Mickey Hart called Kantner the band’s backbone and said Kantner should have received the kind of credit that Slick, Casady and Kaukonen received. Coincidentally, he died on the same day as Airplane co-founder Signe Toly Anderson. Personal life Kantner had three children: sons Gareth (a restaurateur) and Alexander (a musician who sometimes played with Jefferson Starship and now a high school English teacher), and daughter China (a former MTV VJ and actress). After joining the late 1960s San Francisco rock scene's exodus to suburban Marin County by briefly relocating to Bolinas, California in the early 1970s, he decided to return to San Francisco as the Jefferson Starship era dawned, residing for many years in "a beautiful house perched over the blue Pacific in the ritzy Sea Cliff neighborhood." Later in life, he moved to North Beach, where he frequented the original Caffe Trieste. A lifelong cigarette smoker (with a penchant for unfiltered Camels) throughout his adult life, Kantner prophetically stated in a late-in-life interview, "I'm not going to give up the few things I enjoy. Might as well die of something I like." Identifying as a political anarchist, Kantner advocated the use of entheogens such as LSD for mind expansion and spiritual growth, and was a prominent advocate of the legalization of marijuana, which he regularly consumed for most of his adult life. In a 1986 interview, Kantner shared his thoughts about cocaine and alcohol, saying, "Cocaine, particularly, is a bummer. It's a noxious drug that turns people into jerks. And alcohol is probably the worst drug of all. As you get older and accomplish more things in life in general, you realize that drugs don't help, particularly if you abuse them." When Kantner suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in 1980, his attending physician at Cedars-Sinai, Stephen Levy, was quick to point out it was not a drug-related issue, saying: "There is zero relationship between Paul's illness and drugs. He doesn't use drugs." Belying his reputation as a near-teetotaler during the commercial heyday of Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship, Kantner began to use alcohol more frequently in his later years, with bandmate Jude Gold ultimately characterizing Kantner's vodka intake as an "on-again/off-again love affair." In a 2016 reminiscence, Marty Balin reflected on this period: "It was sad to see. He didn't do anything to take care of his health with all his drinking and everything, smoking cigarettes all the time, pushing