The Jefferson Starship comes to the Misquamicut Music Festival at Misquamicut State Beach in Westerly for a free show Saturday night. Co-founder Paul Kantner stands in the foreground with the rest of current lineup.

Paul Kantner helped start The Jefferson Airplane in 1965, which turned into The Jefferson Starship in 1972. At one point he left the band and sued it. It might be a checkered history, but the music has kept him in the fold.

“I don’t want to get too esoteric,” Kantner says, “but it’s the mystical-ness of music — why it affects people, myself included. And the ability to make it was a joy when I learned how to do that, and it continues to be. It’s a surprise every night, almost, that what goes on and how it affects people is some kind of magical something-or-other. I’m not religious or anything, but the effect of it gets into that area somehow.”

The band nowadays spends about a third of the year on the road, Kantner says. “We like to be home, where the excitement is. We never have spent a lot of time on the road. I think our longest tour with Jefferson Airplane was three weeks.

“Bill Graham was constantly berating us: ‘You gotta get out there and take advantage and make money!’ And we would say ‘No — we want to be home where everything’s happening, not in Ohio!’ ”

There’s still money to be made out there, Kantner says, but they still like to stay close to home. “Most people I see who have been on the road for four months look like it,” he says with a laugh. “… We’re sort of lazy Californians as well.”

Singer Marty Balin, the other original Airplane/Starship member, is a sometime member of the current lineup, and will be on stage in Misquamicut Saturday. He’s been in and out of the group over the years, and nowadays joins them when family obligations allow. “He’s a great singer and a great songwriter,” says Kantner, and the flexible nature of his appearances is of a piece with how the whole band operates.

“The nature of the Jefferson Starship, when it started after the breakdown of the Jefferson Airplane, was sort of my band,” Kantner says. “And I tried to make it a band like the Jefferson Airplane, but that didn’t really work, because that was a unit unto itself. … People come and go, and it works out quite well.”

The new Jefferson Starship project moves the band forward by going backwards. On Sept. 1, they’ll release The Tree of Liberty, a collection of folk and revolutionary songs from the Irish, American and Latin-American traditions. The point of the album is “to sort of half-consciously deal with the upcoming elections,” Kantner says, “but also just because it was a place I’ve always wanted to get back to.”

The title of the record comes from Thomas Jefferson’s quote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of patriots and tyrants,” and most of the record is simply acoustic piano, 12-string guitar and voices. “So we’re regressing, if you will.”

It includes songs from The Weavers and Bob Dylan, but Kantner seems most affected by the inclusion of “The Ballad of Carlos Fonseca,” which he first heard during his extensive travels in Nicaragua during the 1980s.

“I was swept away by that song, and I asked this girl who was standing next to me on a chair, ‘What is that song?’ She looked down at me imperiously and said, ‘What are you doing in Nicaragua if you don’t know this song?’ It’s like the second-most popular song, after the national anthem, in Nicaragua. So I whipped out my little tape recorder and taped it, and I’ve been doing it since 1987 here, there and everywhere.”

He doesn’t see any parallels today to the free-wheeling scene that was taking place in San Francisco during the Airplane’s heyday in the mid- and late ’60s, when they broke out of the box with singer Grace Slick and hits such as “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love.”

“That’s one of the things that makes me contemplative about the music business, is that there’s nothing out there that’s going on that occurs like it did in the old days. And it makes me sad for the music business, in that it’s gotten all commercial again … it’s all pretty inconsequential in my view, in terms of the way music affects large groups of people.

“Those were special times, and that’s why I cleave to it, perhaps.”

Not that there aren’t talented musicians out there, he allows. “There’s talent all over the place, always. But most of them don’t get a chance. It’s always been the case.”

The band’s laissez-faire attitude has helped them cope with the ups and down of pop success, Kantner says.

“We had the great fortune of coming into the music business at a time, maybe even starting the process, when albums became popular [rather than singles]. … I think you could count the number of hits we’ve had on one hand, and they were accidents, when you think about it.

“When we put out Surrealistic Pillow, we didn’t think at all to put ‘White Rabbit’ and ‘Somebody to Love’ as singles. And when Marty got ‘Miracles,’ it was like a seven-and-a-half-minute song. And our recording engineer said ‘Let me fool with this,’ and he cut it down to three minutes, and it was the biggest single we ever had.”

(He doesn’t mention the ready-for-radio smashes “Jane” and “Find Your Way Back,” recorded in the ’80s with Mickey Thomas singing, but the fact that Kantner left the band around this time and wasn’t around for “We Built This City” is probably telling.)

So the key, he says, is to ride with the changes.

“You can either accept it or reject it. When we make big five-year plans or whatever, they never work out. Something always intrudes, and oftentimes presents better alternatives.”

Jefferson Starship headlines the Fourth Annual Misquamicut Music Festival, on Misquamicut State Beach in Westerly, Saturday night. The music starts at 5 p.m. and the bill includes Joey Nigrelli; Black and White, featuring Prof. Harp and Ted Stevens; The Beach Band; Terry Sylvester, formerly of The Hollies, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. It all ends with fireworks as an introduction to the celebration of Governor’s Bay Day, which is Sunday. Call (401) 322-1026.

Hip-hop’s best

The Rock the Bells Tour puts most of the best that hip-hop has to offer on one stage, and this year’s edition is no exception, with a mix of generations that includes A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul and The Pharcyde on one hand and Mos Def, Nas (whose new Untitled album is excellent) and Dead Prez on the other. It’s at the Comcast Center, in Mansfield, Mass., and it starts bright and early at noon. Get tickets at Ticketmaster by calling (401) 331-2211 or going to www.ticketmaster.com.

‘Magnificent!’

Dwight and Nicole are a guitar-and-vocals duo out of New York who meld vintage soul music, blues and gospel in a way not many people do anymore. Their latest project was a series of shows (with a band) dedicated to the music of Ray Charles and Betty Carter, and judging from the clips I heard, I’ll be you-know-whatted if they didn’t pull it off. Maya Angelou called them “Magnificent!” and you’re gonna argue with her? They’re at Chan’s, 267 Main St., Woonsocket, Saturday night at 8 and 10. Tickets are $12 for the first show, $10 for the second, and $15 for both. Call (401) 765-1900.

rmassimo@projo.com