How the magnificent Jefferson Airplane arrived at Starship’s ‘We Built This City’
Jefferson Airplane went from soaring with some of the greatest songs ever written in the form of ‘Somebody to Love’ and ‘White Rabbit’ to the Roswell-like crash of Starship’s ‘We Built This City’. To cut to the chase, never has there been a finer time to dig out a classic quote from Joni Mitchell: “You watched that high of the hippie thing descend into drug depression. Right after Woodstock, then we went through a decade of basic apathy where my generation sucked its thumb and then just decided to be greedy and pornographic.”
Jefferson Airplane were, in essence, the quintessential Woodstock band. In fact, they woke revellers up with a morning set for the ages when they hit the stage in front of the 400,000 people in attendance. The year before, they had serenaded the masses at the aptly named ‘Summer of Love’, and their anthemic ‘White Rabbit’ just about summed up the entire era in a two-minute maelstrom.
However, by the time that 1985 had arrived, Jefferson Airplane were a different band in a different world. That year they offered up ‘We Built This City’, a song that became certified as the worst song ever written. Whether you go along with that sentiment or think it’s a bit of harmless toe-tapping fun, you’d have to admit that it doesn’t quite hit the life-encapsulating heights of ‘Somebody to Love’ or the near-mystic melody of ‘Embryonic Journey’.
By the time 1985 arrived, the Jefferson branding had rightly been dropped. After they disbanded in 1972, the offshoot of Jefferson Starship was born in 74 with an altered line-up. A state of lineup flux continued thereafter, with Grace Slick being fired in 78 after drunkenly goading a German audience. She would return for cameos over the intervening years, but the band had changed so much in terms of personnel and sound that Starship seemed a fitting rebrand.
With that, came a slip away from the old ideals. Now, they were chasing top 40 hits in an increasingly sanitized world of synths and catchy choruses. Having fluxed their way into a rudderless state, now the only thing to fall back on was their craft. Thus, they just copied off the charts to keep themselves in the commercial race. When faltering times precluded this, they hired producer Peter Wolf who brough along a stack of tracks already available.
It was almost too easy for them, and after years of hardship, that was the appeal of Starship. As Grace Slick writes: “It felt entirely opposite from the 1969 version of Airplane. 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,” she explains. “I cut my hair, smiled for the cameras, answered press questions, watched the charts, made the records, and kept my ass out of jail.”
It is certainly a far cry from wanting to change the world. In a weird way, however, it almost did. ‘We Built This City’ was a number one single. In fact, it sold enough for songwriter Bernie Taupin (yep, the same lyricist Elton John enlists) to proclaim: “It will probably help send my children to college.”
That was the crux of it. Anybody who had been around the 1960s loathed it because it represented the demise of a dream—a dream once embodied by the same bloody band. The times had indeed a-changed, and what they had changed into was the commercially inclined slide of safe suburban capitalism. Even counterculture kids need pensions eventually, ‘We Built This City’ was Jefferson Airplane taking the cheque. It is that notion as much as the song itself that has led to the track being so vilified even by the members themselves.
