Marquee Bands drummer John Barbata has died at 79

John Barbata, who played drums with the Turtles, Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young but left rock music at the height of his career, has died. He was 79.

His death was announced Monday in a post on Jefferson Airplane’s official Facebook page, which did not provide a cause or specify the location or time of his death.

Mr. Barbata joined the Turtles after leaving his high school band and found almost immediate success: He played on the band’s best-known song, “Happy Together,” released in 1967.

“I heard that the Turtles were looking for a drummer. They called me into the studio to try out some session work. The first song we recorded was ‘Happy Together,'” Mr. Barbata wrote on his website, now defunct but archived by web.archive.org.

“We did it in one take,” he said.

“Happy Together”, written by Garry Bonner and Alan Gordon, stayed at number 1 for three weeks and was considered a pop classic. It has been performed by acts as diverse as Mel Tormé, Weezer, Miley Cyrus and the punk band Simple Plan.

Mr. Barbata joined the Turtles shortly after leaving San Luis Obispo, Calif., where he had first played as a teenager with a band called the Sentinals, to go to Los Angeles to pursue a career in music.

In an interview, Mr. Barbata, a self-taught drummer, spoke about the quick rise to fame that “Happy Together” brought the band. He recalled appearing on television shows such as “The Ed Sullivan Show” and witnessing firsthand the passion of 1960s teenage fans.

“The Turtles were the first and last group I was in where the kids still screamed and went crazy,” he wrote in his memoir “Johny Barbata: The Legendary Life of a Rock Star Drummer” (2005). (He has been variously referred to as John, Johnny and Johny over the years.)

He described a scene at a concert in Alabama where he and his bandmates had to fight their way through a group of girls pulling each other’s hair and ripping off buttons and anything else they could keep as souvenirs.

He left the Turtles in 1970 to join the hugely successful folk-rock group Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. He played on the band’s 1971 live album, “4 Way Street,” which sold five million copies that year, and later appeared on several of the band members’ solo recordings.

David Geffen, who had just launched his first record label, Asylum, invited Mr. Barbata to join a new group called the Eagles, but he declined, saying he couldn’t leave Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, according to a profile about him in the book “Great Rock Drummers of the Sixties” (1989) by Bob Cianci.

The last bands he played with were Jefferson Airplane, which he joined in 1972, and their later offshoot Jefferson Starship. His drumming can be heard on Jefferson Airplane’s final studio album, Long John Silver. He also worked as a session drummer.

John Barbata was born on April 1, 1945 in New Jersey. He said that by the end of his musical career he had contributed to more than 100 albums and was involved in 20 hit singles, although this was not always attributed to him.

After surviving a serious car accident in Northern California in 1978, he was dropped from Jefferson Starship. At the age of 33, he became a born-again Christian and decided to give up rock music.

He became involved in Christian music and eventually settled on a ranch in rural Oklahoma with his wife and daughter. According to Great Rock Drummers of the Sixties, he made and sold redwood coffee tables.

Information about his survivors was not immediately available.

“I was very lucky,” Mr. Barbata once said. “I had a great career. Most drummers only go around once. I went around three times and played with the best musicians in the world.”