Songofthedy 9/2/13 - No intentions whatsoever, I was gone for a night nothing's forever the cruel daylight brought me back to my senses...

Jefferson Starship - "No Way Out"
from the album Nuclear Furniture (1984)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #23 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 8

Today's Song of the Day is by the San Francisco rock group Jefferson Starship, who after morphing from their "Airplane" incarnation in the 70s gradually became more pop-inflected. Their 1982 album Winds Of Change scored them two top-40 hits with "Be My Lady" and the title track, but their sound was falling out of place in the land of synth-filled new wave bands coming on the scene. For their next album, Nuclear Furniture, producer Ron Nevison brought in keyboard wiz Peter Wolf (not the J. Geils Band guy) to punch up the backdrop, and ended up writing the first single, "No Way Out" with his wife Ina. To cap it off, they filmed an over-the-top "concept video" featuring the band in some crazy alien confessional castle that must've been conceived under copious amounts of cocaine...

"No Way Out", with its constant MTV play, brought the band back somewhat, and the single topped the rock radio chart for a week, while reaching the top-40 in July of 1984. But the aftermath of this newly-pointed direction sent original Airplane member Paul Kantner packing, and after legal procedings, the "Jefferson" part of the band name as well. After a followup single from this album, "Layin' It On The Line" (a top-10 rock and minor pop hit), the Jefferson Starship would be put in limbo, only to resurface as "Starship" as a pure pop band with a song that would go down as my most hated hit single of all time.

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And here's the band touring behind the record in 1984 with "No Way Out"...


Up tomorrow: the Purple One goes to the birds.