Dies at 74 Paul Kantner, co-founder of the legendary Jefferson Airplane – The Reason (Bolivia)

The guitarist Paul Kantner, co-founder of Jefferson Airplane psicodélico- -a pioneer rock band in the eighties published a newspaper with experience in Sandinista Nicaragua, he died Thursday at age 74 in San Francisco.

Known for his advocacy of drug use, Kantner died of multiple organ failure after suffering a heart attack, relatives told reporters.

In the eighties Kantner traveled to Nicaragua to learn about the process of the Sandinista revolution and the tour were a witness a book and an album in which he sang poems Guatemalan gerrillero activist Otto René Castillo.

With hits like “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit,” the Jefferson Airplane wrote songs especially for the hippie movement and the memorable “Summer of Love” in which thousands of young people took literally San Francisco (West) in 1967.

These icons of American counterculture were chosen to headline the Woodstock festival in 1969.

Bowman He could not be reached Thursday night but the Recording Academy (Recording Academy), which was rewarding path of Jefferson Airplane Grammy this year, issued a statement to express their grief over the death.

” The music community has lost a true icon, “he said the Academy, and Kantner defined as” a giant rock / folk and integral participant rock stage 60 “.

Kantner was an implied romantically with singer of Jefferson Airplane, Grace Slick time, with whom he had a daughter whose birth inspired the song “A Child Is Coming”.

Jefferson Airplane was one of the first bands to perform at the Fillmore club Bill Graham, one of the epicenters of the hippie music that also gave birth to the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and The Doors.

As icons of the counterculture, Jefferson Airplane headlined two of the emblematic festivals of the time: Monterey (California, 1967) where participation of the band became an album alive. Two years later they performed at Woodstock, where began his presentation on Saturday night and ended at eight o’clock Sunday

-. ” wonderful exploration “

Born in San Francisco, Kantner had throughout his life to the most varied influences in a city whose philosophy, as he himself liked to say It was breaking all the rules.

In 1969 wrote the song “We Can Be Together” (We can be together) after listening to a motto of the rising movement of the Black Panthers. “We are obscene, we have no law, hateful, dangerous, dirty, violent and youth but should stick together,” concludes the issue.

In an interview at that time with Rolling Stone , Kantner not rejected that characterize his music as violent.

“Violent in terms of transforming violently what is happening is not a violent blow up buildings,” he said.

Kantner openly advocated drug use, particularly to allow the free enjoyment of LSD and advocated the legalization of marijuana, while alcohol qualified as “the greatest danger”.

always described his LSD trips as “the most formative time of my life” and in a statement made last year to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune said psychedelic this drug “gave me what I I always hoped that religion gave me “.

For some time Kantner had a relationship with Slick singer, with whom he had a daughter, China, whose birth inspired the song” A Child Is Coming “.

With Slick I think a parallel band Jefferson Starship, whose lighter sound spawned several hits but was also criticized for its commercial trend. Kantner returned to the studio