Songoftheday 8/26/14 - Go now don't look back we've drawn the line...

Starship - "Sara"
from the album Knee Deep In The Hoopla (1985)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #1 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 13

Today's Song of the Day is by the band Starship, who were the mutated result from years of member defection from 60s acid-rock giants Jefferson Airplane. Revamped a la Chicago as a pop/adult-contemporary hitmaking machine, with only Grace Slick hanging on from its original incarnation, Starship had already landed a #1 pop hit in America with my least favorite hit record of all time, "We Built This City". The pasteurized cheese of that earworm would make anything else sound like Mozart, so it's no surprise I wasn't turned off too much by its successor, the mid-tempo ballad "Sara". Written by husband-and-wife team of Peter and Ina Wolf (no, the former wasn't the J. Geils Band guy, but rather a producer who did most of the keyboard work with the group's album), "Sara" was a straight-forward made-for-the-workplace-radio track that barely featured any Slick at all. No matter, at least Mickey Thomas was more restrained in his performance, though he was able to turn in an overblown performance in the high-concept video featuring Rebecca DeMornay as a seemingly drugged-up groupie wife compared to Thomas' own mom in the video. Weird...

"Sara" became Starship's second #1 pop hit in a row in the U.S. They also crossed over to the Adult Contemporary (also #1) and Mainstream Rock (#12) radio charts in Billboard magazine. Internationally, the single also topped the singles chart in Canada, and went top-20 in Germany and Ireland, but relatively tanked in Britain, stalling at #66 in that country.

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Here's Starship live on MTV's Spring Break Beach concert...

...and again from the same year from Disneyland...

Up tomorrow: A theme for Choke Canyon.