Jefferson Starship

Jefferson Starship biography

Jefferson Starship is an American rock band formed in the early 1970s. The band has undergone several major changes in personnel and genres through the years while retaining the same Jefferson Starship name. The current Jefferson Starship, led by co-founder Paul Kantner, more closely resembles its original mix of psychedelic and electric folk music than the pop-driven tunes it was widely known for in the early to mid-1980s. It is not to be confused with Starship, a spin-off of the group featuring former co-lead singer Mickey Thomas that also periodically tours. The latter group is most frequently identified with the 1980s pop tunes of the Jefferson Starship.

History

Paul Kantner/Jefferson Starship

During the transitional period of the early 1970s, when the Jefferson Airplane was in the process of disbanding, singer-guitarist Paul Kantner recorded Blows Against the Empire. This was 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. This agglomeration was informally known as the Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra, a moniker later used on a Kantner album in the early 1980s.

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 Kantner and Slick next worked with Pete Sears (who had first played on Papa John Creach's first solo album), who was co-producing a Kathi McDonald album in the same studio. Sears wrote and recorded the song, "Better Lying Down" with Slick, 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. Sears had worked on three of Rod Stewart's early British recordings, and had to go back to England to play on Smiler, Stewart'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.

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