NEW YORK — Paul Kantner, a founding member of Jefferson Airplane, one of the definitive San Francisco psychedelic groups of the 1960s, and the guiding spirit of its successor, Jefferson Starship, died Thursday. He was 74.
Mr. Kantner’s death was confirmed by Cash Edwards, the publicist for Hot Tuna, a band composed of several former members of Jefferson Airplane. His publicist, Cynthia Bowman, told the San Francisco Chronicle that he had died of multiple organ failure and septic shock.
Mr. Kantner, who started as a folk singer, had a mellow baritone voice that blended ideally with the penetrating tenor of the group’s founder, Marty Balin, and the powerful mezzo of Grace Slick, who joined the band after its first album. He played a steady rhythm guitar that anchored the freak-out style of the group’s lead guitarist, Jorma Kaukonen, and the adventurous bass lines of Jack Casady.
“Paul was the catalyst that brought the whole thing together,’’ Kaukonen said in an interview Thursday. “He had the transcendental vision, and he hung onto it like a bulldog. The band would not have been what it was without him.’’
He was a prolific songwriter, teaming with Balin on some of the group’s best-known songs, including “Today,’’ “Young Girl Sunday Blues,’’ and “Volunteers.’’ He wrote most of the songs on the freewheeling “After Bathing at Baxter’s,’’ the group’s third album, and contributed the title song to the fourth, “Crown of Creation.’’
Mr. Kantner came to be seen as the intellectual spokesman for the group, with an ideology, reflected in his songs, that combined anarchic politics, an enthusiasm for mind expansion through LSD, and science-fiction utopianism. The song “Wooden Ships,’’ which he wrote with Stephen Stills and David Crosby, was emblematic, describing a group of people escaping a totalitarian society to create their own freedom in a place unknown.
It was prophetic. With the breakup of Jefferson Airplane in the early 1970s, Mr. Kantner began exploring his pet themes on a solo album, “Blows Against the Empire,’’ which had a sci-fi mini-epic on one side, and in the albums he recorded with Jefferson Starship.
“We said what needed to be said,’’ Mr. Kantner told People magazine in 1981. “There was an obvious call not to turn the other cheek when we were being slapped by the system.’’
Paul Lorin Kantner was born on March 17, 1941, in San Francisco. After the death of his mother, the former Cora Fortier, when he was 8, he was sent to a Jesuit boarding school by his father, Paul, a salesman. The experience instilled in him a lifelong hatred of authority and a love of protest music.
He learned to play guitar in his teens and learned banjo from the instructional book written by Pete Seeger.
It was while he was performing at the Drinking Gourd in 1965 that Balin approached him about joining the group that would become the Airplane.
“I was the one who was responsible mostly for the harmony songs in the Airplane and the Starship,’’ Mr. Kantner told the website Music Illuminati in 2010. “Marty did his solo business, and Grace did her solo business, and it was left to me to fashion these harmony songs, coming from the Weavers and God knows where else. We just did it, accidentally.’’
Internal tensions caused the Airplane to fall apart in the early 1970s. From the wreckage came Jefferson Starship, introduced purely as a name on “Blows Against the Empire,’’ a concept album about a group of people escaping Earth on a hijacked starship. Mr. Kantner recorded that album with Slick, Crosby, Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, and others.
Mr. Kantner left the group in 1984, complaining that it had become too commercial, and successfully sued to prevent it from using “Jefferson’’ in its name. As Starship, the group, with Slick, recorded several Top 10 hits, including “We Built This City’’ from 1985.
After reforming Jefferson Starship with Balin in 1991, Mr. Kantner toured often with the group. In 2008, it recorded “Jefferson’s Tree of Liberty,’’ a collection of protest songs.
For several years, Mr. Kantner and Slick were a couple. He leaves their daughter, China Isler, and two sons, Gareth and Alexander.
