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Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane, dies at 74

Paul Kantner, 74, a founding member of the Jefferson Airplane who stayed with the seminal San Francisco band through its transformation from 1960s hippies to 1970s hit-makers as Jefferson Starship, died Thursday of septic shock and organ failure.

Paul Kantner, 74, a founding member of the Jefferson Airplane who stayed with the seminal San Francisco band through its transformation from 1960s hippies to 1970s hit-makers as Jefferson Starship, died Thursday of septic shock and organ failure.

Mr. Kantner, who drew upon his passion for politics and science fiction to write such classic songs as "Crown of Creation," "Wooden Ships" (with David Crosby and Stephen Stills) and "Volunteers" (with Marty Balin), had been admitted to a San Francisco hospital after falling ill earlier in the week, according to his former girlfriend and publicist Cynthia Bowman, the mother of one of his three children.

The guitarist and songwriter had survived close brushes with death as a younger man, including a motorcycle accident during the early 1960s and a 1980 cerebral hemorrhage, and he recovered from a heart attack last year.

Few bands were so identified with San Francisco or so embodied the idealism and hedonism of the late 1960s as Jefferson Airplane. The band, which played at both the Monterey and Woodstock festivals, advocated sex, psychedelic drugs, social rebellion, and a communal lifestyle, operating out of a Colonial Revival house near Haight-Ashbury.

Formed in 1965, the Airplane combined folk, rock, blues, and jazz and was the first group from a Bay Area scene that also featured Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead to achieve mainstream success, thanks to the hits "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit."

Besides Mr. Kantner, who played rhythm guitar and added backing vocals, the Airplane's best-known lineup included singers Grace Slick and Marty Balin; lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen; bassist Jack Casady; and drummer Spencer Dryden, who died in 2005. Jefferson Airplane, named in part after blues artist Blind Lemon Jefferson, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 and is scheduled to receive the Recording Academy's lifetime achievement award this year.

Mr. Kantner, with his glasses and shaggy blond hair, did not have the vocal or stage presence of Balin and Slick, or the instrumental power of Kaukonen or Casady. But he became the conscience of the band and by the end of the '60s was shaping its increasingly radical direction.

Meanwhile, Mr. Kantner and his girlfriend Slick reigned as one of rock's most prominent couples. Rolling Stone would note their contrasting styles, labeling Slick "the Acid Queen of outrageousness" and Mr. Kantner her "calm, dry, sardonic flip side." In 1971, Slick gave birth to their daughter, whom the couple originally wanted to call God, but decided to name China. (China Kantner became an actress and MTV VJ.)

After Kaukonen and Casady founded the blues group Hot Tuna, and Balin, the band's estranged original leader, also left, Mr. Kantner and Slick in 1974 renamed the group Jefferson Starship (the name under which the couple had record a 1970 concept album about space travel, Blows Against the Empire). With their sound softened and Balin returned in 1975, the band had hit singles with "Miracles" and "Count On Me" and a No. 1 album, Red Octopus.

Slick and Mr. Kantner broke up in the mid-1970s and he had a son, Alexander (also a musician), with Bowman. (Mr. Kantner's oldest son, Gareth, born in the mid-1960s, became a film producer.)

By the mid-1980s, Mr. Kantner thought the music so "mundane" that he left the Jefferson Starship and successfully forced the remaining members not to use the name "Jefferson." (His former bandmates called themselves Starship and had No. 1 hits including "Sara" and "We Built This City.")

Mr. Kantner, who spent much of his life in his native city, joked that San Francisco was a privileged haven of "49 square miles surrounded by reality." (The correct number is closer to 47). He believed deeply in the 1960s ideals, often citing an anecdote that for a few days in 1966 the stars were so aligned that one could expect any wish to be granted.

"Which, needless to say, it was," he liked to add.