Starship

The name was signed in front of lawyers. In March 1985 the lawsuit Paul Kantner had filed in October the previous year ended in an out-of-court settlement, and the settlement carried a clause that decided everything: neither party could ever again use the words "Jefferson" or "Airplane" without the consent of the five partners in Jefferson Airplane Inc., who were manager Bill Thompson, Kantner, Grace Slick, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady. What was left of the group tried "Starship Jefferson" for a few weeks and ended up keeping a single word. Starship was not a branding discovery or an artistic statement: it was what remained after two words had been crossed out.

And the other part needs saying in full, because it is the part the popular account gets wrong. Of the ten tracks on Knee Deep in the Hoopla, the album that took them to number one, only one carries a writing credit from anyone in the group. Starship's three number ones were written by outside authors. This is not the story of a psychedelic band that reinvented itself in the eighties: it is the story of a vocal brand put at the service of other people's material. It worked, and it worked enormously, which is exactly what makes the case interesting.

What Kantner took with him

Kantner left Jefferson Starship in June 1984, after Nuclear Furniture, and he explained it to the San Francisco Chronicle without hedging: "I didn't want to leave the band. I wanted to end the band". In October he sued, over money and over the right to the name. The March 1985 settlement gave it to nobody: it froze the surname for everyone. Bill Thompson, who handled the management, put the best possible face on it —"the name's too old", he told the same paper— and he maintained that they had been planning to change it anyway. But Kantner also took the last founder with him. Jefferson Airplane had been put together in 1965 by Marty Balin and Kantner, and their first concert under that name was on the thirteenth of August 1965, on the opening night of the Matrix, the pizzeria Balin turned into a venue. By the time Starship went in to record, there was not a single Airplane founder left in the group. The litigation over the surname, on the other hand, lasted far longer than the bands: the last lawsuit, filed by Craig Chaquico in 2017, was dismissed on the fourth of December 2018 after a confidential settlement.

Who was there when Starship began

The line-up it started with, in the Bay Area in 1984, was six strong: Grace Slick —Grace Barnett Wing, by her real name— on vocals, Mickey Thomas also on vocals and on rhythm guitar, Craig Chaquico on lead guitar, Pete Sears on bass and synthesisers, Donny Baldwin on drums and David Freiberg on keyboards. Of the six, only one had a biography in the sixties.

And not even that biography is the one that gets told. Grace Slick did not found Jefferson Airplane: she joined in late 1966, replacing Signe Toly Anderson, and she arrived with two songs under her arm that came from The Great Society, the group she had put together in 1965 with her then husband, Jerry Slick, and with her brother-in-law, Darby Slick. "White Rabbit" is indeed hers. "Somebody to Love" was written by Darby. Neither of the two was a number one: "White Rabbit" stopped at number eight and "Somebody to Love" at five, and they were the only two top forty hits the Airplane ever had.

The other singer was not the new arrival of 1985 either. Mickey Thomas —John Michael Thomas, born on the third of December 1949 in Cairo, Georgia— joined Jefferson Starship in April 1979, five years before the name Starship existed, after the departures of Grace Slick and Marty Balin. He came from Elvin Bishop's band, where he had started as a backing singer: Bishop reckoned that his own raspy voice did not do justice to "Fooled Around and Fell in Love" and handed the lead vocal to the boy on the backing vocals. The song reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100 in May 1976.

A single credit from the house

Knee Deep in the Hoopla came out on the tenth of September 1985, reached number seven on the Billboard 200 and went platinum on the twenty-seventh of December that year. It was produced by Peter Wolf —the Austrian keyboard player and producer, not the singer from J. Geils Band—, who also plays keyboards, synthesisers and electronics on the record. Of the ten tracks, the only one with a writing credit from members of the group is "Private Room", by Chaquico and Thomas: an instrumental, and the B-side of the single.

That broke the band from the inside before it showed from the outside. David Freiberg left in 1985, fed up with the sessions being run by the producer instead of by the musicians. Pete Sears left before the next album and spent the decade in Hot Tuna, with the former Jefferson Airplane men Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady: he went back, literally, to the lineage Starship was supposed to have freed itself from.

The number ones were three, in nineteen months, and not one of them is from the house. "We Built This City" reached number one on the sixteenth of November 1985 and stayed two weeks; it is credited to Bernie Taupin, Martin Page and the producers Dennis Lambert and Peter Wolf. "Sara" got there on the fifteenth of March 1986, for one week, and it is credited to Peter and Ina Wolf; Thomas sings it, with Slick only on the backing vocals. "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now", by Diane Warren and Albert Hammond, written for the film Mannequin, reached the top on the fourth of April 1987 and stayed two weeks, and it was also number one for four weeks in the United Kingdom, in Canada and in Ireland. It was not a "worldwide number one", as is usually said, but it was the second best-selling single of 1987 in the United Kingdom, behind "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley. It was nominated for the Oscar for best original song on the eleventh of April 1988 and lost to "(I've Had) The Time of My Life".

The line that usually closes the account —that Starship got the hits its illustrious ancestor never had— half holds up, and the missing half matters. It is true that neither Jefferson Airplane nor Jefferson Starship ever had a number one single: the Airplane's ceiling was that number five, and Jefferson Starship's, the number three of "Miracles" in 1975. But Jefferson Starship did have a number one album on the Billboard 200, Red Octopus, in 1975, and Starship never did: Knee Deep in the Hoopla stopped at seven and No Protection at twelve. Three number one singles in exchange for the number one album the ancestor had signed ten years earlier. And after the third there were no more: their best subsequent placing was the number nine of "It's Not Over ('Til It's Over)", in 1987.

Los Angeles, not San Francisco

About "We Built This City" almost everybody knows one thing that is false: that it is about San Francisco. Bernie Taupin, the lyricist for Elton John, wrote it in Los Angeles, and it was a lament for the closing of that city's live music clubs. He told it himself to Rolling Stone in 2013: "It was a very dark song about how club life in L.A. was being killed off and live acts had no place to go". Martin Page set it to music and recorded the demo, and the producers Dennis Lambert and Peter Wolf took credits for rewriting the chorus. Before it reached Starship, according to the oral history GQ published, the lyric had been offered to Martha Davis, of The Motels, who declined to finish it. The same Taupin–Page pair signed another number one in those years for a veteran band converted to pop: "These Dreams", by Heart.

The bay came in afterwards, in production. On Page's demo, the gap in the middle was filled by a police report about riots in Los Angeles; in the final version it became a disc-jockey voiceover that names the city on the bay, and the voice belongs to nobody in the band: it is that of Les Garland, a radio presenter in San Francisco and, in 1985, an MTV executive. Variants were recorded for other markets —one for Cleveland, another for New York— and some stations simply dropped in their own presenters. The song the popular account takes for a city's anthem is, strictly speaking, a piece of radio promotion with the city interchangeable.

Its later fame also has names and dates, and without them it makes no sense. Blender put it at number one in "The 50 Worst Songs Ever!" in its May 2004 issue, with an argument from its editor, Craig Marks: "It purports to be anti-commercial but reeks of '80s corporate-rock commercialism". In October 2011, the Rolling Stone readers' poll chose it as the worst song of the eighties by the widest margin in the history of that poll, ahead of "The Final Countdown" by Europe and "The Lady in Red" by Chris de Burgh. And in August 2016, GQ devoted an oral history to it that called it, without qualification, the worst song of all time. Taupin, asked about that verdict, replied that he does not necessarily dispute it, "considering the way it turned out".

The retirement and the brand

What almost never gets told is that the first to say it was the woman who was singing it. Grace Slick, to Vanity Fair in 2012: "that's the worst song ever". She spelled out her objection to The Guardian in February 2025, and it was literal and almost a matter of town planning: no city was built on rock and roll, Los Angeles is made of oil, oranges and the movie business, and of Taupin she said that he is British and that London, obviously, is not built on rock and roll either. Her summary of the whole Starship era fits into three sentences, and it comes from that same piece: "Stupid song. But our producer said, 'Yeah, but it's a hit.' And he was right". About the ballad she said something similar in an interview with the journalist Jeff Tamarkin —"I don't like to sing songs where I don't believe the lyrics"— and she told how, singing it live, she would get up onstage thinking "yeah, right". She was forty-seven when the ballad reached number one, which made her the oldest woman to sing a Hot 100 number one, a mark Cher took from her in 1999.

She left Starship in early 1988 to join the reunion of the original Jefferson Airplane, which released an album in 1989, and in 1990 she retired from music with an explanation that allowed no reply: rock musicians over fifty look stupid and ought to retire. Then came an episode that is on the record: on the fifth of March 1994, in Tiburon, California, she was arrested after a confrontation with police at her home with an unloaded shotgun; she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour and the judge rejected the nine months in jail the prosecution was asking for and sentenced her to outpatient treatment for alcoholism, two hundred hours of community service and random testing.

The band without her did not have long left. On the twenty-fourth of September 1989, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, with the concert cancelled because of the weather, Donny Baldwin assaulted Mickey Thomas in a bar: serious facial injuries, fractured ribs, reconstructive surgery and three titanium plates in his skull. Baldwin resigned immediately and the tour was postponed; no charges were brought. Craig Chaquico, the last man who had come from Jefferson Starship, left in 1990. And in early 1992 Mickey Thomas bought the rights to the name and has been touring with it ever since.

What to remember

Starship was called that because a settlement signed in March 1985 forbade it to call itself anything else. Over the following nineteen months it put three songs at number one in the United States and wrote none of the three; on the album that opened that run, the only credit from the house is on an instrumental B-side. The keyboard player left over it, the bass player went back to playing with the old Airplane men and the singer called the song that was taking her to the top stupid in public. It was not a reinvention: it was a vocal brand at the service of other people's material, run with an efficiency very few managed in that decade.

Grace Slick is not at the top of anything, and she did not want to be either: she retired in 1990, she is eighty-six, she lives in Malibu and she has painted full time since the year 2000. When that radio voiceover plays in the middle of "We Built This City", the whole story is right there: four writers who were not in the band, an MTV executive playing disc-jockey, a city chosen at the mixing desk and a forty-six-year-old woman singing with all the craft in the world something she did not believe. It did not need to be hers to be enormous.

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Sources

Starship was an American band formed in 1984 in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, with Grace Slick (vocals), Mickey Thomas (vocals and rhythm guitar), Craig Chaquico (lead guitar), Pete Sears (bass and synthesisers), Donny Baldwin (drums) and David Freiberg (keyboards), and released on Grunt Records/RCA. It took the name after the out-of-court settlement of March 1985 that ended the lawsuit filed by Paul Kantner in October 1984, following his departure from the group in June that year: the settlement barred either party from using "Jefferson" or "Airplane" without the consent of the five partners in Jefferson Airplane Inc. (Bill Thompson, Paul Kantner, Grace Slick, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady); there was an interim name, "Starship Jefferson". The last lawsuit in the litigation over the name, filed by Craig Chaquico in 2017, was dismissed on 4 December 2018 after a confidential settlement. Jefferson Airplane formed in 1965 in San Francisco around Marty Balin and Paul Kantner, with Signe Toly Anderson, Jorma Kaukonen, Bob Harvey and Jerry Peloquin, and debuted under that name on 13 August 1965 at the opening of the club The Matrix. Grace Slick, born Grace Barnett Wing on 30 October 1939 in Highland Park, Illinois, was not a founder: she joined in late 1966 in place of Signe Toly Anderson, coming from The Great Society, and brought with her "White Rabbit" (written by her, no. 8 on the Hot 100) and "Somebody to Love" (written by her brother-in-law Darby Slick, no. 5), Jefferson Airplane's only two top 40 hits. Mickey Thomas, real name John Michael Thomas, born on 3 December 1949 in Cairo, Georgia, joined Jefferson Starship in April 1979 from Elvin Bishop's band, where he sang "Fooled Around and Fell in Love", no. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in May 1976. "Knee Deep in the Hoopla" was released on 10 September 1985, reached no. 7 on the Billboard 200 and was certified platinum by the RIAA on 27 December 1985; it was produced by Peter Wolf —the Austrian keyboard player and producer, who should not be confused with the singer from J. Geils Band— and Jeremy Smith, with Dennis Lambert as executive producer. The only track on the album co-written by members of the group is "Private Room", by Craig Chaquico and Mickey Thomas, an instrumental and the B-side of the single. David Freiberg left in 1985 over the producer's control of the sessions; Pete Sears left before "No Protection" and joined Hot Tuna with Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady. The three Hot 100 number ones were "We Built This City" (single of 26 August 1985; no. 1 on 16 November 1985, 2 weeks; no. 12 in the United Kingdom; RIAA gold; nominated for the 1986 Grammy for best rock vocal performance by a duo or group, which was won by "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits), written by Bernie Taupin, Martin Page, Dennis Lambert and Peter Wolf; "Sara" (no. 1 on 15 March 1986, 1 week; no. 66 in the United Kingdom), by Peter and Ina Wolf, sung by Mickey Thomas with Slick on backing vocals; and "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" (released on 19 January 1987, recorded in September 1986, produced by Narada Michael Walden; no. 1 on 4 April 1987, 2 weeks; no. 1 in the United Kingdom for 4 weeks, Canada and Ireland; second best-selling single of 1987 in the United Kingdom after "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley; nominated for the Oscar for best original song at the 60th edition, on 11 April 1988, which was won by "(I've Had) The Time of My Life"), written by Diane Warren and Albert Hammond for the film "Mannequin". "No Protection" (6 July 1987) reached no. 12 on the Billboard 200; "It's Not Over ('Til It's Over)" reached no. 9 in 1987 and "It's Not Enough" no. 12 in 1989. Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship never had a no. 1 single —Jefferson Starship's ceiling was "Miracles", no. 3 in 1975— but "Red Octopus" (1975) by Jefferson Starship was no. 1 on the Billboard 200, something Starship did not achieve. Bernie Taupin wrote the lyric of "We Built This City" in Los Angeles as a lament for the closing of that city's live music clubs, as he told Rolling Stone in 2013; Martin Page composed the music and recorded the demo, in which the central passage was a police report about riots in Los Angeles, replaced in production by the radio voiceover recorded by Les Garland, a former San Francisco presenter and at the time an MTV executive, of which variants were recorded for other markets. According to GQ's oral history, Martha Davis, of The Motels, declined to finish the lyric. The Taupin-Page pair also wrote "These Dreams", a no. 1 for Heart in 1986. "Blender" placed the song at no. 1 in "The 50 Worst Songs Ever!" in its May 2004 issue, with statements from its editor Craig Marks; the Rolling Stone readers' poll of October 2011 chose it as the worst song of the nineteen-eighties by the largest margin recorded in that poll, ahead of "The Final Countdown" by Europe and "The Lady in Red" by Chris de Burgh; and in August 2016 GQ published Rob Tannenbaum's oral history describing it as the worst song of all time. Grace Slick called the track "the worst song ever" in Vanity Fair (2012); to The Guardian, on 25 February 2025, she added "I thought they were ridiculous. There isn't a city built on rock'n'roll! Los Angeles was built on oil and oranges and the movie business", "He's British, and London obviously isn't built on rock'n'roll" and "Stupid song. But our producer said, 'Yeah, but it's a hit.' And he was right"; and of "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" she told Jeff Tamarkin "I don't like to sing songs where I don't believe the lyrics… I'm getting up onstage and I'm thinking, yeah, right. It's distracting and disconcerting to me" (interview reproduced by Tamarkin in Best Classic Bands, "17 #1 Hits Worse Than 'We Built This City'", 7 January 2017). Bernie Taupin has said that he does not necessarily disagree with that verdict. At 47, Slick was the oldest woman to sing a Hot 100 no. 1, a mark Cher took from her in 1999 with "Believe". She left Starship in early 1988 to join the Jefferson Airplane reunion, which released an album in 1989, and retired from music in 1990. On 5 March 1994, in Tiburon, California, she was arrested after a confrontation with officers at her home with an unloaded shotgun; on 6 June 1994 she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour and judge William Stephens, of the Marin County Superior Court, rejected the prosecution's request for 9 months in jail and imposed outpatient treatment for alcoholism, 200 hours of community service and random testing, with a 6-month suspended prison term. Slick lives in Malibu, California, is 86 and has painted full time since the year 2000. On 24 September 1989, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Donny Baldwin assaulted Mickey Thomas, who suffered serious facial injuries and fractured ribs and required reconstructive surgery and three titanium plates in his skull; Baldwin resigned and the tour was postponed, and no charges were brought. Craig Chaquico left the group in 1990 and Mickey Thomas acquired the rights to the name in early 1992, with which he continues to tour as "Starship featuring Mickey Thomas". Paul Kantner died on 28 January 2016, aged 74, of multiple organ failure and septic shock; Signe Toly Anderson died the same day, aged 74, of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; Marty Balin died on 27 September 2018, aged 76, with no cause made public. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Billboard, Official Charts, the San Francisco Chronicle, UPI Archives, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, GQ, Blender, American Songwriter, Songfacts, Stereogum, Mental Floss, Ultimate Classic Rock, The Hollywood Reporter, The Guardian (25 February 2025), Best Classic Bands and Wikipedia.