Jefferson Starship: Strange Times at the Launching Pad
CYNTHIA BOWMAN is sitting in her office on the second floor of the three-story mansion still known as the “Airplane House,” now home of the Jefferson Starship. “I used to take LSD right over there,” she says, pointing across the street at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, “and come out right there so I could see the Airplane House as I was coming down. 1967. We used to watch for them to come out of the house.”
Cynthia has been the Starship’s national publicity director for two years. Now, in March 1978, she is in the middle of a storm. The Starship has just put out a new album, called Earth. Everyone in the band — and at RCA — senses that this could be the Starship album. They think there are at least three or four singles on Earth. There is, in fact, a lilt to the music, a cohesion to the vocals. And there’s more Marty than ever before … which means, of course, more love songs. Which, if the pattern starting with “Miracles” holds, means more hits. (“Miracles” — Balin’s contribution to Red Octopus — pushed their first album all the way to Number One in 1975.) RCA, not exactly a company of gamblers, is putting more money — possibly as much as $500,000, according to Starship manager Bill Thompson — into Earth than any previous Airplane or Starship record.
The gamble is paying off: a month after its release, Earth is already near a million units sold, and its first single, “Count on Me,” is in the Top Twenty. Now, a six-week tour, the band’s first since late 1976, is under way, and, following three weeks on the East Coast, will take them to Europe for the first time.
But that’s not the storm we’re talking about. These days, that promotion, marketing and merchandising is automatic once you’ve got the product. The storm is the band itself and the press flak that feeds it. Despite their successes, the stories go, the Starship is a band of personal crises, primarily their two lead singers’, Marty Balin and Grace Slick: Balin’s refusal to commit himself fully to the band, his bad-mouthing of Slick and the group, Slick’s alcohol-fueled binges and run-ins with the law.
The critics, meantime, accuse the band of abandoning its radical, political and musical roots. They’re sliding into slickness, they complain, pointing to the strings on recent albums, the dominance of Balin’s love songs and the absence of Kantner’s sci-fi and political voice.
And that’s only what the press knows about. There’s also the audit the band demanded following the relatively disappointing sales of Spitfire, the followup to Red Octopus. There is the tension — and loss of revenue — caused by the band’s being off the road for over a year because Balin doesn’t like road work. There are musical differences that, among other things, upset Balin and further decrease his involvement with the band. There are disagreements about the course the Starship should follow.
With all of this going on, it’s amazing that the group has managed to stay together for four years. And it’s a wonder, come to think of it, that Cynthia Bowman is not back across the street, in Golden Gate Park, eating acid and talking to the trees.