Creativity Quote by Paul Kantner

It sounds like a shrug, but its real charge is in what Paul Kantner doesn’t say. “I believe” is a perfectly placed hedge from a musician who spent his career around competing myths: who wanted what, who got blocked by whom, and who later rewrote the story. By framing the Rolling Stones’ desire to play Golden Gate Park as belief rather than fact, Kantner signals how the late-60s counterculture ran on rumor, backchannel logistics, and half-official dreams that felt true even when nobody could produce a signed permit.

The subtext is rivalry and measurement. The Stones weren’t just another band; they were the empire. Golden Gate Park, meanwhile, was the Bay Area’s civic commons, the kind of venue that turns a concert into a public claim: this music belongs to the people, not just ticket buyers. Kantner, a San Francisco scene-definer with Jefferson Airplane, is quietly mapping a power struggle over authenticity. If the Stones “wanted” the Park, it implies the city’s utopian, free-show ethos had become the cultural gold standard - something even the biggest rock machine had to seek out to stay relevant.

Context matters: free concerts in the Bay weren’t mere entertainment, they were political theater and urban negotiation, tangled with permits, policing, and the memory of gatherings that could tip from idealism into chaos. Kantner’s line reads like a footnote to a larger argument: the dream was always bigger than the infrastructure, and everyone - even legends - wanted to be seen inside the dream.