![\"Jefferson](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Jefferson-Airplane-Starship-Split-Far-Out-Magazine-1140x855.jpg\")
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Credit: Far Out \/ Noord-Hollands Archief \/ Fotoburo de Boer \/ David Plastik<\/p>\n
You look one way, and Jefferson Airplane<\/a> are concocting some of the most lsyergically thrilling psychedelia of the West Coast with \u2018White Rabbit\u2019, then turn around to see Starship\u2019s perm-mulleted horror scoring the abysmal \u2018We Built This City\u2019. How the fuck did that happen?<\/p>\n It\u2019s a fantastic swing from countercultural heroes to stodgy pop-rock commercialism. Across two short decades, the \u2018Jefferson Family\u2019 evolved across three distinct forms, from the 1960s heights of Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship\u2019s clamour at the 1970s\u2019 arena rock excesses, and Starship\u2019s unashamed dive bomb into corporate rock at its most coldly polished.<\/p>\n You can quite literally chart much of the Woodstock generation\u2019s cultural oblivion by which band Grace Slick happens to be fronting in the following 20-odd years.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a general outline of the \u2018Jefferson Lineage\u2019. 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\u2019s debut. After Jefferson Airplane\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 1975\u2019s Red Octopus would top the Billboard 200, carried some way by the \u2018Miracles\u2019 mega-hit. But the taste of success would pull Jefferson Starship toward soft rock\u2019s 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<\/a>. Kantner had had enough, scarpering after 1984\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s heavyweights like Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, and even David Bowie, becoming tangled in artistic confusion and crises of relevancy across the decade.<\/p>\n Starship managed to nab bona fide Billboard monsters, \u2018We Built This City\u2019 and \u2018Nothing\u2019s Gonna Stop Us Now\u2019 topping the Hot 100, but Slick was dwelling in a different universe of musical stature, whisked from the \u2018White Rabbit\u2019s revolutionary chase of enlightenment to the dull submission to the Reagan era\u2019s cultural decay.<\/p>\n \u201cFor me, the \u201980s incarnation of Starship [\u2026] felt entirely opposite from the 1969 version of Airplane,\u201d Slick confessed in her Somebody to Love? autobiography. \u201cIt 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 [\u2026] I cut my hair, smiled for the cameras, answered press questions, watched the charts, made the records, and kept my ass out of jail.\u201d<\/p>\n Needs must, and the commercial fortunes showered on Starship\u2019s dogged survival mode speak for themselves. Yet, those West Coast winds eventually came calling again. The sole remaining member of the San Francisco<\/a> titans, Slick left Starship in 1989 to rejoin Jefferson Airplane for their big reunion, offering one final album with that year\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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