Credit: Far Out / Noord-Hollands Archief / Fotoburo de Boer / David Plastik
You look one way, and Jefferson Airplane are concocting some of the most lsyergically thrilling psychedelia of the West Coast with ‘White Rabbit’, then turn around to see Starship’s perm-mulleted horror scoring the abysmal ‘We Built This City’. How the fuck did that happen?
It’s a fantastic swing from countercultural heroes to stodgy pop-rock commercialism. Across two short decades, the ‘Jefferson Family’ evolved across three distinct forms, from the 1960s heights of Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship’s clamour at the 1970s’ arena rock excesses, and Starship’s unashamed dive bomb into corporate rock at its most coldly polished.
You can quite literally chart much of the Woodstock generation’s cultural oblivion by which band Grace Slick happens to be fronting in the following 20-odd years.
There’s a general outline of the ‘Jefferson Lineage’. While Jefferson Airplane was still going, guitarist Paul Kantner dropped his Blows Against the Empire solo effort in 1970, curiously boasting the Jefferson Starship credit and the moniker’s debut. After Jefferson Airplane’s final Long John Silver two years later, Slick and Kanter retooled the line-up with the rebranded Jefferson Starship and an influx of new members for their Dragon Fly debut, bringing back old bandmate Marty Balin from his self-imposed musical exile to kickstart their comfy chart presence.
1975’s Red Octopus would top the Billboard 200, carried some way by the ‘Miracles’ mega-hit. But the taste of success would pull Jefferson Starship toward soft rock’s MOR orbit, album after album incrementally descending down the rungs of the glossy adult-contemporary faux-rock in the vein of Toto and REO Speedwagon. Kantner had had enough, scarpering after 1984’s Nuclear Furniture and taking the band name with him. Following a legal battle, Slick and now co-leader Mickey Thomas trooped on as the one-word Starship the following year.
The 1980s were a tough decade for any artist older than punk and new wave. Awkward music videos, studio trends that aged like milk, and the generally rapidly shifting terrain of the rock and pop climate caught some of yesteryear’s heavyweights like Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, and even David Bowie, becoming tangled in artistic confusion and crises of relevancy across the decade.
Starship managed to nab bona fide Billboard monsters, ‘We Built This City’ and ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now’ topping the Hot 100, but Slick was dwelling in a different universe of musical stature, whisked from the ‘White Rabbit’s revolutionary chase of enlightenment to the dull submission to the Reagan era’s cultural decay.
“For me, the ’80s incarnation of Starship […] felt entirely opposite from the 1969 version of Airplane,” Slick confessed in her Somebody to Love? autobiography. “It was almost like having two different occupations. The two bands had different focuses, purposes, and conduct; one was a circus, the other a musical shopping mall. Starship was a working band: do the albums, do the videos, do the road trips […] I cut my hair, smiled for the cameras, answered press questions, watched the charts, made the records, and kept my ass out of jail.”
Needs must, and the commercial fortunes showered on Starship’s dogged survival mode speak for themselves. Yet, those West Coast winds eventually came calling again. The sole remaining member of the San Francisco titans, Slick left Starship in 1989 to rejoin Jefferson Airplane for their big reunion, offering one final album with that year’s eponymous effort and accompanying tour, then bowing out to a semi-retirement. To this day, Thomas is still fronting the Starship, the only original member of the 1980s pop time capsule.
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