Starship - Knee Deep in the Hoopla: Album Review

Starship, Knee Deep in the Hoopla (Grunt, 1985)
Here's three interesting things I learned about the group Starship over at the All Music Guide:

1) The band was created by the settlement of a lawsuit.

Starship was the remaining sextet of musicians that, with Paul Kantner, had made up Jefferson Starship until the rhythm guitarist/singer's exit from that band in June 1984. Kantner, a founding member of Jefferson Airplane, the precursor to Jefferson Starship, had also helped found Jefferson Starship in 1974. Ten years later, Kantner decried the band's tilt toward commercial rock and decided that it was time for the group to dissolve. His bandmates disagreed, and Kantner sued over money and the ownership of the band's name in October 1984. The suit was settled in March 1985, resulting in a cash payment to Kantner and the agreement that the name "Jefferson Starship" would be retired, while the band would change its name to simply Starship (with that name owned by singer Grace Slick and manager Bill Thompson).

How 1980s!

2) This album and it's hit single "We Built This City" was produced by a guy named Peter Wolf, who's actually not the lead singer from the J. Geils Band (and one of the all-time great white guy dancers, I might add).

The newly christened band, freed from Kantner's ties to their old sound, quickly entered the studio. The first product of their efforts was "We Built This City," written by Dennis Lambert, Martin Page, Bernie Taupin (Elton John's lyricist), and Peter Wolf (not the former singer of the J. Geils Band), who co-produced the track and played keyboards on it.

Dude, the real Peter Wolf should've fucking sued.

3) That one guy, the male lead singer to this group, Mickey Thomas, was the guy who sang "Fooled Around and Fell in Love" w/ the Elvin Bishop Group.

In 1992, Thomas organized a band that began playing dates billed as "Mickey Thomas' Starship" or "Starship Featuring Mickey Thomas." Although Thomas did not own the right to use the name "Starship," Thompson and Grace Slick, the co-owners of the name, took no action to stop him, and he continued to perform using the name. In 2003, the Brilliant label issued an album credited simply to Starship called Greatest Hits on which a Thomas-led band re-recorded Starship's biggest hits and some songs from Thomas' tenure in Jefferson Starship as well as "Fooled Around and Fell in Love," the hit Thomas sang with the Elvin Bishop Group in 1976.

So in other words, the guy singing "Fooled Around and Fell in Love" is not actually Elvin Bishop. OK, maybe this is common knowledge to people over the age of, I don't know, 40 or so, but it was news to me gotdamnit. OK, on to the album.

WE BUILT THIS CITY

When I picked up the cover to this album, the first, and really pretty much the only thing that came into my mind was this song. I hadn't heard it in ages (unless you count that one time the Dipset sampled it), but I could hear that shit exactly the way it went. So this song is basically the sound of 5 or 6 coke monkies locked in a studio w/ nothing but a bag and a shitty-sounding synthesizer maybe one of them kind of knew how to work. Yeah, it pretty much sounds like the theme song from some long lost TV sitcom, but come on, it's "We Built This City." You can't really front on it.

SARA

Dude, this was probably the theme music to somebody's prom back in '85-86. If so, it must've been one helluva night. I'm feeling this one too, but not in that same mid-'80s novelty sort of way that I like "We Built This City." This one's actually, sort of kind of almost a good song. Mid-'80s love ballads are definitely not my thing, but as far as these kinds of things go, this one has gotta be up there with anything Foreigner put out, although not quite on the same level as the Peter Cetera-led Chicago--the Beatles of mid-'80s love ballads. Also, "Sara" was obviously some kind of code name for the word "coke."

TOMORROW DOESN'T MATTER TONIGHT

Didn't Prince have a song called "Tomorrow Doesn't Matter Tonight?" No, wait, that was "Money Don't Matter Tonight." Oh well, whatever, nevermind. Supposedly this was a single too, but I didn't really recognize it at all. The cheese factor is cranked up yet another notch. Inspirational sounding, this wouldn't have been out of place at all on the soundtrack to Over the Top, if you know what I mean.

ROCK MYSELF TO SLEEP

Ah yes, a topic that I'm sadly more than a little bit familiar with. It's already bad enough when you've pretty much resigned to the fact that your best option at a certain point in the evening is to "rock yourself" to sleep, but the worst part is when I'm attempting to "rock myself" to sleep and I end up falling asleep before I've "rocked myself" to completion. Shit like that never used to happen when I was 15. Maybe I should start doing coke. This song, very angry and arena rock sounding, does a good job at capturing that kind of frustration

DESPERATE HEART

Kind of a generic, mid-'80s sounding song about being, um, desperate or whatever. Not exactly unlike that John Parr "Man in Motion" song from St. Elmo's Fire, but not nearly as good. But w/ a pretty wicked, mid-'80s LA session musician sounding guitar solo right in the middle of it. Bonus!

PRIVATE ROOM

OK, this is bad. I joke a lot, but I think this actually is about getting a lapdance. It sounds like they took pretty much the same bass line from "We Built This City" and tried to make it more tough sounding. In retrospect, probably not the best of ideas.

BEFORE I GO

The most Prince-influenced song on here, this one is thoroughly layered w/ ill-advised synthesizer noises. I like how half the time you can't really tell if it's Mickey Thomas or Grace Slick singing lead.

HEARTS OF THE WORLD (WILL UNDERSTAND)

Oh fuck, this is bad. This might be the most positive thing I've ever heard before in my life. Grace Slick even sorta kinda raps during the bridge. Cocaine is a helluva drug.

LOVE RUSTS

OK, I'm pretty sure this is Mickey Thomas and Grace Slick sharing lead vocals, but where exactly do they switch off? Like that song "These Dreams" by Heart, only more epic and ominous sounding.

So yeah, this isn't exactly a good album. They didn't really make good albums back in the mid-'80s. But it's got "We Built This City" and "Sara" on it, which do have a certain nostalgic value and the other 7 songs are at least good for a laugh, if not much else. If there's one thing that is pretty gay about this album, it's that Starship had this other song in the mid-'80s called "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" (from the soundtrack to the movie Mannequin), which, based on its optimistic-sounding title, you would think would've been merely the latest in a long string of hits, but actually ended up being pretty much their last hit ever, their "Till I Hear It from You," if you will (for all my mid-'90s heads). It's definitely not on here.