Jefferson Starship: 'I’m always looking forward to another show'
The seasoned American rock band are about to pay their first visit to the UK in ten years.
“When I stop to think about it, it blows my mind a little bit,” David Freiberg admits. The Jefferson Starship frontman looks almost as surprised to hear his own words as he says them, as he considers the length and breadth of his career. “I try not to stop and think about it,” he continues, before a rueful smile quirks his lips. “I’d rather just be out there doing it, because that seems to be what keeps me alive.”
Eighty-seven years young, the Massachusetts-born musician has enjoyed several musical lives over the course of a career that began before man set foot on the moon, and now finds itself stretched into a staggering seventh decade. The star is headed back to British shores this month with his band for the first time in a decade, supporting Foreigner at a pair of major arena shows – but that’s no reason for him to necessarily take stock of the olden days.
“I’m always looking forward to another show!” he laughs down the line from his home studio back in the United States. “Especially as we haven’t been over there in so long. It will be nice with Foreigner. I know we did some shows with some version at one point. But this one seems to be really good!”
Freiberg is no stranger to the merry-go-round of band line-ups. A folk singer-songwriter before he was inspired by The Beatles and their movie misadventures in A Hard Day’s Night to change tack, he springboarded from Quicksilver Messenger Service to Jefferson Airplane, then survived the latter’s disintegration and quasi-reformation into Jefferson Starship alongside Paul Kantner and Grace Slick.
Save for Donny Baldwin, who drummed with the band as it transitioned to Starship in the mid-Eighties, Freiberg is the only one left now. Kantner’s death in 2016 left him at the helm of a band whose identity had metamorphosed through so many iterations and genres that it presented a problem over how to present the scope of their catalogue.
Except, for the multi-instrumentalist, it never was. Freiberg may have cut loose before Starship enjoyed radio-rock success of the highest order, but he holds nothing against those songs. “People want to hear them,” he says. “I mean, when the band went that way, it was all outside hit songwriters, corporate rock. It wasn’t my idea of what to do, and it wasn’t Paul’s either. But people want to hear those songs! It’s been going on so long with the Jeffersons and the Starships and the Airplanes that your audience gets confused.”
He smiles. “What if Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now was somebody’s wedding song, and we’re not going to play it? They’re good songs and they’re fun to sing. I liked We Built This City when I first heard it. Sara was wonderful. I really enjoy singing every single one of them, even if I wasn’t on the record.”
Freiberg spent twenty-odd years out of the picture before Kantner recalled him to Jefferson Starship in the mid-noughties. His death still clearly affects him - but as he points out, the current iteration of the band is far longer-lived than any prior version, and with a sense of familial unity he has always craved too.
“In the back of my mind, I’ve always been chasing The Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night,” he confesses. “All of a sudden, it seems that I am. The people in the band, everybody is completely into what we’re doing. We fit together, we get along. We go for breakfast when we’re on the road. Nobody’s off doing their own thing.”
He gives another gentle smile. “We aren’t trying to play exactly like the record. We try to make the song fit what’s happening now. But I’m pretty sure nobody mistakes them for anything else. We knew we had to keep playing to keep this music alive. Everybody feels the same way. It’s been really cool.”
Jefferson Starship play at AO Arena, Manchester on June 18th with Foreigner. https://www.jeffersonstarship.com/