Jefferson Starship landed in Iowa City’s Englert Theater on Sunday the 21st of September for a spectacular show. The crowd was full of old boomers who listened to this music in their glory days, and then there was me and my fiancee Izzy, twenty-one and ready to be enchanted by a band we love. Where they were reliving, we were just living. As the show began, the projector took us through time, introducing the band’s long history and members that shaped their legacy, with pictures and videos eliciting our minds’ imagination to the past lives of the other 99% of the room. It. Was. AWESOME.
As the sequence ended, the band hopped up and got straight to groovin’ Find Your Way Back, a perfect song to reel us in. Though we’d never heard Jefferson Starship live before, we felt that the band was waiting all along for us to find them. Album by album they went, rapping off their best songs while recollecting stories of old that our souls had somehow always known. Cathy Richardson, their current lead female vocalist, had this great story about how David Freiberg, the last founding member still playing, had the opportunity to join The Grateful Dead before they went off to play live at Egypt in 1978.
It’s not often you go to a concert and get to hear the band play your favorite song, and it’s almost impossible to go to a concert and hear every and only your favorite songs for the entire set. But that’s what happened. I felt bad that the congregation of old-heads weren’t standing up and dancing, because I know I would if I got to hear my favorite band from fifty years ago play live. But I know it was enjoyed by all. Between clapping beats, standing ovations, and hoots’n’hollers, I could feel the love shine through.
Jude Gold absolutely crushed some guitar solos, holding back nothing. Danny Baldwin kept the beat alive and got to sing a few. David Freiberg looked like the happiest man alive, I swear he didn’t stop smiling for a second up on stage. Chris Smith was doing so much work on the keyboard I’m surprised his hands didn’t catch on fire. Best of all was Cathy Richardson, enveloping herself in the mantle of Grace Slick and evolving from it, belting out vocals like it was still the 70s. Once they started playing Jane I knew I couldn’t resist getting up and dancing. Izzy and I were the only ones dancing for the whole song, and Cathy caught on about halfway through. She stepped to the left side of the stage near our seats, singing and strumming, as we were in the heat of a crazed whirl, when she jutted out her pointer finger right at us. In that moment, she was singing for us, and we were dancing for her, and it was like magic. No concert have I ever been to has elicited such a magical feeling in me.
Jefferson Starship ended with an encore of Volunteers, which really got everyone up and going, feeling patriotic and inspired to make our country a better place. And like that, after just an hour and a half, they were gone. They got up, played their best songs, gave me a memory I’ll never forget, and moved on to do it again in St. Charles, Illinois the next Friday. Funny how quickly the best times move by in a flash.
Thank you, Jefferson Starship, for keeping the spirit of rock’n’roll alive.