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Jefferson Starship
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Jefferson Starship is an American rock band that was popular in the 1970s and 1980s. It evolved from a Paul Kantner album project entitled Blows Against the Empire (issued before the first break-up of the original Jefferson Airplane), featuring an ad-hoc group of all-star musicians who called themselves Jefferson Starship. The band proper would initially consist of Kantner, Grace Slick, Craig Chaquico and Jorma's brother Peter Kaukonen to promote Slick's solo album Manhole and after that Jefferson Starship was formally launched.
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Encyclopedia
Jefferson Starship is an American rock band that was popular in the 1970s and 1980s. It evolved from a Paul Kantner album project entitled Blows Against the Empire (issued before the first break-up of the original Jefferson Airplane), featuring an ad-hoc group of all-star musicians who called themselves Jefferson Starship. The band proper would initially consist of Kantner, Grace Slick, Craig Chaquico and Jorma's brother Peter Kaukonen to promote Slick's solo album Manhole and after that Jefferson Starship was formally launched. After the initial tour, Kaukonen left and was replaced by Pete Sears for the first studio album Dragon Fly. The band continued in about the same configuration until late 1978 when Grace Slick, Marty Balin, and John Barbata all left the band under different circumstances. The band redefined their music with more of a hard-rock edge with Aynsley Dunbar and Mickey Thomas joining. In 1984, Paul Kantner left forming KBC Band with former bandmates Balin and Casady. The remaining members renamed themselves Starship, releasing three studio albums before manager Bill Thompson finally dismantled the band in 1990. Kantner began performing again in 1991 with Tim Gorman and Slick Aguilar of the KBC Band, calling themselves "Paul Kantner's Wooden Ships". As the band continued to add more members, Kantner renamed the band Jefferson Starship once again. In September 2008, the band released their latest studio effort Jefferson's Tree of Liberty.
History
Paul Kantner/Jefferson Starship
During the transitional period of the early 1970s, singer-guitarist Paul Kantner recorded Blows Against the Empire, a concept album featuring an ad hoc group of musicians and credited on the LP as "Jefferson Starship", marking the first use of that name.
This 'prototype' version of Jefferson Starship included David Crosby and Graham Nash and Grateful Dead members Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann, and Mickey Hart, as well as some of the remaining members of Jefferson Airplane, lead singer Grace Slick, drummer Joey Covington and bassist Jack Casady. The name of this group of musicians was changed to Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra.
In Blows Against the Empire, Kantner (and Slick) sang about a group of people escaping Earth in a hijacked starship. In 1971, the album was nominated for the prestigious science fiction prize, the Hugo Award, a rare honor for a musical recording. Rolling Stone calls it "a sci-fi song suite that now suffers from concept-album creakiness but at its time boasted an experimental edge." It was while that album was being made that Kantner sealed his love affair with Grace Slick; their daughter China Kantner (who made a name for herself as an MTV veejay in the 1980s) was born shortly thereafter.
Kantner and Slick with the Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra released two follow-up albums: Sunfighter, an environmentalism-tinged album released in 1971 to celebrate China's birth, and 1973's Baron von Tollbooth & The Chrome Nun, titled after the nicknames David Crosby had given to the couple. The artist credit on Baron von Tollbooth gave ex-bassist-keyboard player-vocalist David Freiberg equal billing with Kantner and Slick. Freiberg had known and played with Kantner on the folk circuit in the early 1960s and also appeared on Blows Against the Empire, and he had joined Jefferson Airplane in time to appear on their live LP Thirty Seconds over Winterland. Early in 1974, Slick released Manhole, her first solo album. It was on the Manhole album that Paul and Grace next worked with Peter Sears (who had first played on Papa John Creach's first solo album, who was downstairs co-producing a Kathi McDonald album in the same studio. Sears wrote and recorded the song, "Better Lying Down" with Grace, and played bass on the song "Epic #38". It was during this session at Wally Heider studios in San Francisco, that Paul first asked Pete to play with a new band he was forming that was later christened "Jefferson Starship". However, Sears had worked on three of Rod Stewart's early British recordings, and had to go back to England to play on Smiler, Rod's last album made in London, so Jorma Kaukonen's brother Peter Kaukonen first played with the band early in 1974 before Sears returned to the States and replaced him in Jefferson Starship in June 1974.
Kantner is also credited with discovering teenage guitarist Craig Chaquico during this time, who first appeared on Sunfighter and would play with Kantner, Slick and their bands and then with Starship through 1990. He later embarked on a successful solo career as a smooth jazz artist.
Jefferson Starship
By 1973, with Kaukonen and Casady now devoting their full attention to Hot Tuna, the musicians on Baron von Tollbooth & the Chrome Nun formed the core of a new lineup that was formally reborn as "Jefferson Starship" in 1974. Kantner, Slick, and Freiberg were charter members. The line-up also included late-Airplane holdovers drummer John Barbata, and fiddler Papa John Creach (who also played with Hot Tuna), Jorma Kaukonen's brother Peter, who, after the group's 1974 spring tour, was replaced by Peter Sears (who, like Freiberg, played bass and keyboards) and twenty-year-old guitarist Craig Chaquico. Marty Balin contributed the haunting ballad "Caroline" to their first album Dragon Fly, but did not join the band again until January 1975. Balin stayed with the group for nearly the remainder of the decade. This line-up proved to be the band's most commercially successful so far. Balin's ballad "Miracles" helped 1975's Red Octopus reach multiple-platinum status. Creach left the band in August 1975 to pursue a solo career.
The next album, Spitfire, was released in June 1976 and while it went platinum and climbed to #3, the band considered the album's sales to be relatively disappointing compared to it's predecessor and requested an audit from RCA Records, distributor of their Grunt label. RCA subsequently put a reported $500,000 into the next Jefferson Starship project. Earth was released in March 1978 and followed by tours of the U.S. & Europe.
Balin's reluctance to tour had kept the band off the road for over a year, and Slick's alcoholism increasingly became a problem, which led to two consecutive nights of disastrous concerts in Germany in June 1978. On the first night, fans ransacked the stage when Slick and the band failed to appear. On the second night, Slick, in a drunken stupor, shocked the audience by using profanity and sexual references throughout most of her songs. She also reminded the audience that their country had lost during World War II, repeatedly asking "Who won the war?", and implied that all residents of Germany were responsible for the wartime atrocities. After the debacle, Kantner had had enough, and he asked for Slick's resignation from the team.
Towards the end of 1978, Jefferson Starship (now without Grace Slick) recorded "Light the Sky on Fire" for The Star Wars Holiday Special and their forthcoming greatest hits album Gold. Gold, highlighting their work from 1974's Dragon Fly through to 1978's Earth, was released early the following year. "Light the Sky on Fire" (backed with Sears and Slick's "Hyperdrive", from Dragon Fly) was included as a bonus single in the original packaging of album. (When Gold was issued on CD, both tracks were included on the album.) The album originally had a shortened single version of the hit "Miracles"; early pressings of the CD repeated this, but later editions had the full length version from the album Red Octopus.
Shortly before the release of Gold, Balin too left the group, leaving Kantner and company to find a new lead singer in Mickey Thomas (who had sung lead on Elvin Bishop's "Fooled Around and Fell in Love"). Thomas joined the group in April 1979 and his soaring tenor steered the band toward a harder rock sound. Barbata had been seriously injured in a car accident in October 1978 and was replaced by Aynsley Dunbar, who had previously played with Journey.
After the 1979 release of Freedom at Point Zero (which spawned the hit single "Jane"), the new lineup toured (for the first without Grace Slick) and were augmented by sax player Steve Schuster. (Schuster had played with the band, along with horn player David Farey, on the 1978 tour, and he had also appeared on Freedom At Point Zero).
In early 1981 Grace Slick returned to the band, rejoining in time to sing on one song, written by Pete Sears, "Stranger", on the group's next album, Modern Times (1981). Modern Times also included the humorous "Stairway to Cleveland", in which the band defended the numerous changes it had undergone in its musical style, personnel, and even name. Slick remained in the band for Jefferson Starship's next two albums, Winds Of Change (1982) and Nuclear Furniture (1984). One noted personnel change in the group between the two albums was Dunbar leaving in August 1982 replaced by Donny Baldwin, who had performed with Thomas in the Elvin Bishop Group. Around this time, the band began enthusiastically embracing the rock-video age, making elaborate videos typical of the era's superstar bands. Grace Slick would appear frequently on MTV and such music-oriented television shows as Solid Gold, giving the band a high visibility in the MTV era. However, the Jefferson Starship albums of this era were only modestly successful, yet the band remained a gold-selling (and thus commercially credible) act and a popular concert draw. During this year, band groupie Patricia Lang, helped establish a large "groupie following" with over 1 million fans using internet BBS services, which at the time was very progressive. It is believed to be one of the first uses of the Internet for gathering large fan base support.
Starship
In June 1984, Paul Kantner, the last remaining founding member of Jefferson Airplane, left Jefferson Starship, and then took legal action over the Jefferson Starship name against his former bandmates. Kantner settled out of court and signed an agreement that neither party would use the names "Jefferson" or "Airplane" unless all members of Jefferson Airplane, Inc. agreed to it (Bill Thompson, Paul Kantner, Grace Slick, Jorma Kaukonen, Jack Casady). The band briefly changed its name to "Starship Jefferson" while legal proceedings occurred, but ultimately the name was reduced to simply "Starship". Freiberg stayed with the band after the lawsuit and attended the first studio sessions for the next album. However, he became frustrated with the sessions because all the keyboard work in the studio was being done by Peter Wolf (who'd played on the sessions for Nuclear Furniture and briefly joined the band on the road for the followup tour) and that was the instrument Freiberg was supposed to be playing. He left the band and the next album was finished with the five remaining members. In 1984, Gabriel Katona (who'd previously done stints in Rare Earth and Player) joined the band to play keyboards & saxophone on the road with them through the end of 1986.
The next album, Knee Deep in the Hoopla was released in October 1985 and scored two #1 hits. The first was "We Built This City", written by Bernie Taupin, Martin Page, Dennis Lambert, and Peter Wolf; the second was "Sara". No previous incarnation of the band had ever had a #1 hit. The album itself reached #7, went platinum, and spawned two more singles: "Tomorrow Doesn't Matter Tonight" (#26), and "Before I Go" (#68).
In 1987, "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" was featured in the film Mannequin and hit #1, although only Slick and Thomas (plus Craig Chaquico's guitar solo) appeared on it. At that time, the song made Slick the oldest female vocalist to sing on a number-one Billboard Hot 100 hit, at the age of 47. She held this record until Cher broke it at the age of 52, in 1999 with "Believe".) The following year, the band's song "Wild Again" (which reached #73 on the Billboard singles chart) was used in the movie Cocktail.
By the time No Protection was released, bassist and keyboardist Peter Sears had left the band due to the commercial direction the music had taken. Sears went on to play keyboards with former Jefferson Airplane members, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady in Hot Tuna for ten years. Starship's No Protection was not released until well after "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" (its most popular single) had peaked on the charts, but still went gold; in addition to "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" (#1), it featured the singles "It's Not Over ('Til It's Over)" (#9), and "Beat Patrol" (#46). The last song on the album, "Set The Night To Music", would later become a huge hit when re-recorded as a duet between Roberta Flack and Maxi Priest. For the No Protection tour, Brett Bloomfield was brought in to replace Sears and Mark Morgan was their new stage keyboardist.
Grace Slick left Starship in 1988, going on to join the reformed Jefferson Airplane, for one album in 1989, before announcing that she was retiring from music. Slick, then in her late forties, was becoming more self-conscious about her age. As Kantner, Sears and Freiberg had left the band, all the new and remaining members were more than a decade younger than her. To this day Grace maintains that old(er) people "don't belong on a rock and roll stage."
With Slick's departure, Thomas became sole lead singer. The revamped lineup released Love Among the Cannibals in August 1989. On September 24 of that year while the band was in Scranton, Pennsylvania for a show, Donny Baldwin seriously injured Mickey Thomas in a fight. Thomas was forced to undergo reconstructive facial surgery, and Baldwin was involuntarily dismissed from the team.
Breakup
Subsequent to Thomas' medical recovery, the band continued to tour in support of Cannibals. A replacement drummer, Kenny Stayripolous, was found and two female backup singers, Christina Marie Saxton and Melisa Kary, were recruited after Grace's departure. After the Cannibals tour wound up in 1990, Chaquico, the last remaining original Jefferson Starship member, handed in his notice. Thomas attributes the comparative lack of commercial success of the last album to the interruption of the tour, among other factors. Cannibals remains his personal favourite Starship album.
Early the following year, RCA assembled a greatest hits album, Greatest Hits (Ten Years and Change 1979-1991), which featured two new tracks, one with Thomas & Chaquico (recorded before Craig had left) and the other featuring only Thomas and session players. For a brief period it was thought that Thomas would continue forward as Starship, but manager Bill Thompson then decided it was over and told RCA that the band was done making records. Thomas revived Starship in 1992 as "Mickey Thomas' Starship" or "Starship featuring Mickey Thomas" with different personnel and has toured steadily ever since (see the band's personnel roster at the bottom of the page). The same year, Kantner also revived the Starship name, as Jefferson Starship - The Next Generation.
Jefferson Starship - The Next Generation
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