DEATH BY JEFFERSON STARSHIP PART 1

Here is the info file from Dime

hal’s DEATH BY JEFFERSON STARSHIP INTERVIEWS & CONCERTS:
Part 1, Papa John Creach / JS @ the Catalyst, Santa Cruz CA Oct. 9th 1992

CD 1:

00.0 Phone msg left by Steve Keyser (JS tour manager at the time)

00.1 Hal’s interview with Papa John and Gretchen Creach

Jefferson Starship @ the Catalyst, Santa Cruz, Oct 9th 1992

first set:
1. Other Side of this Life
2. Crown of Creation
3. I’m on Fire
4. Lawman
5. Shadowlands
6. First Pull Up, Then Pull Down
7. There Ain’t No More Country Girls
8. Women Who Fly
9. Ride the Tiger
10. We Should Be Together

CD 2:

second set:
11. Blows Against the Empire
12. Wooden Ships
13. PJ’s Down Home Blues
14. Somewhere Over the Rainbow
15. Genesis Hall
16. Have You Seen the Saucers
17. Dark Ages
18. America > "Get Ready" poem
19. Volunteers
20. encore: Girl With the Hungry Eyes

dsbd master > first-gen cassette > 24-bit Wav (WaveLab) > 16-bit FLAC

Extra Info:

With the tour manager Steve Keyser’s permission (phone msge included)
I had interviewed Papa John Creach at a Veteran’s Benefit in San Jose on
Sept 26th, 1992, and as I uneasily sat backstage in a trailer
before a smirking Paul Kantner and a tired Papa John and wife, I did my best
to do an interview. I did fairly well, I thought — until I looked down and
saw that I had not pressed "record" on the tape!!!

To my humiliated discomfort, I had to extend the interview on Papa John to
make up for lost time. You can hear this unpromising start for the first time.

Well, I thought, that was the end of my interviewing the band.
But no — the band invited me backstage at the next concert, this Catalyst show,
to complete the interview. This time I took
physical notes in pencil on the handout for the concert, and
wound up writing perhaps the best review of my hobby career
(as Papa John and wife smiled at me as I kneeled in front of them,
while Jack Casady had to jump across my legs to get to the fridge).
This is included below. . . .

Paul? I guess he was amused as usual at his discomforted fans, as he
not only played a wetdream of a concert for me — BLOWS! my favorite, BLOWS!
— he invited me backstage to interview Darby Gould and
Prairie Prince a few days later (all tapes to be released here shortly 8′)).

So, 12 years later, I proudly present the first-gen of the concert that the
band sent to me. At the end I will append the interview transcript, and also
release the full interview tape (for the first time).

Enjoy! Part 1 is my personal dedication to Papa John and Gretchen.
We miss you, Papa.

My review from the interview:

Papa John Creach Spartan Stadium 9/26/92 & 10/9/92

From jupiter2@netcom.com Thu Jan 26 10:38:15 1995

[This is the third in a series of interviews with individual
members of Jefferson Starship: the Next Generation. The
group has an as-yet-unconfirmed local concert Nov. 21st [the
San Jose Cabaret–very loud 8′(]. Prairie Prince had
a broken collarbone and was asleep in his car at the
Sept. 26th Vietnam Vet’s Benefit, Darby was singing for
two bands at the Oct. 9th Catalyst, and Paul was tired, so the
other interviews will be forthcoming after the next concerts.]

Papa John Creach paid $40,000 for his fiddle, which he bought
in San Francisco because of the way it felt in his hands;
but unlike B.B. King and Lucille, he gave no pet name to his
prize. Not that he needed to do so: the main female
in his life has always been his wife, Gretchen.

At 79 she is a bright and aware woman, born in Austin, Texas,
brandishing an M.A., and proud of her years teaching in schools
(two of her three brothers taught at universities).

Look around when Papa John walks on stage and you’ll see her in
a Sunday dress, earrings, and close-cropped white hair which she
attributes to a Cherokee grandmother named Sylvia; Gretchen’s middle
name comes from that relative, and she titles her personal management
company, Sylvakian Music, after her namesake.

Mrs. Creach’s role was immediately apparent as guardian and manager.
But, after she scrutinized me at the door of the trailer assigned
to the Jefferson Starship at the San Jose Vietnam Vet’s Benefit, she
quickly opened up to me with a synopsis of her husband’s life as we
awaited his arrival; she was gushingly proud and happy that someone
wanted to talk about him. Beaming over my tape recorder,
she would occasionally lower her voice and conspiratorially
tell me things that were "not to be repeated", as if I were
some old friend.

Papa John was born in 1917 in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, the
son of a machinist and one of ten children, the last other of which,
a policeman, died last year. Love of music was in the family,
and an uncle even played violin.

"John!" Mrs. Creach called out; "here’s a nice young man who wants
to talk to you!"

Papa John addled up, a wiry figure who admitted that "music keeps me
young!" His whole frame exuded a boundless energy, and he refused
to sit down, hovering instead over the food trays or fussing with
his instrument case. "Feel my fingers" he told me, displaying long
splayed fingers that felt like those of a seventeen-year-old; "I
keep them limber by playing". There is also the help of a doctor,
and Mrs. Creach happily named off three others: a wise precaution
since Papa John’s near-fatal bout with the flu caught on a European
tour a few years back. Europe still has a place for Papa John,
and later he proudly showed me a German CD of his with its press
release in that language.

Seastones had asked me to remind Papa John about a 1970 concert in
New York when the Jefferson Airplane, finishing at Fillmore East,
had wound up encoring later with not only the Grateful Dead but
Papa John; an incident that would cause weeks of comment nowadays
but bare mention then. But Papa John did remember his first brush
with the rock-and-roll crowd, having tapped his bow against the
nose of some "unruly kids!".

The kids in his family had their own kind of musical get-together:

"My younger brother played bass, and then Dixie played guitar,
and Richard played drums." Upon reflection he recalled four
sisters and five brothers; one of the sisters played piano
and another was a classically-trained vocalist.

"Back in those days they weren’t doing very big concerts
and that was during _the Depression_ and its like if we don’t
straighten ourselves out we’ll be back in that same place again."

Asked if he saw any familar signs, he quickly answered:

"Signs, yes, they squeeze you out of your money and you don’t
have any place to go! I came up during the Depression. You
couldn’t get a place and they were serving, like, in big cities,
you were on a soup line–you hang out with that type of thing
and that is heavy."

He slowed down a moment and you could see the memories in front of him:

"Now, as we were, my dad, he used to be a molder in a steel mill but when
that shut down we moved on a farm . . . and that’s the way we ate.
The first year we damn near starved to death but the second
year we were the fattest people in the world! We had chickens,
worked a chicken farm; we had all the best vegetables and my mother canned.
We had a whole big basement, house, and come Thanksgiving we
even brewed root beer; my dad was a winemaker and we had crops
of wine down in the basement–"

"So that explains the sparkle in your eye!" I cut in, while
Gretchen laughed "yes!" and Papa John rolled back his eyes with a smile.

"We would go out and collect elderberries, blackberries, out wild,
and if we didn’t can them we would then put them in the old wine
jug! Ha, ha, that’s all out of Michigan, and Pennsylvania, that’s
Beaver Falls, and we would all go out in the woods and get them."

Papa John then recalled that he–

"Left home about 21. I was playing already professionally; we had
a group and that was Melvin Banks, Sayles, that kind of people.
We were working hotels, the restaurants, and they were mighty pretty."

Gretchen had mentioned Bessie Smith as a hero of her husband’s,
but Papa John said that he really liked:

"All your great artists today . . . Bessie Smith I like but I never
had that chance to play with her; I wish I could. And Louie,
we used to play down in Chicago."

"Kinghead Benson used to play with him", Gretchen added and Papa John
continued:

"I was so busy with my other stuff that I had no time to play
with others . . . I knew Cab Calloway . . . Count Basie,
Pearl Hines, I knew all of those cats . . . I learned
all of this stuff from studying: I like rock, I like
the blues, I like jazz, and I like classical–I like
learning some overtures to play! I can get up there and can
play with the orchestra, I get a kick out of it, but of course
there is no money. . . ."

"Plus teach" says Gretchen, "he gets prestige for that."

"Best I can do" Papa John agreed humbly. As the crowd in
the audience judges for itself, that is very good enough:
Slick Aguilar mentioned earlier that Papa John was the
hit night after night, and he was right. But as for the
numbers that are the crowd pleasers:

"I’ve been playing ‘Over the Rainbow’ for years . . .
used to play ‘Danny Boy’, ‘Summertime’, all of those tunes like
that . . . now OtR is something that I like really well but
I need to do some of those other numbers like that that I know.
I’ve got so much in my repertoire that I need to do, back in
‘Stardust’ days and Hoagy Carmichael and all."

Both husband and wife remarked on the difference of the rock crowd,
but his subsequent and frequent playing with the Airplane,
Hot Tuna, and various incarnations of the Starship has indeed
mellowed his opinion, and he has no need of his hearing aid in
joining in with vocalistic scrapings on his fiddle.

On his own Papa John has his own blues band in Los Angeles, where
the couple make their all-too-seldomly-occupied home; Gretchen,
bemoaning the fact that she couldn’t even make a dental appointment,
was later able to proudly announce at the Catalyst concert
in Santa Cruz that she finally had the chance and was booked.

Joining them there backstage during Darby’s opening number with
her other band, Blind Tom (a mix of heavy metal and folk-blues
that had her bringing on Tim Gorman and doing an appropriate
"Acid Queen"), I knelt before Gretchen (while Jack Casady
stepped over my legs on his way to the fridge) and stumbled
across a love story. . . .

"She tells me you have been married for twenty-seven years" I had
commented to Papa John in San Jose, only to have him wave a no
and say quickly "twenty-nine". When asked the difference in
Santa Cruz, Mrs. Creach laughingly admitted, "we shacked up!".

She had first heard him play in Portland, Oregon, where, tired of
teaching, she had a restaurant, the Casbah, with its cook,
Mr. Penny. There musicians congregated after hours, one of whom
was "Johnny Creach"; he disappeared for a few years, only to
return suddenly.

But Mrs. Creach knew he was coming: her boxer dog,
Mr. Mike, recognized him before she even saw Papa John walk
back into her life. It was another two years, but they
finally married in Las Vegas.

Papa John grinned in the corner, warming up his fiddle, and
from Gretchen’s smile you could tell she would always be
happy sitting there and watching him play; the couple had
no children, but they had each other, and the loving young ones
in the audience.

hal

[Postscript: In the L.A. quake of January 1994 Papa John suffered
a heart attack and subsequently died a month later. He will be missed.]

and here is a history from Wikipedia

Paul Kantner/Jefferson Starship

During the transitional period of the early 1970s, singer-guitarist Paul Kantner recorded Blows Against The Empire, a concept album featuring an ad hoc group of musicians and credited on the LP as "Paul Kantner – Jefferson Starship", marking the first use of the latter name. This ‘prototype’ version of Jefferson Starship included David Crosby and Graham Nash and Grateful Dead members Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann, and Mickey Hart, as well as some of the remaining members of Jefferson Airplane, lead singer Grace Slick, drummer Joey Covington and bassist Jack Casady. In Blows Against the Empire, Kantner (and Slick) sang about a group of people escaping Earth in a hijacked starship. In 1971, the album was nominated for the prestigious science fiction prize, the Hugo Award, a rare honor for a musical recording. It was while that album was being made that Kantner sealed his love affair with Grace Slick; their daughter China Kantner (who made a name for herself as an MTV veejay in the 1980s) was born shortly thereafter.

Kantner and Slick (with a similar group of musicians, but without a ‘Jefferson Starship’ artist credit) released two follow-up albums: Sunfighter, an environmentalism-tinged album released in 1971 to celebrate China’s birth, and 1973’s Baron von Tollbooth & The Chrome Nun, titled after the nicknames David Crosby had given to the couple. The artist credit on Baron von Tollbooth gave ex-bassist-keyboard player-vocalist David Freiberg equal billing with Kantner and Slick. Freiberg had known and played with Kantner on the folk circuit in the early 1960s and also appeared on Blows Against the Empire, and he had joined Jefferson Airplane in time to appear on their live LP Thirty Seconds over Winterland. Also in 1973, Slick released Manhole, her first solo album. It was on the "Manhole" album that Paul and Grace first worked with Pete Sears, who was downstairs co-producing a Kathy McDonald album in the same studio. Sears wrote and recorded the song, "Better Lying Down" with Grace. It was during this 1972 session at Wally Heider studios in San Francisco, that Paul first asked Pete to play with a new band he was forming called, "Jefferson Starship". Sears had worked on three of Rod Stewart’s early British recordings, and had to go back to England to play on "Smiler", Rod’s last album made in London. Sears then returned to the States to join Jefferson Starship in 1974.

Kantner is also credited with discovering teenage guitarist Craig Chaquico during this time, who first appeared on Sunfighter and would play with Kantner, Slick and their bands and then with Starship through 1991. He later embarked on a successful solo career as a smooth jazz artist. [edit]Jefferson Starship

By 1973, with Kaukonen and Casady now devoting their full attention to Hot Tuna, the musicians on Baron von Tollbooth formed the core of a new lineup that was formally reborn as "Jefferson Starship" in 1974. Kantner, Slick, and Freiberg were charter members. The line-up also included late-Airplane holdovers drummer John Barbata, and fiddler Papa John Creach (who also played with Hot Tuna), along with Pete Sears (who, like Freiberg, played bass and keyboards) and twenty-year-old guitarist Craig Chaquico. Although Marty Balin was originally not among the re-christened Jefferson Starship, he joined the band while their first album, Dragonfly, was still in the works. His only contribution to the new incarnation’s first effort was the haunting ballad, "Caroline". Balin stayed with the group for nearly the remainder of the decade. This line-up proved to be the band’s most commercially successful so far, although some Airplane fans were less than happy with its more mainstream direction. Balin’s sophisticated ballad "Miracles" helped 1975’s Red Octopus reach multiple-platinum status. The follow-ups, Spitfire (1976), and Earth (1978), were both big sellers.

However, Slick’s alcoholism became a problem, which led to two nights of disastrous concerts in Germany in 1978[1]. The first night, fans ransacked the stage when Slick failed to appear. The following night, Slick, in a drunken stupor, shocked the audience by using profanity and sexual references throughout most of her songs. She also reminded the audience that their country had lost during World War II, repeatedly asking "Who won the war?", and implied that all residents of Germany were responsible for the wartime atrocities[2]. After the debacle, she left the band. Towards the end of 1978, Jefferson Starship (now without Grace Slick) recorded "Light the Sky on Fire" for their forthcoming greatest hits album Gold, and performed it (under its original title "Cigar-Shaped Object") on-camera for The Star Wars Holiday Special. Gold, highlighting their work from 1974’s Dragonfly through to 1978’s Earth, was released early the following year. "Light the Sky on Fire" (backed with Sears and Slick’s "Hyperdrive", from Dragonfly) was included as a bonus single in the original packaging of album. (When Gold was issued on CD, both tracks were included on the album.) The album originally had a shortened version of the hit "Miracles"; early pressings of the CD repeated this, but later editions had the full length version from the album Red Octopus.

Shortly before the release of Gold, Balin too left the group, leaving Kantner and company to find a new lead singer in Mickey Thomas (who had sung lead on Elvin Bishop’s "Fooled Around and Fell in Love"). Thomas’s soaring falsetto steered the band toward a harder rock sound, leading to comparisons to Journey. It didn’t help that former Journey drummer Aynsley Dunbar had replaced Barbata, who had been injured in a car accident.

After the 1979 release of Freedom at Point Zero (which spawned the hit single "Jane"), Grace Slick suddenly returned to the band. She joined in time to contribute one song, written by Pete Sears, "Stranger", on the group’s next album, Modern Times (1981). Modern Times also included the notorious "Stairway to Cleveland," in which the band defended the numerous changes it had undergone in its musical style, personnel, and even name. One noted personnel change in the group was when Dunbar left and was replaced by Donny Baldwin, who performed with Thomas in the Elvin Bishop Group. Slick remained in the band for Jefferson Starship’s final two albums, Winds Of Change (1982) and Nuclear Furniture (1984). Around this time, the band began enthusiastically embracing the rock-video age, making elaborate videos typical of the era’s superstar bands. Grace Slick would appear frequently on MTV and such music-oriented television shows as Solid Gold, giving the band a high visibility in the MTV era. However, the Jefferson Starship albums of this era were only modestly successful, yet the band remained a gold-selling (and thus commercially credible) act, and a popular concert draw.

Starship

In 1984, Kantner (the last remaining founding member of Jefferson Airplane) left the group, but not before taking legal action over the Jefferson name against his former bandmates, who wanted to continue as Jefferson Starship. Kantner won his suit. The band briefly changed its name to "Starship Jefferson", but ultimately the name was reduced to simply ‘Starship’, marking the third incarnation of the band. Freiberg, who had been increasingly marginalized, left as well. In 1985, Starship released Knee Deep In The Hoopla and immediately scored two #1 hits. The first was "We Built This City", written by Bernie Taupin, Martin Page, Dennis Lambert, and Peter Wolf; the second was "Sara". No previous incarnation of the band had ever had a #1 hit. The album itself reached #7, went platinum, and spawned two more singles: "Tomorrow Doesn’t Matter Tonight" (#26), and "Before I Go" (#68).

In 1987, "Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now" was featured in the film Mannequin and hit #1, although only Slick and Thomas (plus Craig Chaquico’s guitar solo) appeared on it. At that time, the song made Slick the oldest female vocalist to sing on a number-one Billboard Hot 100 hit, at the age of 47. She held this record until Cher broke it at the age of 52, in 1999 with "Believe".) The following year, the band’s song "Wild Again" (which reached #73 on the Billboard singles chart) was used in the movie Cocktail. By the time No Protection was released, bassist, keyboardist Pete Sears had left the band due to the commercial direction the music had taken. Sears went on to play keyboards with former "Jefferson Airplane" members, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady in "Hot Tuna" for ten years. Starships, "No Protection" was not released until well after "Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now" (its most popular single) had peaked on the charts, but still went gold; in addition to "Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now" (#1), it featured the singles "It’s Not Over (‘Til It’s Over)" (#9), and "Beat Patrol" (#46). The last song on the album, "Set The Night To Music", would later become a huge hit when re-recorded as a duet between Roberta Flack and Maxi Priest. Grace Slick left Starship in 1988, having become disillusioned with the band’s new pop image and swearing never to perform with them again. In addition, Slick, now in her late forties, was becoming more self-conscious about her age. As Kantner, Sears and Freiberg had left the band, all the new and remaining members were more than a decade younger than her. To this day Grace maintains that old(er) people "don’t belong on a rock and roll stage."

With Slick’s departure, Thomas became sole lead singer, an amazing feat, since he was leading a band that had been founded when he was just 15 years old. The revamped lineup released Love Among the Cannibals in 1989; however, they had disbanded by 1990. Thomas revived Starship shortly thereafter and has toured steadily ever since, usually billed as ‚ÄúStarship featuring Mickey Thomas.‚Äù In concert he plays songs from his stint in Jefferson Starship (1979-1984) as well as Starship material.

Jefferson Starship Returns

After the acrimonious events that resulted in Jefferson Starship‚Äôs 1984 breakup, Paul Kantner reunited with Balin and Jack Casady in 1985 to form the KBC Band. They released their only album, KBC Band (which included Kantner’s hit, "America"), in 1987 on Arista Records. The KBC Band also featured keyboardist Tim Gorman (who had played with The Who) and guitarist Slick Aguilar (who had played with David Crosby’s band).

With Kantner reunited with Balin and Casady, the KBC Band opened the door to a full-blown Jefferson Airplane reunion. In 1989, during a solo San Francisco gig, Paul Kantner found himself joined by former bandmate (and lover) Grace Slick and two other ex-Airplane members for a cameo appearance. This led to a formal reunion of the original Jefferson Airplane (featuring nearly all the main members, including founder Marty Balin, but without Spencer Dryden). A self-titled album was released by Columbia Records to modest sales. The accompanying tour was a success, but their revival was short-lived, and thus Jefferson Airplane’s ‘definitive’ line-up officially disbanded for good. Jefferson Starship rose from the ashes in the early ‚Äò90s and is still active as of 2007. The revived band grew out of Kantner‚Äôs decision to hit the road in 1991 with a stripped down, acoustic ensemble called Paul Kantner‚Äôs Wooden Ships, a trio that included Aguilar and Gorman from the KBC Band. In addition to his classic songs, Kantner and his group performed new material which received resounding praise.

The success of this project prompted Kantner to reinvent his electric band, and Jefferson Starship took off once again. In addition to Aguilar and Gorman, Kantner recruited former collaborators Jack Casady and blues violin master Papa John Creach; former Tubes drummer Prairie Prince; and former World Entertainment War vocalist Darby Gould. In 1993 Marty Balin rejoined Jefferson Starship, ending a 15-year hiatus from the group. Papa John died in early 1993, weeks after touring Europe. Concurrently a sensational young vocalist, Diana Mangano, joined the group as Gould‚Äôs replacement.

In 1995 Jefferson Starship released Deep Space/Virgin Sky, a live album recorded at the House of Blues in Hollywood, California. The album featured eight new and seven classic tunes. Grace Slick joined the band for four songs, ‚ÄúLawman,‚Äù ‚ÄúWooden Ships,‚Äù ‚ÄúSomebody To Love‚Äù and ‚ÄúWhite Rabbit.‚Äù In 1999 Jefferson Starship released the studio album ‚ÄúWindows of Heaven,‚Äù which featured Slick on background vocals on one song, ‚ÄúI‚Äôm On Fire.‚Äù

Balin continued as a full-time member of the reunited band until 2003 and still occasionally joins them in concert as of 2007. Casady remained a member until the late ‚Äò90s and has since joined Jorma Kaukonen in a reunited Hot Tuna. Gorman left in the late ‚Äò90s as well and was replaced by former Supremes keyboardist Chris Smith. In 2005, David Freiberg rejoined the group. Jefferson Starship continues to entertain audiences worldwide with frequent live appearances. Mangano is an expressive and effective singer, and this revived Jefferson Starship can often capture a good deal of the feeling of the original Airplane.

As of 2007 Jefferson Starship continues to tour with a lineup of Paul Kantner (vocals, guitar), David Freiberg (vocals, bass, keyboards), Diana Mangano (vocals), Slick Aguilar (lead guitar), Chris Smith (keyboards) and Prairie Prince (drums). The band sometimes features guest musicians such as Balin, Gould, Gorman and former Grateful Dead keyboardist Tom Constanten. Jefferson Starship played three songs on NBC‚Äôs ‚ÄúThe Today Show‚Äù on June 30, 2007.