Marty Balin, a co-founder of Jefferson Airplane and one of its principal vocalists and songwriters, has died at age 76.
Balin was best known for the Airplane ballad “Today” and the later hit single “Miracles,” performed by the offshoot band Jefferson Starship.
Balin died en route to a hospital in Tampa, Florida, near his home. The cause of death was not immediately disclosed.
Former Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen called his friend “one of the greatest voices of my time.”
Other well-known Balin songs performed by Jefferson Airplane included “Plastic Fantastic Lover,” “3/5 of a Mile in 10 Seconds,” “It’s No Secret” and “Young Girl Sunday Blues.” With guitarist Paul Kantner he wrote the rockers “Volunteers” and “She Has Funny Cars.”
Balin stayed with the Airplane until 1971, although his contributions to the group began to decline after its second album, “Surrealistic Pillow.” He wrote most of the first album and much of the second.
“He was the most consummate of artists in a most renaissance way,” guitarist Kaukonen wrote in a tribute on his blog. “I always felt that he perceived that each day was a blank canvas waiting to be filled.”
Balin was an artful and precise singer, but he often worked in the shadow of Grace Slick, a former model with the arresting voice heard on the Airplane’s biggest hits, “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love.” She quickly became one of the most famous and volatile personalities of the 1960s counterculture.
Like many San Francisco underground rockers, Balin began as a folk singer. He started the seminal Bay Area club the Matrix, with the Airplane growing out of that scene and serving as house band.
“He and Paul Kantner came together and like plutonium halves in a reactor started a chain reaction that still affects many of us today,” Kaukonen wrote two days after the singer’s Sept. 27 death. “It was a moment of powerful synchronicity.”
Grace Slick joined the Airplane after its first album and the band soon found worldwide fame with the release of “Surrealistic Pillow.”
The 1967 album’s “Plastic Fantastic Lover” found Balin looking with psychedelic prescience at the effects of technology and electronic media. He wrote:
Data control and IBM
Science is mankind’s brother
But all I see is drainin’ me
On my plastic fantastic lover
Balin performed with the Airplane at the Monterey Pop Festival (1967) and Woodstock (1969), appearing in films shot at both festivals. His eye-to-eye duet with Slick on “High Flyin’ Bird” was a high point of the “Monterey Pop” movie. Later in 1969, Balin was knocked unconscious after taking on bikers at the Altamont concert. Again, he was featured in the festival’s feature film (“Gimme Shelter”).
Balin, best known for his ballads, left the Airplane as it turned to heavier music at the turn of the decade. He cited other members’ increasing use of cocaine as an aggravating factor in his exit.
He remained friends with his former bandmates, though, and eventually rejoined Kantner and Slick in Jefferson Starship, creating a series of light rock hits such as “Miracles” and “Count on Me.” He and Slick both left that band as it imploded in 1978.
Balin found modest success as a solo act, and worked again with Kantner (and Airplane bassist Jack Casady) in the KBC Band. Kantner and Balin later teamed in a reunited Starship. In 1989, most of the classic lineup of the Jefferson Airplane reunited, with Balin, for an album and tour.
He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Airplane in 1996.
Balin’s solo output over the years resulted in more than a dozen albums. Other popular songs from his solo years included “Atlanta Lady” and “Hearts.”
The singer recently sued a New York hospital saying its open-heart surgery left him with a paralyzed vocal cord and other damage.
Survivors include his wife, Susan Joy Balin, and three children.
Balin’s death leaves behind three members of the classic Jefferson Airplane lineup: Kaukonen and Casady of Hot Tuna, and Slick, now a painter.
- Paul Kantner died in 2016.
- Spencer Dryden died in 1995.
- Signe Anderson (original singer) died in 2016.
- Skip Spence (original drummer, of Moby Grape fame) died in 1999.
- Joey Covington (late-period drummer) died in 2013.
- Papa John Creach (late-period violinist) died in 1994.
Mark Forster
Terrible news.
The airplane were the ones that got me into psychedelic music and Baxter’s remains my favourite album.
Frédéric Augé
Un grand musicien nous a quitté aujourd’hui. Merci Marty pour tous ces bons moments que tu nous a offert, pendant toutes ces années, que ce soit avec l’Airplane, le Starship en en solo. Tes fans de France sont bien malheureux aujourd’hui.
Fritz
Not a week goes by that I’m not listening to Surrealist Pillow. Marty was such a major contributor to the “San Francisco Sound” and the whole cultural revolution. Airplane was never the same after he left and many would say the band just evolved from there, but I always felt it lost its heart and soul and certainly its romantic side when he left. God bless you Marty and thanks for all the beautiful music that will no doubt warm the hearts of millions for many, many years to come.
sean dempsey
Very sad news of the psssing of another founder member of the original Jefferson Airplane. His contributions to Surrealistic Pillow in particular gave the LP and the band a distinctive voice and arguably still their most cohesive artistic statement. A great voice, songwriter and certainly not a man without courage in the face of The Angels on the rampage at Altamont Speedway. A true pioneer of the 60s music scene bridging the gap between the folk rock origins of the San Francisco scene and the harder more psychedelic sounds that the band would follow on Baxters and Crown Of Creation.
Michael Weiner
I’m speechless. He was one of our shepherds.
PapaJoe
I was shocked to hear of Marty Balin’s passing. I alway loved his voice. Seeing the Airplane/Starship many times, I always loved the eye-to-eye vocals of Grace and Marty. The band was never quite the same without him. To this day the songs Today and Comin’ Back to Me from the Pillow album are favorites of mine. His songs on the Jefferson Starship albums like Runaway and Count on Me are also personal favorites Not to mention the mega hit Miracles. I can still see him belting out Volunteers of America live at Winterland. RIP Marty …