Rock 'n' Roll: Open Up, Tune In, Turn On

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Free Love, Free Sex. As the pile-driving beat thunders out of six speakers with deafening insistence, blinding strobe lights flash in rhythm with the music; the walls swim with projections of amoeba-like patterns slithering through puddles of quivering color. Just as in other psychedelic-lit joints, such as Andy Warhol's Gymnasium in Manhattan, the aim is to immerse everybody in sound and sight. When the spell takes hold, young mothers with sleeping infants in their arms waltz dreamily around the floor; other dancers drift into a private reverie, devising new ways to contort their bodies. Some of the crowd sit in a yoga-like trance or, if that fails to satisfy, roll on the floor.

Says Airplane Paul Kantner: "There's a significantly greater communication between the music itself, the people who make it, and the people who listen to it than there was in Elvis Presley's day." One difference is that Elvis never had "acid rock" going for him. The Airplane's Runnin' 'Round This World, for example, is a number that, says Lead Singer Marty Balin, celebrates the "fantastic joy of making love while under LSD." Their latest single, White Rabbit, is a fantasy about a kind of Alice in Wonder-drugland that is "aimed at the twelve-year-old junkie." Explains Grace Slick, a striking former model who gives the Airplane go-power with her big, belting blues voice: "It doesn't matter what the lyrics say, or who sings them. They're all the same. They say, 'Be free —free in love, free in sex.' "

Pop Potpourri. The crew aboard the Airplane is in their middle and late 20s. Musically, they represent a kind of pop potpourri: Balin and Kantner are refugees from folk music, Drummer Spencer Dryden and Guitarist Jack Casady from jazz, Singers Jorma Kaukonen from blues and Grace Slick from pop. Together they produce a lilting, carefree music that crosses so many stylistic lines that they are the only rock group to be invited to both the Monterey Jazz Festival and the Berkeley Folk Festival, not to mention gigs with the San Francisco Symphony and TV's highbrow Bell Telephone Hour.

Preaching the rock 'n' roll is "the Sermon on the Mount, the greatest church in the last century," they like to call their music "love rock." Is that any way to run an Airplane? Yes. Formed just 21 months ago, the high-flying group now has both a single and an album in the top ten bestsellers, commands $5,000 for a performance. "The stage is our bed," exults Balin, "and the audience is our broad. We're not entertaining, we're making love."