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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



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Today in counterculture history (03/17) 2
#14135109 - 03/17/11 02:49 AM (12 years, 10 months ago) |
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- 1941: Paul Kantner is born
Quote:
Paul Lorin Kantner (March 17, 1941 – January 28, 2016) was an American guitarist and vocalist, known for co-founding the counterculture era psychedelic rock band Jefferson Airplane and its spin-off band Jefferson Starship. He was born in San Francisco, California.
Although the band was originally formed by Marty Balin, Kantner eventually became the leader of Jefferson Airplane and led the group through it's highly successful late 1960s period. While still active with the Jefferson Airplane, in 1970 Kantner and several Bay Area musicians did a one-off side project under the moniker "Paul Kantner and the Jefferson Starship". Jefferson Airplane would continue along until 1972, when the band broke up Kantner revived the Jefferson Starship name and continued to record and perform with that band for the next five decades. Kantner has the longest continuous membership with the band; at times he was the only founding member still in the band from the original Jefferson Airplane lineup.
Early years
The son of Paul and Cora Lee (Fortier) Kantner, Paul had two much older half-siblings: a half-brother and a half-sister. His mother died when he was eight years old, and Kantner remembered not being able to attend her funeral, having been sent to the circus instead. His father, a traveling salesman, sent young Kantner off to Jesuit military school after his mother's death. It was in the school's library at age eight or nine where he read his first science fiction book, finding an escape by immersing himself in science fiction novels and music at an early age. When he became a teenager he went into total revolt against all forms of authority, and became determined to become a protest folk singer in the manner of his musical hero, Pete Seeger. He attended Santa Clara University and San Jose State College, completing a total of three years before he dropped out to enter the music scene.
1960s–1970s
During the summer of 1965 singer Marty Balin saw Kantner perform at the Drinking Gourd, a San Francisco folk club, and recruited him as part of the original Jefferson Airplane. When the group needed a guitarist, Kantner recommended Jorma Kaukonen, whom he knew from his San Jose days. Kantner would be the only member to appear on all Jefferson Airplane/Starship albums bearing the Jefferson prefix. Kantner's songwriting often featured whimsical or political lyrics with a science-fiction or fantasy theme, usually set to music that had a hard rock, almost martial sound. Kantner and Jefferson Airplane were among those who played at Woodstock. Forty years later, Kantner recalled: “We were due to be on stage at 10pm on the Saturday night but we didn’t actually get on until 7.30am the following day.” Later in the year, the group also played at Altamont, where Marty Balin was knocked unconscious on-stage by a Hell's Angel member originally hired as security for the concert. Kantner is seen in the documentary movie about the Altamont concert, Gimme Shelter (1970 film), in a tense on-stage confrontation with a Hell's Angel member regarding the altercation.
Despite its commercial success, the Airplane was plagued by intra-group fighting, causing the band to begin splintering at the height of its success. Part of the problem was manager Bill Graham, who wanted the group to do more touring and more recording. During the transitional period of the early 1970s, as the Airplane started to disintegrate, Kantner recorded Blows Against The Empire, a concept album featuring an ad-hoc group of musicians whom he dubbed Jefferson Starship. This earliest edition of Jefferson Starship included members of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (David Crosby and Graham Nash) and members of the Grateful Dead (Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann, and Mickey Hart), as well as some of the other members of Jefferson Airplane (Grace Slick, Joey Covington, and Jack Casady).
Personal life and death
Kantner had three children; sons Gareth (a film producer), and Alexander (a musician who sometimes played with Jefferson Starship), and daughter China (a former MTV VJ and actress.)
A political anarchist, Kantner once advocated the use of psychedelic drugs such as LSD for mind expansion and spiritual growth, and was a prominent advocate of the legalization of marijuana. In a 1986 interview, Kantner shared his thoughts about cocaine and alcohol, saying, "Cocaine, particularly, is a bummer. It's a noxious drug that turns people into jerks. And alcohol is probably the worst drug of all. As you get older and accomplish more things in life in general, you realize that drugs don't help, particularly if you abuse them." When Kantner suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in 1980, his attending physician at Cedars-Sinai, Stephen Levy, was quick to point out it was not a drug-related issue, saying: "There is zero relationship between Paul's illness and drugs. He doesn't use drugs."
Kantner died in San Francisco at the age of 74 on January 28, 2016 due to multiple organ failure and septic shock after he suffered a heart attack days earlier. Shortly after Kantner's passing, Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart reflected, "He was kind of the backbone of that band. It was always about Grace and Jack and Jorma (Kaukonen), I don’t think he got the credit he deserved." He died on the same day as Airplane co-founder Signe Toly Anderson.
(https://en.wikipedia.org)
- 1967: Time Magazine publishes an article entitled "San Francisco: Love on Haight"
Quote:
San Francisco: Love on Haight Friday, Mar. 17, 1967
The Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco is not so much a neighborhood as a state of mindlessness. The Erewhon of America's "pot left," a 10-by-15 block midtown section, has over the past year become the center of a new utopianism, compounded of drugs and dreams, free love and LSD. It is a far cry from the original Utopia, envisioned some 400 years ago by Sir Thomas More, whose denizens demanded six hours of work each day: the 7,000 mind-blown residents of San Francisco's "Psychedelphia" demand a zero-hour day and free freak-outs for all.
Speed & Acid. Utopia on the Bay is bounded at one end by the greenery of Golden Gate Park, split down the middle by the fragrant eucalyptus trees of "The Panhandle." Tourist buses have already made The Haight-Ashbury (its residents insist on the definite article) a regular stop. Down the center of Psychedelphia runs Haight Street (which hippies hope to have renamed "Love Street"); the region itself—once the residence of such formidable families as the silver-mining Floods and the couture-vending Magnins—is studded with steamboat-Gothic mansions and psychedelic gathering places like the "I and Thou" coffee shop and the "Print Mint." Its inhabitants wear everything from Elizabethan motley to Judean beards. They preach every gospel from the 19th century socialism of France's Charles Fourier to the all-purpose caritas of St. Francis. Most of them—perhaps 80%—are steadily high on drugs ranging from LSD to such synthetic stimulants as Methedrine, Dexedrine and Benzedrine, which are known collectively as "speed." Gaudily painted trucks and buses thread with somnambulatory leisure through The Haight-Ashbury's sunny streets like evocations of an acid dream; the sickly scent of incense fills the air to mask the reek of marijuana.
Strollers wear jingle bells at their ankles, beads or flowers at their throats, and strum guitars or tootle flutes. It is not rare to see a Haight Street hippie put a dime in a parking meter, then flake out along the curb for a legal dose of sun tan. Wall posters, in the style of China's Red Guard movement, abound—most of them signed "Love" or "Peace" and bearing such timeless messages as "Gypsy come home—your mother is pushed out of shape."
Illogical Extension. The Haight-Ashbury is an illogical extension of such 1950-style scenes as Los Angeles' Venice West, New York's South Village, and San Francisco's own North Beach, where the beats of the Kerouac-Ferlinghetti-Ginsberg generation gathered in delicious despair. What has been added is a vague sense of mission, drawn from the ideals of the New Left and the new lotus-eaters. Central to that new theme are "The Diggers," who run a sort of psychedelic soup kitchen providing free chow to hungry hippies.
Led by a pug-nosed Irish-American named Emmett Grogan, 23, The Diggers beg leftovers and handouts from nearby restaurants, butcher shops and groceries, rumble around in a rainbow-painted truck dispensing stew and sympathy. "The whole idea is love," explains Digger Leonard Sussman, 23, who recently quit an insurance job in New Jersey to join the love-Haight mission. "We have a farm in Mendocino given to us by a friend where we'll grow food," he explains, "and other Diggers will go to Chile or Mexico to grow marijuana in the backyard."
Getting Together. Not that The Haight-Ashbury Utopia needs any new source of supply. Narcotics arrests in the district last year more than trebled (from 148 in 1965 to 485 in 1966). A "lid" (22 grams) of marijuana sells for $10 (v. $25 in New York City) and a 100 microgram "tab" of LSD can be had for $4. Some pot peddlers even pass out supermarket-style trading stamps with each purchase. Apart from narcotics arrests, however, the crime rate shows no drastic escalation. During a January "Human Be-In" at Golden Gate Park, 10,000 hippies turned out to sing folk-rock songs, watch a psychedelic parachutist descend from a "high trip," and listen to Hindu prayers by Sometime Guru Allen Ginsberg, who has survived the transition from beat to hip. Even members of Hell's Angels, the roughknuckled, leather-jacketed motorcyclists in Nazi drag, turned up to turn on: some were seen holding lost children or gently shaking tambourines. Not a single fight marred the Be-In, and as the sun went down (to the sullen wail of Ginsberg blowing a conch shell), the forgathered hippies quietly cleared every bit of litter from the park. Officials later said that they had never seen so large a crowd leave so clean a field.
Reaction to the New Utopia among "straight" San Franciscans has been remarkably bland. "They only steal if they're hungry," shrugs one Haight Street grocer. "I'd do the same." One of the district's most sympathetic observers is the Rev. Leon Harris, 60, pastor of The Haight-Ashbury's All Saints' Episcopal Church, whose favorite anecdote concerns a stuffy woman parishioner who came in to complain of the New Utopians. Says Harris: "I told her to take a careful look at the church windows. She gasped when she realized that the saints, too, wore beards and sandals."
(http://www.time.com)
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Edited by Learyfan (03/16/22 09:22 AM)
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



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Re: Today in counterculture history (03/17) [Re: Learyfan] 3
#15959079 - 03/17/12 10:27 AM (11 years, 10 months ago) |
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



Registered: 04/20/01
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Re: Today in counterculture history (03/17) [Re: Learyfan] 1
#17967580 - 03/17/13 07:21 AM (10 years, 10 months ago) |
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Happy Birthday Paul!
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Edited by Learyfan (03/17/18 11:31 AM)
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



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Re: Today in counterculture history (03/17) [Re: Learyfan] 1
#19707404 - 03/17/14 05:47 AM (9 years, 10 months ago) |
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Jefferson Airplane - "We Can Be Together"
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memes
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Re: Today in counterculture history (03/17) [Re: Learyfan] 1
#19707420 - 03/17/14 06:01 AM (9 years, 10 months ago) |
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



Registered: 04/20/01
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Re: Today in counterculture history (03/17) [Re: memes]
#21419279 - 03/17/15 05:36 AM (8 years, 10 months ago) |
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-------------------- -------------------------------- Mp3 of the month: The Apple-Glass Cyndrome - Someday
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deucedbi9
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Re: Today in counterculture history (03/17) [Re: Learyfan]
#22862877 - 02/04/16 09:25 AM (7 years, 11 months ago) |
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Just read of his passing. Another musician that made up our childhood sound-scape bites the dust. I guess that's what happens as you get older.
RIP Paul.
-------------------- whether low pressure sucks or high pressure blows... it's a bugger to cycle in. even though I'm feeling good Something tells me I'd better activate my prayer capsule
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



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Re: Today in counterculture history (03/17) [Re: deucedbi9]
#23015663 - 03/17/16 05:40 AM (7 years, 10 months ago) |
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Paul would have been 75 today. R.I.P.

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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



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Re: Today in counterculture history (03/17) [Re: Learyfan]
#24169085 - 03/17/17 05:42 AM (6 years, 10 months ago) |
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50th anniversary of that Time Magazine article with the delightful play on words, "San Francisco: Love on Haight".
-------------------- -------------------------------- Mp3 of the month: The Apple-Glass Cyndrome - Someday
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



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Re: Today in counterculture history (03/17) [Re: Learyfan]
#25070750 - 03/17/18 11:31 AM (5 years, 10 months ago) |
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Annual bump.
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ServantOfBaphomet
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Re: Today in counterculture history (03/17) [Re: Learyfan] 1
#25070890 - 03/17/18 12:58 PM (5 years, 10 months ago) |
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-------------------- Do what thou Wilt shall be the Whole of the Law Love is the Law. Love under Will
Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia!! The Sovereign Peanut has Spoken!!
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unam sanctum


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"During a January "Human Be-In" at Golden Gate Park, 10,000 hippies turned out to sing folk-rock songs, watch a psychedelic parachutist descend from a "high trip," and listen to Hindu prayers by Sometime Guru Allen Ginsberg, who has survived the transition from beat to hip. Even members of Hell's Angels, the roughknuckled, leather-jacketed motorcyclists in Nazi drag, turned up to turn on: some were seen holding lost children or gently shaking tambourines. Not a single fight marred the Be-In, and as the sun went down (to the sullen wail of Ginsberg blowing a conch shell), the forgathered hippies quietly cleared every bit of litter from the park. Officials later said that they had never seen so large a crowd leave so clean a field."
How it should be. Not like standing rock where everyone left their garbage.
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



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Re: Today in counterculture history (03/17) [Re: unam sanctum]
#25879659 - 03/17/19 09:41 AM (4 years, 10 months ago) |
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Exactly. That's an interesting article, because it starts out completely negative and then ends on two positive notes.
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



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Re: Today in counterculture history (03/17) [Re: Learyfan]
#26540136 - 03/17/20 07:30 AM (3 years, 10 months ago) |
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Annual bump.
-------------------- -------------------------------- Mp3 of the month: The Apple-Glass Cyndrome - Someday
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



Registered: 04/20/01
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Re: Today in counterculture history (03/17) [Re: Learyfan]
#27257015 - 03/17/21 09:26 AM (2 years, 10 months ago) |
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Today would have been Paul Kantner's 80th birthday!

-------------------- -------------------------------- Mp3 of the month: The Apple-Glass Cyndrome - Someday
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



Registered: 04/20/01
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Re: Today in counterculture history (03/17) [Re: Learyfan]
#27698436 - 03/17/22 03:42 AM (1 year, 10 months ago) |
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55th anniversary of the Time Magazine article "San Francisco: Love on Haight".
-------------------- -------------------------------- Mp3 of the month: The Apple-Glass Cyndrome - Someday
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Learyfan
It's the psychedelic movement!



Registered: 04/20/01
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Re: Today in counterculture history (03/17) [Re: Learyfan]
#28233170 - 03/17/23 04:06 AM (10 months, 9 days ago) |
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Annual bump.
-------------------- -------------------------------- Mp3 of the month: The Apple-Glass Cyndrome - Someday
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