Jefferson Airplane – It’s No Secret (1966)

The female voice on Jefferson Airplane’s first single isn’t Grace Slick — it belongs to the singer most people have forgotten was there first, and she was already on her way out the door when the band’s debut album arrived.

Ask most people to name the woman who sang in Jefferson Airplane and you’ll hear one answer: Grace Slick. But the band that cut It’s No Secret — their very first single, released in early 1966 — hadn’t met Slick yet. The female voice threading through those early harmonies belonged to Signe Toly Anderson, the founding vocalist who helped define the Airplane before “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love” rewrote the band’s story and, with it, public memory.

Keep watching: Signe Toly Anderson — The First Voice of Jefferson Airplane · explore more Psychedelic Rock →

It’s No Secret was written by Marty Balin, the singer who built Jefferson Airplane in the first place. In the band’s earliest incarnation it was essentially his group — he wrote or co-wrote nearly every track on their debut and sang lead on most, with Anderson and Paul Kantner wrapping his melodies in harmony. Balin had recruited Anderson, a respected Portland jazz and folk singer, after being struck by her performances at a local club, and her warm, grounded voice gave the early Airplane a steadiness the later psychedelic lineup would trade for fire. It’s No Secret is a love song, direct and unguarded, from a band still finding the edges of what it wanted to be.

The censors got to the album, but not this song

The single arrived ahead of the debut album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, released August 15, 1966. That record carries one of the odder footnotes in 1960s rock: RCA executives, nervous about suggestive lyrics, forced the band to rewrite lines across several songs and even pulled an early pressing. The B-side of this very single, “Runnin’ ‘Round This World,” was dropped from the album entirely because a lyric about “fantastic trips” was read as a drug reference. It’s No Secret itself escaped the censors’ pen, but it came wrapped in that same atmosphere of a major label not quite sure what it had signed.

Commercially, the Airplane’s first steps were modest. Neither It’s No Secret nor its follow-up single charted, and Jefferson Airplane Takes Off climbed no higher than No.128 nationally, though it sold briskly around San Francisco. The numbers undersell the moment. This was the first band out of the city’s exploding scene to land a major-label deal, and the record captured a sound the rest of the country hadn’t caught up to yet.

The lineup that didn’t last

By the time the album reached stores, the band on its cover was already dissolving. Drummer Skip Spence had left in May 1966 to eventually co-found Moby Grape. Anderson, who had given birth that same spring, left in October to raise her daughter — and her replacement was Grace Slick, who arrived carrying the two songs that would make the Airplane famous. That hand-off is why It’s No Secret sits in such a strange light today: it’s a hit-making band’s debut single, sung by the lineup almost no one remembers, fronted by a woman written out of the popular story by the fame that came right after her. Anderson died in January 2016, on the same day as Paul Kantner. The voice on this record is hers, and it’s worth knowing whose it is.