaningful politically’, Kantner grumbles, ‘that's ’cause you put a pretty dull picture of what he should have been on him' (ibid., p. 200). When the Hoffmans argue that young people should (metaphorically) ‘kill their parents and take over’, Kantner demurs: ‘There's no need to kill ’em. That's sort of a harsh thing to subject the typical American teen-ager to. What do you mean by that?’ (ibid., pp. 206, 208). When the Hoffmans describe radical bombers (presumably those in groups such as Weatherman) as ‘heroes’, Kantner asserts that ‘it's wrong to blow up property’ (ibid., p. 210). While he claims rather defensively that ‘we think our politics speaks through our music’, Kantner also protests that ‘We Can Be Together’ is ‘not an anthem …It's fun to sing’ (ibid., pp. 194, 203).

Despite their differences, Slick and Abbie Hoffman maintained a friendship. Their most famous exploit occurred on 24 April 1970, when Slick, invited to a formal tea at the White House along with other alumnae of Finch College, brought Hoffman along as part of what they later claimed was a plot to dose President Nixon's drink with LSD (‘Abbie Hoffman Barred’ 1970; Rowes Reference Rowes1980, pp. 161–5; Tamarkin Reference Tamarkin2003, p. 218). (The two were barred as a security risk.) In a 1970 Rolling Stone interview, Slick asserted that ‘I prefer Abbie Hoffman to Richard Nixon simply because he's more entertaining, more interesting to listen to. I don't care what the two of them are talking about’ (Fong-Torres Reference Fong-Torres2006, p. 31). This suggests that, for Slick, Hoffman's revolutionary political aims were less appealing than his nose-thumbing, prankster persona. Kantner remembers similarly that Hoffman ‘was a stand-up comedian, really, not a politician. He made me laugh, so inevitably I was converted to his cause’ (Doggett Reference Doggett2007, p. 354).

A survey of critical reporting on the Airplane reveals that their revolutionary rhetoric was received in a variety of ways, even among presumably sympathetic members of the counterculture. Surprisingly, mainstream publications often expressed the most approval, perhaps out of a fear of seeming unhip or politically backward.Footnote ¹⁵ A 1968 review of Crown of Creation in High Fidelity, for example, stated sympathetically that ‘the Airplane has always involved itself in radical politics and in the current social revolution’ (Lowe Reference Lowe1968, p. 128). Similarly, a 1970 review of Volunteers in Stereo Review argued that the band's ‘advocacy of political and emotional revolution’ is ‘only an advance sortie for the action yet to come’ (Heckman Reference Heckman1970, p. 87). Several reports in the alternative press similarly expressed support for the band and their rhetoric. In San Francisco's Rolling Stone, white critic Ralph J. Gleason argued that Slick's blackface makeup and Black Power salute were positive signs of ‘a new way of life emerging in this society’ (Gleason Reference Gleason1968, p. 20). Distant Drummer, a Philadelphia alternative paper, described Volunteers favourably as ‘a scathing scatological attack on standardized valve [sic] systems’ (Boehlke Reference Boehlke1969). Other countercultural publications were more sceptical, often invoking what historian Thomas Frank terms the ‘theory of co-optation’: the view that ‘emblems of dissent … were quickly translated into harmless consumer commodities, emptied of content, and sold to their very originators as substitutes for the real thing’ (Frank Reference Frank1997, p. 16). Georgia Straight, a Vancouver paper, attacked Volunteers for its ‘inspecific politics and packaged, consumerized anti-Amerikanism’ (Quigley Reference Quigley1971, p. 23). Lester Bangs, writing in Detroit's Creem, called the Airplane ‘radical dilettante capitalist pigs’ (Zimmerman Reference Zimmerman2008, p. 60). Baltimore's Harry ran a review of an Airplane concert at which the police arrested unruly members of the audience while others stood idly by, singing along to ‘Volunteers’. Reporter Thomas V. D'Antoni asked pointedly, ‘What kind of revolution is that? No matter what kind of revolution you're into – political, cultural, spiritual or all three – what kind of shit is waving your fist as your friends are dragged off? And singing “got to revolution” at the same time. Somebody please explain that to me’ (D'Antoni Reference D'Antoni1970, p. 17). In the leftist journal Ramparts, Ed Leimbacker accused the Airplane of hawking ‘harmless words and grand gestures rather than truly radical actions’ (Leimbacker Reference Leimbacker1971, p. 106). The more conservative Time magazine took a similar view, citing Slick's blackface routine as an example of ‘revolutionary hype’ (‘Music: Rock’ 1969, p. 49). Even during the heady days of the late 1960s, with their climate of worldwide social and political upheaval, observers of the rock scene were far from a consensus about rock's role in revolution or even about the value of revolution itself.

After Volunteers, Kantner's notion of revolution turned definitively toward the ‘Dionysian’, filtered through his longstanding interest in science fiction. In 1970, Kantner, backed by members of the Airplane along with such guest stars as David Crosby, Jerry Garcia and Graham Nash, recorded Blows Against the Empire, an album that tells the literally escapist, if intentionally abstract, tale of a countercultural community that hijacks a starship and takes off into space in search of freedom (Kantner/Jefferson Starship 1970). Kantner explained in an interview that ‘it's my answer to the ecology problem. It's the only way it's all going to get together and work. Unless we have a war or a big disease or a famine, there's just too many people, and they're gonna have to get off the planet’. He also claimed, probably with tongue in cheek, that famed LSD chemist Owsley Stanley could ‘have the starship together in less than a year’ ‘if you give him $50 billion and an island and a machine shop’ (Fong-Torres Reference Fong-Torres2006, pp. 30–1). Peter Doggett argues that ‘by the time their starship had carried them through galaxies way “past Andromeda”, Kantner and Slick had cast themselves adrift from their generation and their culture’ (Doggett Reference Doggett2007, p. 418).

The 1971 album Sunfighter, credited to Kantner and Slick, more directly addressed contemporary politics with ‘Diana’, a brief song recorded in two parts and dedicated to Diana Oughton, a member of the Weatherman collective (Kantner and Slick 1971). Oughton had been killed along with two other Weathermen in New York on 6 March 1970, when a bomb that they were building exploded prematurely (Jacobs Reference Jacobs1997, pp. 95–9). ‘Diana’ combines indirect statements of protest about parents killing their children with more self-consciously poetic lyrics referencing Roman mythology and images of nature. The song's lack of a definite political stance leaves it open to multiple interpretations, even among its performers. Slick described ‘Diana’ as simply ‘a tribute to a goddess’: ‘Diana was part of the astronomy, star formation, and the Roman and Greek myths about Diana, who was a hunter’ (Tamarkin Reference Tamarkin1997). Kantner, in contrast, makes it clear that Oughton's death was the inspiration for the song. In an interview conducted around 1997, Kantner discusses ‘Diana’ at length, in terms suggesting that the song's vagueness reflects a deep ambivalence about the violent actions underlying Weatherman's revolutionary rhetoric. Kantner explains:

In the final analysis, then, Kantner remained largely a cultural, rather than a political, radical. His aversion to what historian Howard Brick terms ‘a radical romance of violence’ (Brick Reference Brick1998, p. 159) is understandable – the bomb that killed Oughton was intended for an ‘attack on a dance for military officers’ (Jacobs Reference Jacobs1997, p. 98), and Terry Anderson argues convincingly that Weatherman's tactics were ‘not revolution, simply nihilism’ (Anderson Reference Anderson1995, p. 329). Kantner's defence of ‘poetic’ treatments of anarchy and violence, however, leaves him open to charges of celebrating and perhaps encouraging violence even as he disavows it in ‘reality’, or of assuming a self-important, hypocritical posture of ‘radical chic’ that, as Peter Doggett puts it, is ‘confrontational and yet empty at the same moment’ (Doggett Reference Doggett2007, p. 209). At the very least, the poetic revolution advocated by Kantner easily leads to narcissism, justified by what critic Michael Lydon called the Airplane's belief ‘that the place for the revolution to begin and end is inside individual heads’ (Lydon Reference Lydon1971, p. 117). On the other hand, Kantner's insistence on the value of humour and poetry reminds us that his music is not simply a vehicle for political slogans, but rather invites unpredictable, slippery interpretations that exceed the literal meanings of its text and the immediate context of its creation. How might we think about the revolutionary potential of Jefferson Airplane's music beyond its direct associations to radical politics?

III

It is easy to be cynical today about the rock revolution represented by Jefferson Airplane, especially given the vagueness and ineffectiveness of their political rhetoric. Journalist Tom Waldman, for example, writes flatly of the entire era that ‘since the “revolution” never occurred in the 1960s, rock cannot be the soundtrack to that revolution’ (Waldman Reference Waldman2003, p. 8). Looking back, the band's members themselves sometimes concur. Bassist Jack Casady, for example, remembered that ‘naturally, nobody wanted people to die in a war, but I don't think there was tremendous deep thought about the situation. Paul waving his guitar over his head like Che Guevara, and pumping his guitar in the air in military fashion, was all okay theater at the time’. Lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen agreed: ‘I always thought that Paul was very politically naive. And I always thought that I was very politically savvy because my dad was a government guy. After the fact, I suspect neither one of us really knew very much about what was going on. But it was better to have an opinion than to have none'.Footnote ¹⁶ Kantner remembered that Kaukonen referred mockingly to Volunteers as ‘Paul Kantner's Mein Kampf West’ due to its political rhetoric (Kantner 1996, disc 1, track 10). Kantner himself argued in Reference Kantner1996 that the Airplane didn't do ‘political things. We didn't encourage voting drives. We just continued the Timothy Leary of the drop in, tune out, drop out situation, which had worked quite effectively for us up until that point’ (ibid., disc 1, track 10). He went on to contrast Jefferson Airplane to the politically engaged folk musicians of the previous generation: ‘we didn't want to go out and be the Weavers – or I didn't – and be in labor unions, and support Communism, and do the Wobbly thing, and carry on singing Lead Belly songs for our life, but I think the spirit of addressing your community, the world that you live in through your own particular optic, is what I learned at the Weavers' knee’ (ibid., disc 2, track 7). Slick later conceded that her proposed White House prank was ‘an irresponsible and dangerous plot’, and claimed in 1987 that ‘Volunteers’ ‘doesn't make any sense, and it never did’ (Glausser Reference Glausser1988, p. 46; Slick Reference Slick and Cagan1998, p. 193). Skepticism about the band's political commitments might lead us to dismiss Jefferson Airplane and other 1960s rock bands outright as deluded or self-indulgent, or to praise their music only as complex, autonomous art while downplaying its connection to broader social trends. On the other hand, as I have suggested, an uncritical, poorly defined belief that rock was unambiguously ‘revolutionary’ similarly tells us little about the music or its social significance.

In conclusion, I want to suggest that closer attention to issues of race can help us address the revolutionary ambitions of 1960s rock without romanticising or trivialising them. Slick's blackface gesture was only one particularly flagrant example of a racial dynamic prevalent in 1960s rock and the culture surrounding it. Nadya Zimmerman demonstrates that in San Francisco, ‘racialized elements were thrown in the pluralistic mix of signifiers that underscored the counterculture's cultural landscape, allowing the counterculture to deal implicitly and indirectly with racial politics without being pinned to a particular cause or explicit racial agenda’ (Zimmerman Reference Zimmerman2008, pp. 29–30). More specifically, ‘the counterculture conceived of itself as a risk-taking outlaw culture, and it shaped that self-image by trading upon symbols of racially charged “outlaw” cultures in the Bay Area – namely, the Black Panthers and the Hell's Angels’ (ibid., p. 30). The counterculture, however, was more interested in the style of black radicalism than in its substance, ‘appropriat[ing] the antiofficial, outlaw sensibility of the [Black] Panthers … while remaining one step removed from participatory racial politics’ (ibid., p. 33). For the counterculture, African Americans became romantic symbols of authentic experience and identity, rather than pragmatic political strategists to be emulated.

Jefferson Airplane's relationship to racial issues exemplifies the sense of idealistic detachment described by Zimmerman. Beyond surface gestures such as Slick's salute and a sign on their shared San Francisco mansion reading ‘Eldridge Cleaver Welcome Here’, Jefferson Airplane made little overt comment on the racial turmoil of the late 1960s (Lydon Reference Lydon1971, p. 117).Footnote ¹⁷ At times, their rhetoric seemed to mock traditional ideas about black identity, but it is often hard to tell whether they were making fun of stereotypes or simply perpetuating them. The band's name, for example, was an abbreviation of ‘Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane’, a fictitious country blues persona invented for Kaukonen by his friend, guitarist Steve Talbot (Gleason Reference Gleason1969, p. 128; Tamarkin Reference Tamarkin2003, p. 32). The band's frequent, casual references in interviews to African Americans as ‘spades’ may have reflected a hip, ironic sense of superiority to racism, or perhaps the presumption of solidarity between white members of the counterculture and oppressed blacks expressed in Abbie Hoffman's slogan for the radical Diggers group, ‘Diggersareniggers’, and Jerry Farber's 1967 essay ‘The Student as Nigger’ (Hoffman Reference Hoffman1968, p. 28; Farber Reference Farber1970). Zimmerman, examining the pervasiveness of such language among whites of the counterculture, argues that ‘the transformation of a racist slur (“spade”) into a term of praise is, at the very least, a deeply patronizing gesture when coming from a white audience’ (Zimmerman Reference Zimmerman2008, p. 35). Discussing ‘radical minstrelsy’ in 1960s San Francisco, Sumanth Gopinath points out that such rhetoric, even when it was intended to combat or deconstruct racism, also had the contradictory effect of ‘return[ing] classic minstrel stereotypes in new forms to mass audiences for consumption’ (Gopinath). Even at the time, the Airplane's comments on race impressed some observers as merely offensive rather than subversive. Susan L.M. Huck, for example, noted with characteristic sarcasm that ‘Grace always calls Negroes “spades”. If she says it, it must be all right’ (Huck Reference Huck1970, p. 18). Others criticised the band's racial rhetoric for its lack of substance. Michael Lydon singled out the group's Cleaver sign as an example of their ‘mushy politics – sort of a turned-on liberalism that thinks the Panthers are “groovy” but doesn't like to come to terms with the nasty American reality’, a stance that Lydon termed ‘the politics of the much-touted “rock revolution”’ (Lydon Reference Lydon1971, p. 117).

White critic Lydon's skepticism toward the rhetoric of white radicalism mirrored that of many politically engaged African Americans during the Black Power era. As historian William L. Van Deburg explains, many black radicals felt that ‘unlike the poor blacks whose culture they attempted to imitate, all the hippies had to do to reap the advantages of their class was to clean up, clear out their drug-fogged brains, and rejoin the ranks of the economically secure. Surely, said a growing number of black activists, no lasting coalition could be made with such people’ (Van Deburg Reference Van Deburg1992, p. 46). While the Black Panthers' socialist leanings led them to form uneasy alliances with white activists of the New Left, their ‘faith in white radicals and Marxism’ was ‘a belief shared by no other major Black Power organization’ (Joseph Reference Joseph2006, p. 219). Even the Black Panthers were deeply torn over white involvement in their activities, with the party's Honorary Prime Minister Stokely Carmichael warning the Panthers against becoming ‘the black shock troops of the white New Left and the “counterculture”’ and calling hippies ‘cowards’, even as Minster of Information Eldridge Cleaver negotiated an alliance between the Panthers and the white activists of the Peace and Freedom Party, who nominated him for the US presidential race in 1968 (ibid., pp. 221, 236, 240). If black radicals were ambivalent about the white counterculture generally, they appear to have been largely unconcerned with, or unaware of, Jefferson Airplane's occasional attempts at political engagement. A survey of the Black Panther newspaper, as well as the more mainstream black publications Ebony and Jet, reveals no mention of Slick's blackface appearance or Black Power salute during the weeks following the Smothers Brothers broadcast. For most African Americans engaged in political and social struggles, Jefferson Airplane were simply irrelevant.

If we view the Airplane as musicians as well as public figures, however, their relationship to African American culture and politics becomes more complex. If, as I have argued, one of the significant features of 1960s US radicalism was the tendency of white radicals to grant African Americans authority and to respect their leadership, Jefferson Airplane were in the vanguard as artists, if not in politics as typically conceived. The band's music involved a complex blend of various African American musical practices and genres that had inspired its members in their formative years. Lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen was a blues fanatic who revered black musicians from Muddy Waters to Reverend Gary Davis (Gleason Reference Gleason1969, pp. 107, 126; Tamarkin Reference Tamarkin2003, p. 29). Bassist Jack Casady cited the bass players featured on the Motown and Stax labels as important influences, and he had played briefly with rhythm and blues legends Little Anthony and the Imperials in the early 1960s (Gleason Reference Gleason1969, p. 200; Tamarkin Reference Tamarkin2003, p. 49). Drummer Spencer Dryden had begun his career in jazz big bands and had worked for two years with African American saxophonist Charles Lloyd (Gleason Reference Gleason1969, pp. 213–4). Slick's early influences included ‘black folk singers like Stan Wilson, Miriam Makeba, and Odetta’, and her compositions for the band reflected her interest in the work of jazz musicians such as John Coltrane (Slick Reference Slick and Cagan1998, p. 57; Tamarkin Reference Tamarkin2003, p. 153). From 1970 to 1975, the Airplane worked frequently with Papa John Creach, a black violinist in his fifties who had performed with the Illinois Symphony Orchestra as well as with jazz and R&B saxophonist Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson (Tamarkin Reference Tamarkin2003, p. 228).

This array of interests and experiences was, on one level, nothing special – many white rock musicians of the era were similarly involved with African American music and musicians. Like many of their peers, Jefferson Airplane drew on their African American influences creatively to produce new forms and techniques, rather than simply aspiring to precise imitations of existing genres of black music. Zimmerman argues that musicians such as Jerry Garcia and Janis Joplin were either unaware of or unworried about the racial politics inherent in such borrowing and believed that genres such as the blues should be available to anyone who chose to perform them (Zimmerman Reference Zimmerman2008, pp. 39, 44). Jefferson Airplane, in contrast, were informed at least in part by the notion that black musicians deserved autonomous control over their own music. Spencer Dryden, for example, remembered with equanimity the experience of being excluded from some African American jazz groups. Dryden commented that ‘it's coming time, man, for the American Negro to do his thing … And I still have a lot of good [black] friends; it's just that they're in their section of what they're doing right now. They're sort of like doing their thing together’ (Gleason Reference Gleason1969, p. 212). Singer Marty Balin speculated that ‘a lot of Negro cats come up and say, “Wow, man, I dig your voice. Too much!”’, perhaps because, unlike white blues revivalists like Paul Butterfield, he did not strive for ‘a communication with a Negro type of sound’ (ibid., p. 97). Unlike many of their overtly political statements, the band's comments on their musical style sometimes displayed a nuanced sense of music's racial significance. The Airplane appear to have been engaged in a complex if imperfect attempt to create a contemporary musical form that reflected African American influences without asserting dominance over those influences.

Standard accounts that depict 1960s rock as the soundtrack to a revolutionary movement of white youth, however, have limited serious consideration of rock's African American influences and performers. As John J. Sheinbaum argues, the ‘conventional narrative’ of 1960s rock ‘reasserts largely segregated spheres of activity in the mid-1960s at the same time that it disproportionately values those spheres’ (Sheinbaum Reference Sheinbaum, Beebe, Fulbrook and Saunders2002, p. 111). Stepping away from this reductive view suggests that the story of the rock revolution is more ambiguous than either cynics or romantics would have it. Slick's blackface routine, in which she seems to play at revolution by imitating African American radicals, exemplifies the frequent emptiness and arrogance of rock's politics. Jefferson Airplane's music, however, often reflected a respectful and thoughtful effort, not simply to revive or mimic various aspects of black music, but to creatively synthesise them into new forms of expression. If rock musicians such as Jefferson Airplane tore down walls during the 1960s, they did so as much through continued exploration of African American musical tradition as through utopian visions of political and cultural revolution.