Starship
Knee Deep in the Hoopla

LA RECENSIONE

I avidly listen to, and also play, rock music, and have been eagerly researching it for many years; the result, at present, is not particularly positive from a biological standpoint but it is from the perspective of the stability and firmness of the opinions that have gradually developed within me.

One of which makes me categorize Jefferson Airplane as a genuine flop of a band. This includes “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love,” which happen to be their most storied episodes in collective memory. Paul Kantner, their leader, was an insignificant composer, singer, and guitarist, with a "style" distinctive but for all the wrong reasons: he brayed protests more than melodies, conceived rough and unsteady choruses; he wasn’t skillful from any perspective, apart from his civic and pacifist commitment which, however, doesn't directly pertain to the musical aspect.

The Airplane lasted a few years during which they released too many records, then changed their name for a while to Jefferson Starship, meanwhile starting a slow downward drift towards other musical shores, until eventually reaching a true final bipolarity: half of the songs were still Kantner's and therefore in the usual shabby and disharmonious style, the rest handled by the newcomers who had nothing to share with the Airplane’s sixties’ counterculture but a lot with pop rock, melodic hard rock, and AOR.

Having gotten rid of the dreary Kantner, the band lost the legal right to use the name Jefferson, and thus, by 1985, voilà, here you have just the Starship... Speaking of hoopla, in Yankee slang, it also seems to mean crap, so the title of this album is “Knee Deep in the Hoopla.”

These Starship rely on an Australian producer/composer/pianist who emigrated to California named Peter Wolf, who prepares a ready-made meal for them, that is, a number of pop-rock songs just to sing and noodle on (70% of which he handles with his keyboards). They perform and it’s a considerable success. The excellent Grace Slick, the only face from Airplane still in the lineup, stops drinking for a while, and here we catch her, a splendid forty-five-year-old, colorful in the eighties style, voice still intact. Yet she is only the second choice as the lead... the producer favors the other frontman, with a booming tenor timbre, Mr. Mickey Thomas. She acquiesces and, for a few years, carries on with the Starship, then she will get tired and return with Kantner for an Airplane revival project in the late '80s, unsuccessful since the hippie ideology no longer pulls, it’s only the music that matters now, and they lack it, neither rock nor pop.

Do Starship have the music, though? Well! Eighties pop rock, hedonistic cheer, mandatory and sustained dance quota, the rest... ballads. So, the reason I keep this album is the grand ballad “Sara,” which at the time was perfect, perhaps now dated but still perfect. Thomas sings it excellently, accompanied by an abundance of chime-like electric piano Yamaha Dx7, soft electronic percussions, with the correct eighties touch. There’s nothing wrong with making cheesy stuff, as long as it’s done well. In this album, two-thirds are rubbish, but the rest is okay, with inside a masterpiece (of its kind). Always better than Surrealistic Pillow or Blows Against the Empire.