Starship beams down Knee Deep in the Hoopla on September 12, 1985


Ah, September 12, 1985—a date that hangs in the air like the afterburn of a rocket launch, all fire and fury and that peculiar American dream of reinvention. There they were, the remnants of Jefferson Starship, those wild-eyed prophets of the Summer of Love, shedding their psychedelic wings like so much tie-dye confetti and reemerging as Starship. Not just any starship, mind you, but a sleek, chrome-plated vessel hurtling straight into the heart of the Reagan Revolution's pop cosmos. And on this crisp autumn day, they unleashed Knee Deep in the Hoopla upon an unsuspecting world, a sonic declaration that the hippies had traded their beads for synthesizers, their protests for platinum records, and their free love for the cold, hard calculus of the charts.

The whole affair, it must be said, was a marvel of the new, late-20th-century American science of marketing. Could these really be the 80s descendants of Jefferson Airplane, a crew of grizzled veterans who had, in a previous lifetime, chanted about acid and revolution, a band that had once been the very soul of the counterculture? Yes, and now, they were STARSHIP! All slicked-up and blow-dried, with their hair-sprayed manes and synth-pop sheen, they had been transformed into the purest embodiment of Reagan-era consumerism!

And with it came the SINGLE! The very anthem of this brave new, blow-dried world! The song, written by the immortal Bernie Taupin, of all people, was called "We Built This City"! But what city did they build? This city was built on a foundation of pure, unadulterated CASH! A monument to pure, white-hot, synth-driven FM RADIO, designed to be piped, inoffensive and shimmering, through the speakers of every suburban shopping mall from coast to coast!

And the people ate it up! Of course they did! It was the zeitgeist! The whole country was gorging itself on SUCCESS! And what better soundtrack for this great, joyous, national ORGY OF SUCCESS than Knee Deep in the Hoopla?! 

They'd jettisoned the old guard—Paul Kantner, that brooding revolutionary, shown the AIRLOCK after some backstage supernova of egos—and what remained was a quintet lean and mean. There was Mickey Thomas, with that Voice of his, a voice that could scale glass walls, a voice established with Steve Perry's as one of the top two in rock history. And Grace Slick, the QUEEN of the Acid Rock, the high priestess of the counterculture, now, in her forties, adding her own voice to this saccharine confection. Guitar hero Craig Chaquico wove post-Van Halen shred and melody in and around the electronic sheen of Peter Wolf's production. That production kept the bass lines of Pete Sears a prominent and audible sonic element, and lent the heft to the drum tracks of Donny Baldwin required to ensure they wouldn't be mistaken for a robot machine. 

It was a WONDER! A monument to the American capacity for FORGETTING! For reinvention! In the grand American pageant, Knee Deep in the Hoopla was more than an album; it was a metamorphosis, the butterfly emerging from the Airplane's cocoon into the blinding lights of superstardom. Here was the '60s dream, polished and repackaged for the '80s hustle—a band that once railed against the machine now riding its waves, knee-deep in the very hoopla they'd once decried. 

In an era of Rubik's Cubes and Reaganomics, where the dream of another American utopia went, as they once tentatively titled it, BERSERK, this album was the sound of compromise triumphant, of rock stars trading tie-dye for tuxedos, folk anthems for factory-forged hits. It sold millions—yes, millions!—certified platinum before the year was out, turning has-beens into headliners once more.

On September 12, 1985, as the needle dropped on turntables across the land, Starship didn't just release an album—they ignited a revolution in pastel. Somewhere in hyperspace, they delivered one of the greatest albums the 80s would gift us with. Compare it to the rank debris emanating from the FM radio spectrum of today, and WEEP, my friends!

Location: San Francisco, CA, USA

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