Creativity Quote by Paul Kantner

The line lands like a shrug that’s secretly a diagnosis. Paul Kantner isn’t bragging about clarity; he’s admitting that the band’s language had drifted so far into its own headspace that it needed subtitles. “We printed all the words out” points to a very specific, very 1960s solution: the lyric sheet as a bridge between psychedelic ambition and the messy realities of amplification, slurred enunciation, and crowds more interested in the feeling than the syntax. It’s practical on the surface, but the punchline is “because otherwise nobody would be able to understand them” - a sly jab at the era’s myth that music alone could transmit pure revelation.

The subtext is self-mocking and defensive at once. Kantner frames the opacity as both a feature (these words are worth preserving) and a problem (they’re not naturally legible in the usual pop delivery system). There’s also a quiet critique of rock’s inflationary poetics: if your message requires printing to be comprehensible, maybe the message is competing with its own aesthetic.

Context matters. Jefferson Airplane and their peers were pushing rock toward manifesto, science fiction, and political parable, often in venues with terrible sound and audiences primed for sensation. Printing lyrics becomes an admission that “communication” in that scene wasn’t automatic; it had to be designed. Kantner’s wit works because it punctures the counterculture’s seriousness without dismissing it: the dream is still there, but it needs a user manual.