JEFFERSON AIRPLANE Onetime drummer reflects on losses from fire

Spencer Dryden is the drummer playing the bolero beat on 'White Rabbit.'
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Spencer Dryden didn't feel the heat, but he heard what he thought sounded like kids shooting BBs at the house. Cooking a late lunch in his kitchen in September, he turned and looked down the hallway of his Petaluma, Calif., home and saw the fire.
"The bedroom door from floor to ceiling was solid orange," he said. "I knew this was no wastebasket fire. This sucker was going up. That was it."
The BBs he thought he heard turned out to be his ammunition going off. Wrapped in a blanket on the tilted kitchen floor of the funky Sonoma County cottage where he now lives are the remains of two charred, cherished rifles, the barrels clotted and scorched, the stocks all but burned off.
"God knows what can be done with those," he said. "I imagine they're a total waste."
Lost everything
The onetime drummer for the Jefferson Airplane lost virtually everything he owned -- his gold albums, his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame award, all the posters he saved, his extensive photo and film archive including all the Super 8 home movies he took during the early days of the Airplane, his audio and video equipment, five computers, and all kinds of one-of-a-kind items like the huge painting done by Airplane vocalist Marty Balin that was a gift to Dryden from the band's original drummer, the late Skip Spence, or the Jefferson Airplane metal sculpture that used to hang above the entrance to the Fillmore Auditorium.
There was no insurance. The Red Cross found him a hotel room.
"I'm not one of those boo-hoo kinds of people," said Dryden. "But you do realize, when all is said and done and you're sitting in a hotel room with nothing to do, you realize, well, I don't have much anymore."
Dryden, 66, also is dealing with some serious health problems. He underwent one hip replacement surgery and is awaiting a second. He hobbles around slowly with the aid of a cane. Hearing loss has left him nearly deaf. Doctors recently put Dryden in the hospital for heart trouble (a valve was discovered to be pumping backward) and he needs to have an operation for that, too.
"The heart surgery is what scares me," he said.
Recruited for audition
Dryden was playing rim shots behind comics and strippers at the Pink Pussycat on the Sunset Strip in 1966 when he received a call from the Jefferson Airplane's manager inviting him to audition.
He joined the band in time to back the group's new vocalist, Grace Slick, on the Airplane's second album, "Surrealistic Pillow," which produced two Top 10 hits -- "White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love" -- that vaulted the Airplane into the front ranks of the new rock bands of the day.
The bolero beat he played underneath "White Rabbit" was novel for rock music. As a member of the Airplane, Dryden played the Monterey Pop Festival, Woodstock and Altamont, where he dropped LSD, got lost looking for the band after performing and ended up hitching a ride home from some concertgoers.
Sitting at his kitchen table covered with notepads, laptop and cell phones, he freshened his cranberry juice from a pint of vodka in the freezer without rising from his chair, and lighted another cigarette.
He gets by on Social Security, disability payments and an occasional feeble royalty check, though his friends -- including Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead -- organized a benefit on his behalf in San Francisco recently.
His eyes brimmed with tears as he talked about the benefit.
He hasn't really worked since he officially retired in 1995, although, truth be told, he wasn't working that much before then, either.
"I'm gone," he said. "I'm out of it. I've left the building."