Starship - Greatest Hits: Ten Years and Change, 1979-1991 (1991)

No.

The Jefferson Starship, the seventies offshoot of the original acid-rock band the Jefferson Airplane, was one of the better mainstream bands of that decade, producing competent, listenable hits such as "Miracles" and "Count On Me." But when Marty Balin and Grace Slick left after the group's 1978 album Earth, Paul Kantner, the only original Airplane member still associated with the group, should have taken the hint and disbanded it. But no, he had to carry on, replacing the esteemed Balin with the insufferable Mickey Thomas and persuading Slick (who was not an original Jefferson Airplane member - she replaced Signe Anderson after the Airplane's debut LP) to return a couple of years later. The sound of the Jefferson Starship changed for the worse after Balin was gone, as the group began offering up more wailing guitar solos to match Thomas's high-pitched tenor. When Kantner finally gave up on the band in 1984, the remaining members wanted to continue, but with no remaining link to the original Jefferson Airplane and with Kantner suing over their continued use of any band name involving the use of the third U.S. President's surname, the group simply became Starship.  The inference was that they were now a completely different group from the Jefferson Starship, just as the Jefferson Starship had been a different group from the old Jefferson Airplane.

The 1991 compilation Greatest Hits: Ten Years and Change, 1979-1991 exposes the lie that they were two different bands; with or without Kantner, the music was the same brand of overproduced, excessive pop-rock. The only difference was that overdone guitar solos on the earlier songs were replaced by synthesizers on the later ones. One thing that had not changed was Thomas's voice, which still sounded like the screeching of a feral cat. And Grace Slick, whose voice really did soar like an airplane or a starship in the sixties and seventies, was sounding more and more like a Spirit of St. Louis replica that had trouble getting off the ground.

And what of the songs themselves? Well, if your idea of great rock and roll is bludgeoned AOR fodder like "Find Your Way Back," you clearly need this record. A lot of the songs here are empty power ballads, like 1979's "Jane," which has all the subtlety of Gallagher demolishing a watermelon (and is just as silly), 1985's "Sara," the writing of which (by producer Peter Wolf - not the guy in the J. Geils Band - and his wife Ina) must have relied on a dictionary of clichés, and, of course, their synthesizer-heavy, chart-topping 1987 hit "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now," co-penned by legendary eighties songwriting hack Diane Warren and by Albert Hammond. Hammond, of course, wrote many good songs and a couple of great ones with Lee Hazelwood, eventually branching out to write songs with other partners, but pairing him with a schlockster like Warren suggested the result you'd get from a computer short-circuiting in a matchmaking service. Anyway, "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" was recorded by Starship for the movie Mannequin, which starred Andrew McCarthy and Kim Cattrall - and, no, McCarthy did not play the title role. It seemed appropriate, given the fact that musical mannequins now dominated the Starship lineup. What's annoying about the choices on this greatest-hits record is what isn't here; "Be My Lady," a palatable 1982 single in which Thomas keeps his histrionics in check, is absent from this collection.

The most interesting song here, of course, is the 1985 hit "We Built This City," a song credited to no fewer than four composers - including always-boring pop-rocker Martin Page and Elton John lyricist Bernie Taupin - that inevitably sounds like it was designed by committee. The music is full of throwaway guitar riffs, and the song is filled with random lyrics that make no sense. Easily one of the most annoying songs of all time, and perhaps the worst non-Madonna song of the 1980s, it finds Starship bragging about being a pillar of San Francisco rock (geez, even Greg Kihn was a more credible Frisco rocker by 1985) even as their main concerns seem to be people playing corporation games and counting money underneath bars. Oh yes, and something about Guglielmo Marconi playing with a poisonous snake. It's worth noting that Bernie Taupin was in a creative stupor in the mid-eighties, but here he seems to have reached back to the bag of abstruse phrases he used in writing the words to some of Elton John's earliest songs. Only this time he doesn't have Elton to brighten the music or edit out the more unbearable inanities. But then, without inane lyrics, "We Built This City" would not exist (if only!). Starship increasingly relied on outside professional songwriters after Kantner left, clearly showing that they increasingly had no vision of their own; with outsiders calling the shots, they became more and more like the kind of ready-made pop group that the original Jefferson Airplane was certainly not.

The ten years covered by this album feature songs from six of the seven albums the (Jefferson) Starship issued between 1979 and 1989.  (Grace Slick left Starship for, of all things, a Jefferson Airplane reunion, making it ridiculous for Starship to continue with no Airplane alumni whatsoever in it, but continue they did, with the 1989 LP Love Among the Cannibals.)   The change is a pair of bonus songs, one written by Warren and the other by Page.  Both are forgettable; Warren's song, "Don't Lose Any Sleep," is, naturally, soporific.  (Kantner and Thomas now lead separate "Starship" bands; Slick is retired.)  This greatest-hits album is strictly a marketing tool, but then, so was the band responsible for it.  The Jefferson Airplane and even the early Jefferson Starship were about opening our minds; this music is the product of minds full of bread.