When Grace Departed

Browsing around on YouTube this morning I found footage of Jefferson Airplane at Woodstock in ’69 singing ‘Somebody to Love’ (which isn't in the movie). What a mighty band they were with their powerful, complex, multi-layered songs and Grace, the most devastating frontman (person?) of the era - only the ingrained sexism and lack of imagination of critics and historians makes them say Jagger.   I flipped forward a little over a decade after that, drawn by a masochistic desire to wreck the high Grace's booming voice and startling blue eyes had put me on, and watched ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now’ by their Reaganite incarnation Starship. (Or were they Jefferson Starship? I dunno.) My memory of it turned out to be accurate: they were fucking hideous. Grace is still there out front but all of her charisma, all of the sexual power she had, is gone; and with her hair piled up on her head and a gaudy jacket on she looks like a groupie at an Elvis Presley concert. The rest of the band are dressed equally badly. And who are they?? Not at all the languorously cool, serious musicians of the Woodstock line-up (and if any of them are the same people time has played a cruel game with them). Has Grace just done a mid-period Dylan and hired a bunch of session players who’d do whatever she told them to? Did Grace even have any control over what she was doing then? I’d prefer to believe she didn’t. I’d rather think that the putrid recordings she made in the ‘80s were the result of some kind of terrible contractual impasse. But a lot of previously great artists were seized by madness in those days. It was as if the success of the new conservatism worldwide had convinced them that liberalism and non-corporate progressive rock and roll had disappeared forever, so everybody had to reposition themselves in the new world or starve. Even Bob Dylan had synthesizers on his albums; and he dressed himself up in his videos like an extra from ‘Miami Vice’.