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Music Icon Marty Balin

Part 1: The Process of Songwriting
Marty Balin helped to launch the scenes that became known as psychedelic rock and the Summer of Love. His actions in 1964 and 1965 not only created a new form of music, but also helped to change the direction of an entire generation. The founder, singer and songwriter of Jefferson Airplane, and later Jefferson Starship, is celebrating his 40th year in the music business doing what he does best - writing songs, performing them live, and working on his growing body of artwork.

Robert Yehling is collaborating with Marty on a book, “Full Flight,” which will be published in 2002. The following interview and conversation with Marty took place for a cover story in High Times magazine, which was published in 2000. Subsequent excerpts from the interview will continue to appear in WordJourneys.com:

Robert Yehling: One thing you said during your Spring 1999 show at Nuance Galleries was that sometimes, how you feel and what you feel in the world comes out as music, and sometimes it comes out as art. Obviously, there was a period of time when you were just performing and writing music. Now that you create both music and art, how does this work for you on a daily basis?

Marty Balin: It's easier to paint sometimes, especially portraits. To do a portrait of someone in song is more abstract. I can't just write about someone in a song. It's more universal. I wouldn't just try to say the girl's name; I would try to use words so that when I'm on stage, everyone I sing to is that person. Whereas in a painting, you try to get the quality of that personality. I try to get a dynamic pose, the monumental moment, the look that really conveys the way he holds his hand on a guitar, the way a singer sings. I just take that and let the portrait paint itself.

In a song, I'm much more broad. I've learned to include everybody in an audience. The nouns and pronouns change, it becomes more direct, and I can include everybody. I think in a good song, everybody immediately feels it, and everybody is included. With a painting, people look at it and either like it or not. But if you're talking to someone direct, and I say, 'You,' you think I'm talking about you! Songs are more direct in that sense. You can really strike emotionally just by saying the right thing with the right music.

To me, writing songs is like painting. With a few songs I've written, I've actually painted pictures in my mind; each line is like a painting. “Caroline” is a good example. When you're on stage, it's like a square. You're in the middle, you see people over here (the front rows), then everything's kind of dim. Sometimes I do songs where I “paint” pictures in that square. With “Caroline,” one line was a picture on that square, then a bigger picture, then a bigger picture topping that. I even fell down laughing, cracking myself up, because it got to be a question of, “How much can I put into this?” I even got Atlantis falling into the ocean into it.

Q: What are you aiming to achieve when you write? I've heard that because of your comfort and spontaneity on stage, you sometimes envision the act of performing your songs live when you write them.

M.B.: I do different things. Sometimes, I want a song to make a statement that is appropriate for opening a show. If I don't have any song that does it, I'll write one for myself. When I write a love song, I write about something I'm feeling specifically, but I don't put a specific name to it. When I'm on stage, I can really say it to one person - and if you say it to one person, you're saying it to all of the people.

Q: Songwriting is one thing, but what you're also talking about is stage presence. How did you develop such dynamic stage presence?

M.B.: I grew up on a stage. I've always been singing and dancing. I was a dancer for years, working in professional shows. As a dancer, you learn how to carry yourself. I've always sung as a natural thing; it's always something real to me. I sang in choirs in church, on street corners.

Q: What type of songs have you been writing?

M.B.: Love songs, love songs, love songs. I really don't write anything but love songs.

Q: When did you first understand that you had the folk song-love song-ballad technique down?

M.B.: I guess I'm known more for the love songs, but I have written a lot of other songs - fast songs, a lot of Paul (Kantner's) songs, strange songs. I've written some of his epics. I'll write to anyone who's got an idea; I'll collaborate with anybody. When I write for myself, I usually go for a pretty melody; I'm a sucker for a good melody. As soon as I hear something, I'll pick it up on the guitar, then I'm going to write something to it.

Q: When you're writing, does the melody come to you before the words?

M.B.: Yeah. I'll sing and hum a melody over and over until words start to happen, then I'll write them down. I'll write a song three or four times, then Bang! That perfect word will come up, the essence of the whole thing. Sometimes you'll just write that song that will come out in five minutes; those are the best songs. Sometimes, I'll think of a melody for years, go into my head for years until I hear what it says to me, because I want to find the exact words. The right word with the right sound on stage is enormous. The wrong word or sort of the right word, well, it's that old thing Mark Twain said about the difference between a lightning bug and lightning - a word. That's true about writing songs. And sometimes I just play with words: “Plastic Fantastic Lover” was just word play. I just wrote this song called “Shooting Star,” talking about a relationship, and I'm using words like “zoom” and “zip.” I want to hear 'em sing from the stage - you get a lot of people singing “zoom” and “zip,” and it gets to be fun.

Q: Yet, it's a very much a matter of what you want to hear, isn't it?

M.B.: I pretty much just write for myself, and since my songs haven't been covered that much, no one really cares; I don't have that pressure. I'm just pretty much an underground guy doing what I want to do, singing what I want, writing what I want, painting what I want. I'm pretty grateful for that. I have a little band in Tampa and I go out and play a lot of these songs that no one's heard of. During the height of Starship, I always had little bands on the side and we'd play dance songs, stuff like that. I get the feeling that eventually, people will catch up to me and they'll want these songs.

Q: It seems every great musician is “discovered” by someone, and that every “overnight success” is at least a few years in the making. What is your discovery story?

M.B.: As a young kid, I hung out with Johnny Mathis' brother, Ralph. He and I were good friends, and Johnny heard me singing around the house. He said, “You know? You oughta be a singer. You gotta good voice, kid.” That's the first time I realized that maybe I could do something as a singer. By chance, I ended up in L.A. with this girl I was in a play with. We went to this publishing house, and while she was talking to somebody, someone was over playing the piano. I went over and started singing with him, and he said, “Hey, you do this?”

Next thing I knew, I was in a session doing some background voices on somebody's record. After that, they gave me some demos to see if I could do them. In the first session, they had a complete string section with Jimmy Haskell conducting. The Blossoms were singing background vocals, Glen Campbell was the guitar player, Chuck Nietchy on keyboards, Rick Collander on bass. I sang these four tunes. They didn't like my real name, so they changed it to Balin. They put out the tunes as singles on this little label called Challenge Records. One or two got on the air - including “I Specialize In Love,” which is really my first single - and I started going out and doing record hops. One time, I even met Sam Cooke at an American Legion Hall dance. Boy, I was really knocked out by that.

Q: What happened in the three years between this four-song record and your decision to form Jefferson Airplane?

M.B.: I enjoyed singing so much that when I was working in lithography, printing plants that my father had me doing, I just said, 'You know, I'm going to do something artistic. I just don't want to work everyday doing this routine stuff.'

Q: You attended art school for awhile as well.

M.B.: Well, I tried art school, but I was an egomaniac. I thought I was too big for art school. I'd always get in arguments with these teachers.

Q: The spirit of the rebel who would help create a counterculture was already alive and kicking!

M.B.: Yeah, that's true. But I just wanted to paint. I mainly went to art school to go to the bottom floors and get canvases that were already stretched, and take them home and paint. I must admit I resorted to a little thievery at the time, just to get a chance to paint on canvas. I did learn a bit about torch work with steel.

Q: What about singing?

M.B.: I thought I'd continue singing, because every time I sang, someone would pay me. I had an idea to go to Europe and study stone work, drawing and painting, because art was my first love. I thought the fastest way I could earn the money to do that was by singing. So I put the Airplane together.

Part 2: Jefferson Airplane Forms
Marty Balin helped to launch the scenes that became known as psychedelic rock and the Summer of Love. His actions in 1964 and 1965 not only created a new form of music, but also helped to change the direction of an entire generation. The founder, singer and songwriter of Jefferson Airplane, and later Jefferson Starship, is celebrating his 40th year in the music business doing what he does best - writing songs, performing them live, and working on his growing body of artwork.

Robert Yehling is collaborating with Marty on a book, “Full Flight,” which will be published in 2002. The following interview and conversation with Marty took place for a cover story in High Times magazine, which was published in 2000. Here, he discusses the formation of Jefferson Airplane - and the permanent change of the American social scene in the 1960s. Subsequent excerpts from the interview will continue to appear in WordJourneys.com:

Robert Yehling: Jefferson Airplane was originally formed so that you could earn enough money to go to art school in Europe and bop down to Florence to study stone work?

Marty Balin: That's what I had in mind. But I couldn't get us any jobs anywhere, because there was an ordinance in San Francisco that basically prevented anyone from plugging in, using electricity. So I decided to build a nightclub, The Matrix. Before I knew it, out of the woodwork came every other band there was, from the Dead to Joplin, Santana, Steve Miller, you name it. Plus, all the jazz musicians came down, there were a lot of comics at the time; they all came to this place. It just happened overnight. It was an alternative place for people to go. There were only a couple of clubs in town - the Purple Onion and Hungry Eye. There was the old jazz club scene from the Beatnik era, where I used to do and hang out.

Q: So you didn't think the Airplane would be more than a club band?

M.B.: I didn't think beyond that at all. I didn't know there was a bunch of people who were interested in the same thing; I didn't see the scene when it was first forming, though I certainly dreamed about it a lot in 1964 - putting art and music together. Same thing I'm doing now, come to think of it! I was just looking for quick money to get to Europe. And then nobody would hire the band and I, because we had drums and electricity. At the time, it was a folk scene. When I told the folk clubs where I played, and that I was going to have a drummer, they said, “Well, you can't play here.” And no one would hire us. So one night, in one of these clubs, these girls brought over their boyfriends. We started talking, and each guy said he had $3,000 to invest. I just said, “Give it to me. I'll build a nightclub. You can have the nightclub; I'll put a band in there and I'll keep the band.” And they did. And I did.

Q: We've heard and read any number of stories about how Jefferson Airplane took off. Since you were the leader of the band, you must know for sure. How did the Airplane take off?

M.B. : I remember Ralph Gleason came one of the first nights we played; he was the main jazz columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. At the bottom, he had these little bullet-point mentions, and I thought, “Boy, if we get in these little mentions, we're going to get some work.” The next day, the whole column was about Jefferson Airplane. Whoa! The next night, every record company around was sitting in the audience, offering us a deal. The guys in the band said, “Let's sign; let's sign; let's get a deal!” And I said, “No, we won't sign until we hear from Phil Spector” (who went on to produce The Beatles' Let It Be album, among many others). The third night, Phil Spector's sister was sitting in the audience. She said, “Phil wants you to come down to L.A.” So we flew down there and met him; we didn't get along at all. So we walked out and came back. Things went along pretty fast after that. The scene exploded.

Q: Were you still painting then, or had you already given it up to concentrate on music?

M.B.: When I opened the Matrix, I painted a bunch of paintings of these great blues artists and put them on the walls. That was one of the last times I painted. I don't know what happened to the paintings.

Q: Wasn't this the time you first connected with Bill Graham?

M.B.: Yes and no. We were working with the Mime Troupe, which Bill Graham ran at the time. We'd go up there to practice with the Mime Troupe, and he called me in there. I remembered him, because when I was a dancer, I was in “Guys and Dolls,” and he auditioned for the part of Big Julie. He and the director didn't get along; pretty soon, she threw him out. Great fights went down between Bill Graham and this tiny hell-on-wheels director.

So when I saw him, I went in there and said, “I know you - Big Julie!”

He asked, “What are you doing?”

“Playing music,” I told him. “There's a whole new thing happening; people want to play music and there's a new spirit in the world.”

Pretty soon, he put on that Mime Troupe dance, and it was a smashing success. He started to put on dances. He listened to bands, learned what was going on, and picked up people that he liked, Tito Puente and the Latin groups from New York.

Q: Was Jefferson Airplane the first truly psychedelic band to form? And how in the world did you come up with a name like that? It was so outrageous that you even got that ball rolling, of bands naming themselves the craziest things?

M.B.: Well, The Charlatans were up at the Red Dog Saloon; that was really the first band. And the Beau Brummels had already put out a couple of hits, catchy folk tunes; they're finally getting some credit now for how significant they were in the mid-60s. But we were the first so-called psychedelic band who got our name in the papers, had a regular place to play, had a bunch of original music and had a scene.

We also had the weirdest name. We never said it out loud until the first night on stage, when we told the crowd, “Jefferson Airplane loves you.” We'd talked about a name amongst ourselves; we wanted something different than Byrds, Animals or stuff like that. So Jorma Kaukonen came up with the name. He had a friend whose dog was named “Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane.” So Jorma said, “Let's call ourselves Jefferson Airplane.” We all laughed; it was the funniest thing we'd heard! When we told other people, they laughed. They cracked up. And that was the spirit we wanted to go for. Boy, that name spread like fire. We put out a little “Jefferson Airplane Loves You” button to go along with the Peace button, and people started coming out of the woodwork. Then Donovan wrote “Fat Angel,” which has that line “Fly Jefferson Airplane/Gets you there on time…”

Q: From there, it could not have happened much quicker.

M.B.: It was quick. The light show people came to us, then the ballrooms came into existence. Suddenly, we had all these places to play. It was The Scene. For awhile, it was great. It was really great.