At the Helm of Wooden Ships : Music: Paul Kantner, founding member of the Jefferson Airplane, now has an acoustic group and a new vehicle for change.

Paul Kantner, a founding member of the Jefferson Airplane and composer of some of the most vivid countercultural anthems of the ‘60s, was discussing his latest musical project:

“You’ve gotta take acid and go down to the dance hall to appreciate it, man,” he said, laughing.

“Naw,” he added, “all that was sort of like the fourth grade. It’s something you did when you were a kid. Next!”

Kantner may make light of his identification with the hippie movement and all its excess, but for many, his music and the ideology it represented live on. He and his current band--an acoustic group called Wooden Ships that also includes Airplane alum Jack Casady on bass and former Who sideman Tim Gorman on keyboards--play tonight at the Belly Up in Solana Beach. Expect at least some of the crowd to be hanging on every word he sings.

Indeed, if some predictions are true--that the ‘90s will shape up as a new era of reform and relative benevolence--Kantner’s old vision well might become ever more pertinent.

“With Clinton getting elected, there’s sort of a sense of cautious optimism in the air that’s nice to experience, actually,” Kantner said during a recent phone conversation from his home in the Bay Area. “A sort of sense of--I wouldn’t call it elation--hopefulness, maybe?

“You can breathe a lot easier. A lot of those (bad people) are gone. Those in-your-bed, in-your-living-room, in-your-bank-account, in-your-everything-else people were pushed back a little bit.

“It was like a Dark Ages for a while, almost, intellectually, culturally . . . Our world was getting very strange there, and I’m hopeful the election of Clinton will help swing the direction of the country.”

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the Airplane was at the forefront of Haight-Asbury”freak” culture and the San Francisco rock scene, with a multilayered, often angry sound that epitomized the spirit of freedom, radicalism and revolt against authority that permeated the air.

Kantner’s songs of political outrage, and his sci-fi-tinged tales of other worlds, went a long way toward establishing the band’s popularity, influence and importance. Among his contributions to the Airplane were “Crown of Creation,” “Volunteers” and “We Can Be Together”:

We are the forces of chaos and anarchy,

Everything they say we are we are,

And we are very proud of ourselves.

But time moved on and things changed. The Airplane metamorphosed into the more commercial Jefferson Starship. It racked up a number of pop hits in the ‘70s, including, Kantner’s “Ride the Tiger” and singer Marty Balin’s “Miracles,” but the group had reached a nadir by the mid ‘80s when its name was shortened to Starship (certainly, there was little of the original “Jefferson” spirit left by then) and it released a definitive corporate schlock rocker, “We Built This City,” which was a massive hit. By that time, Kantner had quit the group in disgust.

He, Balin and Casady formed a group called KBC, but it didn’t last. In 1989 there was a reunion of the full Airplane but it, too, was brief, yielding a disappointing album and tour.

“I thought onstage, we crackled,” Kantner said. But “getting together through all the lawyers and hassles was a bit difficult (and) precluded a lot of stuff that I would have liked to have done. I would have liked more rehearsals and working together a bit more first. There just wasn’t the blend I expected.

“There’s still great potential with that group of people working together,” he added. “We need to do it again and get it right the next time. Nothing is definite yet, but we’ll probably do it in the mid-future.”

Meanwhile, there’s Wooden Ships. Kantner, playing an acoustic 12-string, will be singing songs he wrote for the group as well as a number of older, more familiar tunes. “We go through science fiction, psychotic love affairs, crazy women and a number of alternate, psychic universes,” Kantner said, tongue firmly back in cheek.

“I’ve been pushing this around the country on and off for about a year. I’m also working on a broader project I hope to record later, where I’m using some women singers I’m particularly fond of”--Airplane alumnae Grace Slick and Signe Anderson (who preceded Slick in the band) and Ronnie Gilbert of the legendary Weavers.

Kantner says music still can be a catalyst for the kind of social change the Airplane helped champion.

“Music has always been a way of uplifting people from other-zone consciousness, where you sort of get released from your every day person and become this free, on-vacation type of person,” he said, demonstrating his own still-robust reserve of ‘60s-style optimism and philosophy.

“Good art, good music and good poetry, I think, has been used throughout the ages for this sort of thing, whether consciously or unconsciously, and it serves its purpose. Music is like a huge reflector of what’s going on. That’s not going to change.”

* Wooden Ships with Paul Kantner, Jack Casady and Tim Gorman plays tonight at the Belly Up Tavern, 143 South Cedros Ave., Solano Beach. The Travel Agents open at 8:30. Admission: $9. (619) 481-9022.