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NEW YORK – Marty Balin, a patron of the 1960s "San Francisco Sound" both as founder and singer of Jefferson Airplane and co-owner of the club where the plane and other groups played, has died. He was 76 years old. Balin died Thursday in Tampa, Florida, on the way to the hospital, said his spokesman Ryan Romenesko. The cause of death was not immediately available.
Balin, who underwent an emergency cardiac operation in 2016, sued a New York hospital earlier this year, saying that a tracheotomy had paralyzed a vocal cord and had caused other damage.
"We knew that he had health problems, but he did not talk about it at all and we never pressed him," said Jorma Kaukonen, founding member of Jefferson Airplane, at A concert with his group Hot Tuna. "His passage to me at least was sudden and unexpected.
"He was definitely one of the greatest voices of my time," continued Kaukonen. "His intense commitment to song and music has never stopped."
Balin with black eyes and baby's face was a former folk musician who formed the plane in 1965 and who, in two years, was at the heart of a national wave that briefly influenced the influence of the Beatles. Pepper "album.
The aircraft was the premier event for San Francisco-based artists such as Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin, many of whom played at the Matrix, a ballroom that Balin helped direct and for which the aircraft served as a group. .
The sound of San Francisco was a psychedelic blend of blues, folk, rock and jazz and the musical expression of the hippie lifestyle emerges.
Balin himself was known for his ardent tenor on the ballads "Today" and "This is not a secret" and on the political anthem "Volunteers". In the mid-1970s, when the aircraft was grouped under the Jefferson Starship, a more popular film, Balin starred in such hits as "Miracles" (which he co-wrote). -written), "With Your Love" and "Count On Me". He then had a solo success with "Hearts" and "Atlanta Lady".
The plane was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996, but Balin would have long had mixed feelings. The pride in the group's achievements was overshadowed by its eventual break-up and Balin's acknowledged jealousy of Grace Slick, the other main singer. Slick joined the group in the fall of 1966, shortly before the plane recorded his second album, "Surrealistic Pillow".
On Twitter, the group called Balin a "true legend".
One of the most charismatic rock singers and performers, she has replaced Balin as the supposed leader, on stage and on the best-known songs of the plane, "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit" ".
"Whenever I did something, it was always Grace Slick and the plane and Grace Slick and the ship," he told Relix magazine in 1993. "Even though it was my I even composed my own songs and people approach me and say, "I'm surprised you're doing this song. I've always thought it was to Grace. "For a moment, it hurt me, but I can not help it."
Kaukonen said Friday that Balin himself was wanting at least partly, adding that the singer had never liked to draw attention to him.
"It was a good guy, he was a nice guy, he was just not openly gregarious," Kaukonen said. He recalled that Balin always carried himself with "a quiet dignity" while other members of the group could be "mouths".
Balin has been married twice, most recently to Susan Joy Finkelstein, and has had three children.
He was in the show business well before the plane. Born in Cincinnati, Martin Jerel Buchwald, he found himself in the San Francisco Bay Area while his father, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, was struggling to find work.
Marty Balin was a passionate and artistic child who left the State University of San Francisco to pursue a career in music. He recorded some singles with some of Phil Spector's musicians in the early 60's before joining the folk band The Town Criers. He also changed his surname to Balin.
Like many of his peers, Balin switched to electronic music after seeing The Beatles' 1964 film "A Hard Day's Night". Through the club's stage, he brought singer and guitarist-songwriter Paul Kantner, singer Signe Anderson (whom Slick replaced), guitarist Kaukonen, bassist Jack Cassidy and drummer Skip Spence. star. (Spence would leave after the first album and would be replaced by Spencer Dryden). The name Jefferson Airplane, proposed by Kaukonen, was based in part on bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson.
Meanwhile, Balin and a handful of business partners converted a Fillmore Street pizzeria into a Matrix, which opened in August 1965. A year later, the band signed with RCA Records and released the folk album. rock "The Jefferson Airplane Takes Off". for which Balin wrote or co-wrote eight songs. The plane, very early sensitized to the counter-culture, took out buttons and bumper stickers on which was written: THE PLANE OF JEFFERSON LOVES YOU.
"I remember it was really handsome and beautiful for a year or two," Balin told Relix magazine in 1993. "And then, Time magazine came out and they were interviewing me." I said to the guy, "It's great that you're publishing this gorgeous beauty scene here," and he looked me right in the eye and said, "The fastest way to kill him. "
Starting with "Surrealistic Pillow", a soundtrack for many during what is called Summer of Love from 1967, the band's music has become more experimental. In albums such as "Blows Against the Empire" and "After Bathing at Baxter's", Kantner was the main composer (and finally Slick's boyfriend) and Balin was out of place with his own band and with the rock scene in general.
He avoided hard drugs and preferred tight pop songs to long jams. The classic movie "Gimme Shelter", centered on the unfortunate 1969 Altamont concert, showed Balin being knocked down by the Hell's Angels. In the early 1970s, he had left the plane.
"It was a period of cocaine at the time – everyone was taking cocaine. And the people I would work with, they would yell at you and it would become intense. The plane was doing this kind of trip, "he told songwritersuniverse.com in 2018.
In recent years, he has released albums such as "The Greatest Love" and "Good Memories", a retrospective of his songs Airplane / Starship. He was also reunited on the occasion with former members of the group, that they perform in concert with Casady and Kaukonen and their group Hot Tuna, or that they train Signe Anderson on scene to interpret the first single from Airplane, "It's No Secret".
And he loved to return to his folk roots, make club performances as part of an acoustic trio.
"All night it's me – and if you dig it, cool," he told Relix in 2016. "And I'm having fun, I'm moving where I want, of d & # 39; a song that I want to the other.There is no ego and (we are released) people's problems – wait for someone to light a cigarette, drink a drink or change the guitar and organize his music.Let's go to the music, man, that's what I do – just fly.
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