Pat talks with manager Bill Thompson about Jefferson Airplane, Altamont, and Led Zeppelin
Yeah, mention the Jefferson Airplane to just about anyone - and they will almost immediately get a pained look on their face. Why? They confuse the Airplane with the later period Starship shit !?!, they've only heard the two Airplane songs that get played to death: Somebody to Love and White Rabbit, or… several years ago, I sat down with Airplane manager Bill Thompson – he had a few interesting stories to tell about Grace Slick "which one of you guys has the biggest cock?", Altamont, Led Zep, and the San Francisco scene back in the day:
PT: So how did the Airplane boxed set all start?
BT: Well, I went to Joe Gallante, the president of RCA, and said it was
time that a boxed set of Airplane material came out. I told him that we
had a lot of tapes which had never been released - we could put together
an incredible boxed set! That was a year ago last June. We put out all kinds
of requests for information, asking that unreleased tapes be sent to me.
Appeals appeared in Rolling Stone, Bam, Ice and a lot of other publications
and I started getting a lot of tapes - things like 'Emergency' which we
got from Bob Ciccone who did that special back in 1970. Then we hired a
guy called Pat Ieraci who had worked for us for years and years on all the
old LPs to go back into the vaults in Indianapolis and look for stuff. I
gave him a lot of material which collectors had sent to me, things like
'Would You Like A Snack?' which Grace and Frank Zappa had written together.
Collectors would send the rundowns of every song ever recorded, when it
was recorded, who was the engineer etc… people talked about the Airplane
doing the legendary Rolling Stones song 'Satisfaction' so we combed the
vaults and found 30 seconds of the Airplane jamming 'Satisfaction', just
fucking around one day. A couple of songs came along which I had personally
forgotten about - "Don't Let Me Down" which Marty and Jorma put
together and "Things are Better in the East" which I remember
happening, but it just got buried. And then we found a bunch of live stuff
- the Fillmore show (or shows) - it's a little hard to figure out - but
they went back into the vaults and found it. We thought it might have been
a Kaleidoscope show in Los Angeles, but we weren't certain. That's our best
recollection, but anyway they went in there and fixed all that stuff up.
Originally the idea had been to put together an album of unreleased things
plus one side of live stuff and another of 'greatest hits' - it's kind of
like that now, but it's all mixed in from beginning to end. So we kept working
on the thing and we were trying to get it out by last Christmas, but I told
Joe Gallante that I needed more time and he said OK, put it out in February/March.
I was busy, they were busy and the thing went on and was going to come out
in July.
In the early days, did you have any aspirations to be a manager?
Not at the beginning, I was in journalism. I worked at the San Francisco
Chronicle. Marty and I lived together, we had all these grandiose ideas
- he was going to start a band and I was going to get all the publicity
for the band and the scene, and in a way that kind of happened. Marty started
the band and also got a club, the Matrix. I got the press for that, I was
the first P.R. for the club. I got Ralph Gleason to do the first review
of the Airplane, and I had the Airplane and the Matrix all over the Chronicle
- in the society pages, on the financial pages, all over the place. I'd
have the reporters come down to the Matrix and we'd give them free beers
- they all came! 'Reporter' and 'beer' go together, they're like synonyms
almost. The band's first manager got the advance for the first record, Matthew
Katz - a notorious figure, he took off with the money and went to the Bahamas.
About $25,000 I think it was. Guys would call up and say, "Can we have
the band to play in front of two thousand people and we'll give you a keg
of beer" and Marty would say "OK, sure, no problem". I'd
say to Marty, "Why don't you let me talk to these people - at least
let's get a price for it…" I knew that much at least, I'd done
some sales jobs and sold advertising. So anyway, Bill Graham wanted to book
his first show at the Fillmore Auditorium on February 4th, 5th and 6th (there's
a poster in the booklet) and when I booked the date I doubled the price
to $2000 a night, a lot of money then. So when Matthew Katz came back I
was kind of in the picture and became the road manager. Nobody would talk
to Matthew, but they would talk to me. There was an opening slot with the
Rolling Stones, and they talked with me about it - not Matthew.
How did Matthew Katz manage to get these bands under his wing, d'you
think?
He had a golden tongue. He came on like he knew everybody, but once he got
the artist he was really difficult to work with and alienated everyone.
So they finally decided they were going to fire him and said to me, "Until
we find a real manager we want you to speak to the people for us".
I really didn't know what I was doing, I was just helping them out part-time.
I took a leave of absence from the Chronicle until we got Bill Graham in
to manage the band, with me as his assistant. That lasted for a year. Grace
especially did not like Bill Graham, he was not her idea of a manager. He
was tough, a strict guy who wanted them to work, work, work. He wanted them
to tour which they really didn't want to do, so they told me and Marty to
go an fire Bill Graham! That was like firing King Kong! It wasn't fun at
all. Anyway, after that point people kept calling me up and I just kind
of took over. It wasn't really a planned thing, it just kinda happened that
I evolved into a manager.
One of my favourites is ‘Quah’, the LP by Jorma Kaukonen.
That's a great one - besides being the most underrated guitarist of that
time, Jorma is arguably the greatest finger picker/acoustic guitar player
in the world, and has been for some time. A true musician. Same thing with
Jack - they love to play. One thing that happened with the Airplane is that
Jack and Jorma wanted to play more. Especially when Marty was around, the
songs that Paul and Grace and Marty wrote kind of forced Jorma and Jack
to play something different, and that was some of the greatest music to
come out of the whole thing.
Could you tell us a little more about 2400 Fulton Street?
Well, when I was the interim manager in 1968, this lady Jackie Watts and
I were looking for a place to rent. Jackie worked with me for fifteen or
sixteen years, she now works for Ultrasound, who do the Grateful Dead's
sound - a wonderful lady. Anyway, at the time we didn't have any office
space and Jackie and I went over and saw this house, 2400 Fulton Street.
The guy who owned it was about 87 years old, he wanted a hundred thousand
dollars for it and I negotiated with him for a while. Anyway, he had this
niece or grand-daughter who really loved the Airplane so he sold it to us
for seventy thousand! I think the rent was about $309 a month, for all those
years we were there. It had twenty or so rooms in the place. We rehearsed
in the basement. Paul lived there for a long time, Grace lived there for
a while, Jorma lived there… I think Marty and I were the only ones
not to live there. We had all kinds of weird stuff - we even had the first
water bed! One day we came in and a couple were found screwing on the bed,
nobody knew who they were and we had to throw them out. Security was a problem
to an extent - there were a lot of people passing through, and we never
had a high security attitude. One time a guy showed up who said that he
owned the house - looked me straight in the eye and asked what I was doing
in his house! He said it so intensely - I said, "Wait a minute - I
own this house!" Another guy came by one day and told me that he'd
been King Arthur in a previous life. We had great parties there, we did
all of our business there - it was a great place. At the end it was getting
a little run-down - the place had been built in 1905. The story goes that
on the night of the 1906 earthquake, Caruso had slept there and then left
San Francisco never to return, so the musical vibes went way back. It was
the end of an era when we sold it in 1987 - sold it for $700 thousand. It
was Paul Kantner's idea to name the compilation '2400 Fulton' and then we
had a picture of the house put on the front of the album.
So I guess it was a trial by fire for you getting into the music
business?
A lot of crazy scenes went down, of course. Grace was in her drinking days,
which was always an adventure. Whether we would do a show or not depended
on what condition she was in. In fact, on 'Would You Like A Snack' that
I mentioned before, it sounds to me like Grace was drunk. I can't think
of any polite way of putting it! Given the combination of Grace and drink
and a full moon and when Grace was having her period, it was a very dangerous
time. I remember once when we played Fort Wayne in Indiana, all these elements
were working together at the same time and Grace started off the show by
saying "OK! Which one of you guys in the audience has the biggest cock?"
Well, we had trouble getting dates for a while in certain areas. If she
started drinking she would go on a 36 hour run. As Grace will tell you,
she didn't drink just a little - she'd drink everything she could lay her
hands on!
How long did Grace's relationship with Paul last?
Well, Grace and Spencer got together in 1967 and that lasted for one and
a half to two years. After they broke up we don't know exactly what happened,
but I do know that I was at the Airplane house one day and I came to work
and Grace came down from the third floor smiling from ear to ear…
that's when they started, so probably they were together from 1969 to 1976.
Six or seven years, I think. There was a whole series of adventures - she
was going out with the guy who did the lightshows, she eventually married
him actually, and Paul forbade him to come on the road. He was gonna blow
up his house and his car. One night we were someplace in Virginia and Grace
and he got into a fight. She got a black eye - it was just terrible! Paul
had a gun that he carried with him, and it turned out that the lightshow
guy had a gun too. I thought, this is gonna be great! There's going to be
a shootout at this motel in Norfolk, Virginia! A lot of crazy things like
that happened.
Do you remember a show in England with Led Zeppelin and the Airplane?
Yeah, we co-headlined at the Bath Festival. My friend Freddy Bannister put
it on, he's a promoter. I remember it raining. We were way up high, about
fifteen feet off the ground, so that the audience way at the back could
see it. Now Peter Grant, the manager of Zeppelin, was a great big guy -
about 300 lbs - and in the middle of the show a kid got up on the stage
and Peter Grant picked him up, lifted him over his head and threw him over
the side! Could've killed him! Not a very nice guy, but Led Zeppelin were
an amazing band. A great band, but personality wise - a little strange.
Led Zeppelin had been to San Francisco - they played the Winterland I think
a couple of years beforehand. They'd been told that San Francisco was the
hippest place in the world and that if you weren't endorsed by San Francisco
you weren't going to go very far, or at least on the scale that they wanted
to. They did very well in San Francisco though - they did very well everywhere.
I think if they came back today, even with another drummer, they could do
amazing business if they wanted to.
San Francisco was the centre of the music scene throughout the Sixties
– what the hell happened?
Well one of the things that I always hoped could have happened would've
been that the bands could be got together and when we first started making
records – in fact we tried to get the deal together and become part
of it – we could have combined our publishing and a lot of other things.
Everyone wanted to do their own thing though, and a lot of people moved
out of town, so it kind of dissipated. I don't know exactly what happened.
Altamont in December 1969 seemed to signify the end of the Sixties, symbolically
as well as literally. I'm in the film actually - you can see me on stage
talking to the band. I look like Buffalo Bill with my beard and goatee.
Marty thought he was some old film actor, Errol Flynn or somebody, with
his sword going out there to talk to the Hell's Angels. There was this guy
called 'Animal' who had some sort of animal's head on top of his head…
Marty told him to get fucked and Animal knocked him out. When Marty woke
up, Animal told him: "Hey man, never say ‘fuck off’ to
an Angel" so Marty told him again to get fucked and Animal knocked
him out again. Some of the guys said, "Excuse me Mr. Animal, but aren't
you supposed to be protecting the bands here?" and he replied once
more that nobody says "fuck off" to an Angel. So I told Marty
that if he continued to do this he may not go home at all, I mean this guy
doesn't give a shit whether you live or die… Marty wanted to do something
but Animal weighed about 100 lbs more than him so we finished the show and
got him out right away. I got out before the Meredith Hunter killing –
got everyone out of there apart from Paul and Grace, they stayed on stage
and watched the whole thing.
How did you come to be playing Altamont?
We were playing at the University of Florida and I got a call from Rock
Scully saying the Stones wanted to do a free show and they wanted the Airplane
to play in it - this was literally the day beforehand. When we got there
there were thousands and thousands of people - no-one knew it was gonna
be that big, they'd thrown it together so quickly. It was a guy called Sam
Cutler whose idea it was to hire the Angels. It was thought that it would
be cool although I never knew exactly what would happen with those guys.
They would turn up at shows and were taking pills all day long… you
never really knew. The thing was, they never should have been put into the
position of trying to control three hundred thousand people. Angels don't
like to be cops; anybody put into a situation that they're not familiar
with would react crazily. Anyway that's what happened and ultimately you've
got to blame the Rolling Stones. We refuse to take any money from that film,
we want all the money given to the family of the guy that died - that was
our deal, although I don't know if that's what's happening or not.
So what finally killed the scene, do you think?
Possibly it was greed. From my point of view though, Jefferson Starship
made a lot more money than the Jefferson Airplane. Jefferson Airplane was
a huge cultural influence in the things that they helped start in this city,
that really influenced generations of people all over the world. A lot of
people made more money, but in the 60s the Airplane was as important as
just about anybody. They were the first band - they started the whole thing…