Open Up, Tune In, Turn On

ROCK 'N' ROLL

The snarl of an engine splits the stillness. Out of the half-light, the projected silhouette of a Piper Cub glides ghostlike across a side wall. Suddenly, sound track and silhouette become a screaming, whooshing jet that dives at the stage and disintegrates with a shattering roar in the midst of six musicians. The drummer roars back with a thumping beat. The guitarists twang away lustily. And, momentum building, voices wailing and all systems gogo, the Jefferson Airplane blasts off.

The launching pad is San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium, where for the past year and a half the combo with the singular name has fashioned a freewheeling style of music that has made it the hottest new rock group in the country. The Airplane is the anointed purveyor of the San Francisco Sound, a heady mixture of blues, folk and jazz that began as the private expression of the hippie underground and only recently bubbled to the surface. Now, in such cavernous San Francisco halls as the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom, as well as in rollerskating rinks, movie theaters, veterans' halls, park bandstands, college gyms and roped-off streets from Pacific Heights to Butchertown, about 300 bands are inviting the faithful to "blow your mind" with the new sound. Hairy hippies all, they go by such fanciful names as the Moby Grape, the Grateful Dead, the Allnight Apothecary, the Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Country Joe and the Fish, the Loading Zone, and the Yellow Brick Road.

Frock Coats & Turbans. In its permutations, the San Francisco Sound encompasses everything from bluegrass to Indian ragas, from Bach to jug-band music--often within the framework of a single song. It is a raw, raucous, rough-hewn sound that has the spark and spontaneity of a free-for-all jam session. Most of the groups write their own songs and, unlike most rock 'n' rollers, improvise freely, building climax upon climax in songs that run on for 20 minutes or more. It is a compelling entreaty to open up, tune in and turn on. Says one regular Fillmore irregular: "Fight it, stay aloof and critical, and you'll suffer one of the most painful headaches imaginable."

The sound is also a scene. With its roots in the LSDisneyland of the Haight Ashbury district, the music is a reflection of the defiant new bohemians, their art nouveau and madly mod fashions. Performances at the Fillmore attempt to induce psychedelic experiences without drugs. The hippies and teenyboppers, wearing everything from Arab caftans and top hats to frock coats and turbans, huddle over sticks of burning incense, casually daub the floors and each other with fluorescent paint.

Free Love, Free Sex. As the pile-driving beat thunders out of six speakers with deafening insistence, blinding strobe lights flash in rhythm with the music; the walls swim with projections of amoeba-like patterns slithering through puddles of quivering color. Just as in other psychedelic-lit joints, such as Andy Warhol's Gymnasium in Manhattan, the aim is to immerse everybody in sound and sight. When the spell takes hold, young mothers with sleeping infants in their arms waltz dreamily around the floor; other dancers drift into a private reverie, devising new ways to contort their bodies. Some of the crowd sit in a yoga-like trance or, if that fails to satisfy, roll on the floor.

Says Airplane Paul Kantner: "There's a significantly greater communication between the music itself, the people who make it, and the people who listen to it than there was in Elvis Presley's day." One difference is that Elvis never had "acid rock" going for him. The Airplane's Runnin' 'Round This World, for example, is a number that, says Lead Singer Marty Balin, celebrates the "fantastic joy of making love while under LSD." Their latest single, White Rabbit, is a fantasy about a kind of Alice in Wonder-drugland that is "aimed at the twelve-year-old junkie." Explains Grace Slick, a striking former model who gives the Airplane go-power with her big, belting blues voice: "It doesn't matter what the lyrics say, or who sings them. They're all the same. They say, 'Be free --free in love, free in sex.' "

Pop Potpourri. The crew aboard the Airplane is in their middle and late 20s. Musically, they represent a kind of pop potpourri: Balin and Kantner are refugees from folk music, Drummer Spencer Dryden and Guitarist Jack Casady from jazz, Singers Jorma Kaukonen from blues and Grace Slick from pop. Together they produce a lilting, carefree music that crosses so many stylistic lines that they are the only rock group to be invited to both the Monterey Jazz Festival and the Berkeley Folk Festival, not to mention gigs with the San Francisco Symphony and TV's highbrow Bell Telephone Hour.

Preaching the rock 'n' roll is "the Sermon on the Mount, the greatest church in the last century," they like to call their music "love rock." Is that any way to run an Airplane? Yes. Formed just 21 months ago, the high-flying group now has both a single and an album in the top ten bestsellers, commands $5,000 for a performance. "The stage is our bed," exults Balin, "and the audience is our broad. We're not entertaining, we're making love."

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