The Enterprising STARSHIP BEAM 'EM UP, BINKY

The Enterprising STARSHIP BEAM 'EM UP, BINKY

FEATURES

Barbara Pepe

MTV’s annual New Year’s Eve party has got this reputation as being the place to unveil next year’s big breakthrough artists. After all, it was here that Cyndi Lauper first told us what girls really wanted, and Duran Duran performed at the ball before there was money for videos in Rio and their lead singer got rich enough to almost drown in his own yacht. True to form, the bill at Manhattan Center last December 31 also featured the Hooters, Charlie Sexton and the Divynls. But here it is raining ping pong balls at 11:30 pm and who’re these five geezers onstage? The Starship?!? Yes, indeedy, 20-odd years, three name changes and none of the original members later, the Jefferson Airplane’s grandchild is touted as brand new talent. You know something? If you look at it through the weird, cockeyed grid that colors anything these guys do, it makes perfect sense.

To even begin to understand, turn back the time machine to another New Year’s Eve, ushering in this hope-filled decade at a seedy little club called X’s in San Francisco. There was Paul Kantner, who knew about headbands before Jim McMahon ever heard of Adidas or Pete Rozelle, slinging a 12-string guitar and introducing the world to a hot-sticked, metallized drummer, Aynsley Dunbar, and .some southern boy named Mickey Thomas in a live radio broadcast. Off stage left, obscured by David Freiberg’s keyboard wall, Grace Slick peeped over an amp stack, self-exiled from the Jefferson Starship she’d fled two years before. A fair crowd of Bay area-ites turned out looking for some fun, as they have since 1965 for the hometown crew, but we’re not discussing a Bruce Springsteen stadium sellout here. Those who did were shocked to find out that the band still rocked. In fact, these guys were hot. The whole U.S. decreed it so a couple months later when the single, “Jane,” leveled atop the charts at number five and the album, Freedom At Point Zero, sold half a million copies to get its gold certification. Not too shabby a performance in those pre-MTV, record company recession times.

"Apparently this band isn't great at writing under pressure."

—Grace Slick

It was then that the inexplicable Fate’s Fickle Five phenomenon first found the light of whatever. Nobody told Mickey Thomas about it before he signed on. “I knew they were poised and ready for a new musical direction, but I wasn’t aware that it would reoccur like this every five years,” he’s honest enough to admit.

(OK, if you’re not a rock historian or too embarrassed to let us know that you never heard of Fate’s Fickle Five, we’ll tell you. See, once every five years the Jefferson Spacecraft makes NASA-sized noise with some new album, coins money, number one hits and does these sellout tours. People go crazy, the record industry acts like the Jefferson Wheelchair were miraculously healed at a revival meeting and then Something Always Happens. Band members have brain hemorrhages, go into AA or get pissed off with the musical direction and leave. I’m not making up this stuff; it’s true. Somewhere during this downward spiral they bottom out with a major tragedy, spend a couple years limping along while trying to rebuild, and before you know it, another ‘half decade’s gone past and here they are busting out again.)

Grace, who’s so closely identified with this gang that she might as well be an original member (for the record, she replaced Signe Anderson, who quit when she got pregnant), can’t explain it. “I think God figures if they’re stupid enough to keep at it this long, give ’em a little tidbit every now and then,” she reasons. Or, how about this analogy: ‘‘Every 10 years the United States sleeps, then for the other 10 it wiggles around. They say your body renews itself every seven years. Maybe Starship renews itself every five.” Don’t like that one? Try this. ‘‘It’s like a snake shedding its skin. Every five years the old goes off and there’s a new killer ready to bite.”

The only trouble with likening yourself to a snake, besides the fact that it’s repulsive, is that the reptile spends a good bit of time crawling on its belly to get to where it’s going. Some of the Starship’s more vicious critics, who just adore heaping scorn, abuse and garbage on the clan, claim that’s what they’ve done on their new record, Knee Deep In The Hoopla. So is it sellout to heavy metalurgists? Are they just out to feed starving bank accounts? Or can somebody please get it that when people get to be 20 years older they change, grow up and it’s time to move on. ‘‘When a group member goes out that’s going to change the sound,” Grace explains logically. ‘‘A 12-string goes out and a synthesizer comes in. Now those are two very different instruments.”

The departee was, of course, Kantner, who took the “Jefferson” nomenclature with him in a 1984 lawsuit. “He’s working with Marty (Balin, another alumnus) and Jack (Casady, ditto) on a band and he tells China (the daughter who resides in papa Paul’s place one week and mama Grace’s the next, has for most of her 14 years and shocks both her parents with her normality) they’ve made four demo tapes,” Slick updates. She hasn’t heard any of this from him, mind you, because “I can’t deal with people who are that goofy, literally. They have to have some kind of ability to see a couple of sides to the story. I’m not a good psychiatrist. I just want to say ‘Hey, straighten out.’ He’s unwilling to see where the problem is and the problem is with Paul.”

Now lest one think this is going to degenerate into cheap one-sided mudflinging (don’t get your hopes up), the ever self-revealing Ms. Slick quickly moves on to point out that “I’ve done the same thing he’s doing. I’ve been the flat tire.” She refers to her two-year hiatus during which she made a couple solo discs with some pretty original stuff on them that unfortunately didn’t set anything on fire and got her personal interior in order. “Marty’s been the flat tire and now Paul’s the flat tire. You can go 60 miles per hour on a flat tire, but it sounds terrible and it fucks up the rest of the car. It’s a lot easier to go 60 miles per hour an hour if one of the tires isn’t flat.” (Great with the analogies, ain’t she?)

To get up to speed, Starship had to eliminate Kantner quirks like writing eight minute songs and changing the set list every night, which the rest of the band and crew found to be a pain in the butt and didn’t have the artistic effect on the audience Paul thought it did, or turning down a job opening for Journey when the I.R.S. trucks were backing up to Thomas’s door to collect his furniture. “We all went nuts,” Slick recounts, still disbelieving the incident. “Now there’s nobody saying, ‘We’re not opening for them, we’re too great.’ We’re not the Rolling Stones. We know exactly how good we are and how much money we can command.”

In the end, Kantner just walked away from the band he founded with Jorma Kaukonen, Balin, Casady and Anderson back in the peace and love, everybodyget-stoned-and-get-off-on-the-lights-show ’60s. “We never fired him. He just disappeared,” his co-veteran of many campaigns explains. David Freiberg did a similar powder, leaving this space craft crew a lean and mean five-Slick, Thomas, Craig Chaquico, Pete Sears and Donny Baldwin.

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All that trauma resolved, the newlychristened Starship could, as Mickey puts it, “break totally free and go into a new— and what we considered modern—musical direction.” First off, they quit looking within the membership for songs, since the whole time they were supposed to be crafting new material the bullcrap was flying. “’Apparently this band isn’t great at writing under pressure,” Slick assesses. Calling in demos from songwriters who’d contributed to Thomas’s solo MCA album, cassettes discovered by producers Dennis Lambert, Jeremy Smith, Peter Wolf (no, not the one from the J. Geils Band, before you get totally confused) and anybody else who could whistle a tune into somebody who was somebody’s ear, they whittled the plastic mountain down to just nine. “It was better, from my point of view, to have songs that I liked up front before we started taking them apart and making them into records,” asserts Mickey.

The initial result was “We Built This City,” which the band felt funny about but went with because the producers and the record label, RCA, liked the song. Fate’s Fickle Five was in the “up” phase. “We Built This City” gave Starship their first number one single—ever. (More tedious details. Red Octopus hit the number one album slot four times back in 1975 during a previous Fate’s Fickle Five cycle, but its propelling single, “Miracles,” leveled at number two.) Then they went out and toured with Night Ranger, technically co-headlining, but the younger headbangers got to close the set. “We were a little apprehensive about that,” Thomas says, and Slick adds, “We’re used to playing for friends, and that’s easy. It was good to see people who who came to see another band enjoy you.”

The new Starship is starting to get respect, though, and not just in the United States. To start the new year right, they all flew off to visit with some pretty harsh critics in the European press and charmed the microphones out of their hands. Also seems like the band may make a real performance trip over yonder this summer, the first time they’ve set equipment on the Continent since the Germans trashed "$1 million worth of the stuff at the Lorely Festival in 1978. Or they might rake in some of the lucrative summer bucks here for a change, since they won’t be locked up the studio or imitating not-quite-ready-for-prime-venues players during some kind of reorganizational shuffle. Whatever, it’s sure to be a success. You can’t fight Fate’s Fickle Fives. HI