yeah yeah. i had a guilty pleasure post about jefferson airplane a little while back. but the airplane and the starship are two different modes of transport, if you know what i mean.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIsiR43Zw5Mwhen jane was released in 1979, i think the only person left standing from the original jefferson airplane lineup was paul kantner. (someone chime in if i’m mistaken.) my beloved grace slick (and her rockin’ haircut that i’ve copied for the past 30 years)had been kicked out, thanks to her infamous drunken tirades against basically the entire nation of germany. marty balin bailed the group just before this album (but not before contributing some mid-1970s hits which i can hardly stand.) luckily, they somehow pulled in journey’s drummer aynsley dunbar and discovered teenaged guitarist craig chaquico who has since gone on to play smooth jazz and new age successfully. voila! instant band.
to my young ears, the song had a fantastic hook — and a killer keyboard part for me to bang along with on that poor, beleagured piano (the one that still graces my family room, despite the times when hellboy pounds on it.) i didn’t care that the singer was obviously being played by his girlfriend, jane. (when i was 14, those sorts of things didn’t loom large in my mind. the song could have been about flying monkeys and i would have been fine with it, as long as the hook was working.) i hear it, and i’m instantly transported to summer camp — the second year i was working at one, that is. (for $50 a week. yes, you read that right. by my calculations, i would have to work one hour to afford the big gulp coffee i required prior to each work day.)
ah, leonard baer day camp, 1979:

my hair had not improved one iota from the year prior, when i was a mere CIT:

what a difference some years make:

i think i was still pulling in that $50/week by 1983. probably kept me in hair supplies, i think. but it kept me from working on the sleazeside heights boardwalk, a scary and dangerous thing for a girl of a certain age to be doing, my parents insisted…
where was i? r i g h t…
jefferson starship. 1979 was probably their last year of interest for me. (and apparently billy corgan, too.) they’d go on in various incarnations, building up to the atrocity known as we built this city, one of the worst popular songs of the 1980s. (a decade that had a lot of awful musical opportunities, so no mean feat.) by then, they had dropped the jefferson part of their name and were simply starship. perhaps they should have put whatever dirigible they were flying in in park in 1979, cut their losses, and followed solo careers.
sigh. nothing lasts.
thankfully, i still have jane. and, come to think of it, my grace slick hair.
Please tell me you’ve seen “Wet Hot American Summer.” Or at least know of it. (It’s a summer camp movie. Or the parody of one. Featuring this song in the soundtrack. It also stars Janeane Garofalo. I love Janeane.)
I always liked “Jane” too. I never really decided how I felt about Jefferson Airplane/Starship/Go-cart or whatever. It was “White Rabbit”, “Somebody to Love” then “Jane” then out. “We Built This City” had a lot to do with it, I’m sure. Ugh.