Track by Track With Paul Kantner:

BFT: The record starts with what sounds like an overture: "Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra:"

PK: That's the title track of the movie over which the credits are rolling. It just sort of states the premise. Here we are and the world's a little crazy.

BFT: "Telepath:"

PK: That's a hint of the strength of Lilith and of strong, rational women in general. I'd like this album to push that idea up in the air.

BFT: Your voice sounds filtered on this song.

PK: I'm not supposed to be the singer. In the story it's a song on a car radio during this dream sequence in front of Frederick's of Hollywood where there's this big spaceship over all of LA so you can't see the sky.

BFT: Ronnie Montrose plays lead guitar on this, and Jack Casady, your old partner in the Airplane, plays bass throughout the album.

PK: Yeah, I had seen him playing and he had been playing real good. Like even when I didn't like his band sometimes, I'd enjoy hearing Jack play 'cause his bass sound really jolted the room and shook the walls.

BFT: "Circle of Fire:"

PK: There's a lot of circles of fire that are involved here. With the telepathic girls, there's a whole ring of things that happen in the eyes when the "tele-pathos," I call it, takes over and they get working. It's like a NASA rocket taking off, that circle. It's the circle of protection around the settlement in Australia. There's any number of circles.

BFT: "Mount Shasta:"

PK: After Lilith's lover has been killed, she goes sort of mad and retreats to this pagan ceremony she's learned a long time ago in the caves of Mount Shasta (in Northern California). She sings in the cave. That's where Grace cuts loose here. It's meant to suggest a change of focus, of rebuilding. And a bit of danger. A lot of it came from a movie, 'Silent Flute,' that Bruce Lee wrote with Sterling Silliphant and James Coburn, and there's a section where he's in a cave full of monkey people and has to fight his way out.

BFT: Grace sounds spectacular on this album.

PK: Real good, and a lot of one-takes, without knowing much going in other than a vague melody line that I'd sung to her. She was a joy to work with. She fulfilled the character of Lilith.

BFT: In "Lilith's Song," she starts with a little girl's voice. She becomes passionate and angry.

PK: That was what the part called for. Lilith is declaring that her lover's dead and she's not gonna let it rest. There's also a section in there unrelated to the story but related to John Lennon. I likened the way Lilith felt when John Kellog died to the way we all felt when John Lennon died. Now, this is expressed romantically from a woman to a man, but when I wrote it it was expressed sort of to the Beatles:

Long ago and far away I looked into his face
What a lovely place
You are my kind
You are my country
My love, my light, you are my freedom....

I was referring to what they all did for the world. "Fly fly fly, silver boy" is your basic Silver Beatle. But here:

In the beginning was a flame
And if burned brighter and bluer than all our lives
Taste the sky like a bird in flight/Like the wind
Like your life
Like my love tonight
What a spectacular sight
Don't turn out the lights.....

Which is what started happening in the seventies. People just started turning the lights out slowly.

BFT: Side Two begins with the band and friends in Australia. "Transubstantiation."

PK: Which is change. They've had to change their whole life around and redirect. They're here in the middle of Australia in this sort of dark place.

BFT: And the first song under "Transubstantiation" is "Esperanto."

PK: A bit of nostalgia, for something you loved a lot that's gone.

BFT: Why the sound and imagery of a Marlene Dietrich?

PK: Good question. It's just that level of nostalgia is real inherent in that sort of feel. It gets a little Zorba the Greek, too, and you could take it to Italy on the Palazzo with the Nazis rolling in. It's any level of warfare where you're displaced, and that era suggests it best to me. It's just my cultural upbringing, I guess. That's where all the big movies were being made; we were really brought up on World War II. War in color doesn't seem right to me. It's like watching the "Honeymooners" in color. It's not the way it's supposed to be.

BFT: "Science Friction:"

PK: It's just a transition piece detailing in lyrics what went on back home. "They took my mother, they killed my father, killed my president...and they're coming after me." Now they've come to the center of the desert, their new home; they're in a refuge.

BFT: "The Mountain Song:"

PK: In the movie, it's like a big pagan celebration around a bonfire. It's just this great bacchanal springtime festival. It's a real hopeful, almost folkie kind of song. It starts off just rolling, kind of folk, and builds up. "The Mountain Song" actually started ten years ago with Jerry Garcia and David Crosby, when that whole nut of people was still revolving in the studios. That basic lick was one of Garcia's that was used at that time. It was just a rambling chorus over and over. And then I wrote more words to it and showed it to Jerry and asked if I could use it, and he said, "Yeah."

BFT: "Declaration of Independence." Whose kids are these singing?

PK: Kids of the band, kids of the people. "Declaration" is just a light moment in the story and a nod to the Weavers, and to Pete Seeger in particular, whom I learned the song from. But I changed it over to a girl.

BFT: Your 12 year-old daughter China sings lead. How was she in the studio?

PK: Nervous. I had to pay her. Then she got a little less nervous.

BFT: Did you pay her scale?

PK: Double or triple scale, what I pay everybody else.

BFT: "Underground:"

PK: It's a tour of the chambers that have been dug out, ala 'Forbidden Planet.' It's a scene in the movie of people taking a tour and giving a hint of the power underneath the settlement. Under "The Mountain Song" is this big, powerful engine.

BFT: "The Sky is No Limit:"

PK That's after the battle. This is having been released from the planet, pulling out. You're sailing away now to ethereal oneness with the universe. Sperm into space, as it were.

BFT: "Sperm into space?"

PK Yeah, it's a little bubble going off from the mother planet and breaking out of the womb. The song starts out folky and builds up slowly....it's sort of that initial awe that the astronauts talk about, that you think you would feel at getting free of the atmosphere, that quiet drift in space. But the band is on their own unit; it's like a 25-mile wide spaceship; they're standing outside and the night is clear above them and they see the earth and the moon, and it's the drone of eternity. I can picture it; it's like I've been there almost. It's hypnotizing. It's like acid or something where you look for the first time up into the sky. It's the same thing, figuring out what that is, and the depth to which it goes is religious. As close as I've gotten to religion. That and music.

BFT: "Let's Go:"

PK: That's obvious. "OK, movie's almost over!" This is where we get the traditional thing of all the characters walking through in shadow, like in the forties movies, and all the guys who have been killed during the movie wave to the audience. "Joking, just joking."

BFT: Why are the Airplane and Starship mentioned in the song?

PK: That's what was before, parallel, and this is a step further down the line. I'm telling the people who liked the Airplane and the Starship, "Here's another step if you want to take it." Not this band, but this concept. I think our generation is already doing that, likening people to the prospect of being out there in a natural setting rather than it being some big science fiction place where big green guys are after you, or the moon is green cheese. It's a natural environment and that's the first step to getting people ready to go. It's like the way it was getting people ready to come to America, to go across in a covered wagon after they've lived in Vienna with Mozart and everything. "What do we wanna go in the fucking covered wagon for?" Because there's something there to do for those who want to do it. For the weirdos that want to do it. For the weirdos that wanna go.

Last Updated: 11 October 2000