Did they actually play on their records? Not being snarky. A lot of the West Coast bands actually used session musicians for the albums.
The bands learned the songs and played in concerts.
It’s not a secret. There’s a documentary about the guys in the 1960’s.
A new group featuring Lee Skylar bass, danny kortchmar (guitar and vocals), waddy wachtel (guitar and vocals), and russ kunkel (drums) literally played on over a thousand albums from the mid 1970’s and they’re still active. A new documentary on the Immediate Family should be out next year.
The Airplane were part of the San Francisco scene, in which playing their own instruments was part of their authenticity.
The L.A. scene was very different. The Wrecking Crew and the Immediate Family tended to back singers rather than bands. Sure, they sometimes worked with bands, most famously with Brian Wilson for the Beach Boys. They did so many gigs that no blanket statement is possible.
In the 60s, though, San Francisco bands were famously self-contained except when they brought in some of their buddies to jam with them.
I’ve never seen anything that indicated the Jefferson Airplane did not play their instruments. They brought in other musicians to augment their sound (e.g., Jerry Garcia, Nikkie Hopkins), but they were not the usual west coast studio musicians.
Most interesting bit of trivia for the group was that drummer Spencer Dryden’s father was Charlie Chaplin’s half-brother, making Chaplin his uncle.
Garcia played with everybody in San Francisco, since he was pretty point the pole that everybody swung around.
Hopkins was an English session musician but had moved to SF and became the keyboardist for SF group Quicksilver Messenger Service. (And did magnificent work for the band that is mostly forgotten today. His solos were works of transcendent art.)
LA guys Steve Stills played on Volunteers and David Crosby on Crown of Creation but by then they were leaving their bands and regularly traveling up in SF to soak up the vibes before returning to form CSN.
You have to work pretty hard to find 60s SF groups using standard session musicians, even when they recorded in LA, which the Airplane did for every album before Volunteers. Early pop group The Beau Brummels credited some of the Wrecking Crew for their fourth album Triangle, but by then they were down to two musicians and a vocalist.
Inner saw them live, but disappointed in the live vocals, both Grace and Marty. Both tried their best to loud and edgy, but Jorma and Jack seem to be in own world just wanting to jam. Not that it’s a bad thing, but that was what Hot Tuna was for.
