The Jefferson Airplane/Jefferson Starship/Starship continuum makes for some downright interesting reading. If you love dramatic personnel and sound changes, they are your band, always keeping you guessing. However, it's a little disingenuous to package the three bands together. In the case of the first two, they co-existed together for a period of time, and the wax was barely dry from the last Airplane album, Bark, as the nascent Jefferson Starship came into being with the science fiction flavored Blows Against the Empire (properly credited to Paul Kantner with most of his past and future bandmates helping). Meanwhile, Starship is really just the bitter result of an traumatic split in Jefferson Starship that involved founder Paul Kantner packing up the "Jefferson" part of the name and storming out of the group. In fact, the last recorded lineup of Starship bore no resemblance to the old Airplane and literally dissolved in a fistfight (between singer Mickey Thomas and drummer Donny Baldwin).
While Dragon Fly, the "proper" debut of the Jefferson Starship, is also quite removed musically from its Airplane ancestor, it does sport a few familiar names: Grace Slick, Paul Kantner, and, for one song, Marty Balin. The rest of the classic lineup was having too much fun in Hot Tuna and Riders of the Purple Sage to be bothered to show up, though John Barbata and Papa John Creach were in the earlier Jefferson. New to the band was 20 year old guitarist Craig Chaquico (ex-??? but hey now what were you doing before age 20??), David Freiberg (ex-Quicksilver Messenger Service), and Pete Sears (ex-Fleur de Lys and Silver Metre, the Blue Cheer spinoff band). On paper it seems like a pretty ridiculous mashup of different sources, but on disc you get a strangely coherent album.
The two singles derived from the album are genuinely the best two tracks. "Ride the Tiger" is an awesome song, capturing the energy of the old Airplane within the structure of the new band. Even old Papa Creach is getting into it, matching Chaquico's other-worldly solo, each one sandwiching the oddly racial bridge verse. Did the world come alive in the summer of '75? Probably not, but, how much did you actually party in 1999, Prince fans? "Caroline" may very well have been the other big hit because it added the credibility of Marty Balin's writing and singing talents, but it really is a worthy song and, although they may not have know it back then in 1974, established the Jefferson Starship playbook for the next three albums. As for most of the other songs, they at least have some passage or two that sticks with the listener. While "Devil's Den" is good from start to finish, "Be Young You" takes its sweet time to find its groove. The only song I never really figured out was "Hyperdrive", the closing number. It's a boss, badass title for a closing track that runs nearly eight minutes, but it just sort of wanders around, leaving poor Dragon Fly ending with a whimper rather than a bang. Maybe I should listen to "Ride the Tiger" backwards and pretend it's the closing number.
Poor closing tracks aside, yhings only got better for the rising Jefferson Starship as the decade trooped on. Marty Balin signed on full-time, doubling down on "Caroline" with the mega-hit and wedding song favorite "Miracles". Even though some of the stuff on the later albums, like Spitfire and Earth, hasn't held up so well over the years, it was a lucrative time for the band. Maybe it was their notorious appearance on the Star Wars Holiday Special, but then everything blew up in spectacular fashion, with Balin leaving for good, Grace Slick going on a one-album sabbatical for 1979's Freedom at Point Zero, and Barbata's car crash sidelining him permanently from the group. This paved the way for the "next generation" members Mickey Thomas and session-drummer extraordinaire Aynsley Dunbar. The new configuration managed to hold water, and Slick's return didn't hurt anything. The death knell struck in 1984 with a marginalized Kantner suing the rest of the band and literally tearing the name in half. Since things were going so well, lawsuit aside, the de-"Jefferson"ed band carried on to spectacular 1980's success with songs like "We Built This City". However "Starship" was even more porous went it came to the writing process, propped up with a huge cast of songwriters. While it's one way to score a big hit, it's no way to sustain a band. Thomas's control over the band eventually squeezed out everyone else, and the final Starship album shares exactly one band member (Craig Chaquico) from the glory days of Dragon Fly. He vanished after 1989 to pursue a career in soothing new age music and the band temporarily folded. While there has been a "Starship Featuring Mickey Thomas" tooling around since 1992, they've only mustered a single album to their name, more content to be a cozy 1980's nostalgia act. Oddly enough a Jefferson Starship with far more familiar personnel came back to life in the 1990's and has been slightly more productive. I won't even pretend to know who is in what band and how much they are contributing these days, but then again the whole Jefferson Airplane/Starship thing is more of a 1960's, 1970's, or 1980's thing (take your pick!), and certainly not a driving force of this decade or the previous two.
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