At age 16, Craig Chaquico was living a double life: high school student by day, session guitarist by night. The gifted young Bay Area guitarist had already been playing in a band called Steelwind, led by his English teacher, who introduced him to Jefferson Airplane founder Paul Kantner. Soon, Chaquico was tapped to play on solo albums by Kantner and his Jefferson Airplane partner, singer Grace Slick.
“It was pretty crazy,” Chaquico says. “I was recording songs with Jerry Garcia and some of my Bay Area heroes, but it wasn’t automatic rock-star fame because I’d still have to go home, ride my bicycle to school, and keep my grades up, or else my parents would throw my guitar in the trash.”
Following the Jefferson Airplane’s breakup in 1973, Kantner and Slick formed Jefferson Starship and asked Chaquico to come on board for a six-week tour.
Most parents would have panic attacks at the thought of their young son traveling the country with band members well into their thirties (and some noted partiers at that), but as Chaquico recalls, “My dad was down on it, but my mom figured, ‘It’s just one tour. He’ll go and get it out of his system. He’s got a good head on his shoulders. He’s not going to turn into a drug addict.’”
While the last part of his mother’s prediction held true, Chaquico didn’t stay for just one tour. Instead, he joined the new band as an official member.
The guitarist contributed ripping solos on the group’s 1974 debut, Dragon Fly, which included Kantner’s rocking single, Ride the Tiger, and a year later, on Red Octopus, he proved to be an indispensable songwriting collaborator on songs like Fast Buck Freddie and Sweeter Than Honey.
Former Airplane co-vocalist Marty Balin had by now joined the group, and it was his hypnotic ballad Miracles (which featured Chaquico’s tasteful soloing) that boosted the album to Number 1 on the Billboard charts.
For Chaquico and Jefferson Starship, the hits kept coming, mostly thanks to Balin-sung ballads like With Your Love and Runaway, but in 1979 the band reconfigured themselves (Balin and Slick were out, singer Mickey Thomas was in) as a hard-rock powerhouse. Their 1979 outing, Freedom at Point Zero, included the radio staple Jane, on which Chaquico broke out an epic, paint-peeling solo.
The guitarist stayed with the group for the next decade, which saw more membership changes (Slick rejoined, Kantner split) and musical shifts (outside pop writers and synths were in, big guitar solos were out), and by the time they released 1984’s Knee Deep in the Hoopla, they were known as simply Starship.
Critics slammed Starship as “corporate rock,” but record buyers couldn’t get enough of anthemic singles like We Built This City and Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now. For Chaquico, the end came after Slick bolted again and the band’s 1989 album, Love Among the Cannibals, stalled on the charts.
“Everybody else had already left or been let go,” the guitarist says. “Now it was just me and Mickey. It was a turning point for me because I’d been on every song. We had just come off three Number 1 keyboard songs that featured Mickey in all the videos. There was this change of approach where it was just going to be about Mickey. I thought, ‘Well, hey, that’s the way it goes.’”
Let’s go back to you teaming up with Paul Kantner and Grace Slick for this new group. Were you immediately gung-ho, or did you have some reservations?
Well, I was thinking of waiting until Led Zeppelin asked me, but that never happened. [Laughs] No, it was immediate – I definitely wanted to do it, especially with the sense that it was a new band and we weren’t going to be playing Jefferson Airplane songs for 50 years. We were going to write our own stuff.
It is rather stunning that your parents let you join a band featuring people much older than you.
No more than the parents of other young guitar players who were in bands with older people. The idea of playing with older musicians appealed to me because I figured they had more experience.
Other members of the band had been around a little longer, and I think they looked forward to adding a bit of a newer influence to what I thought was already a great band. By the time I was asked to join the band – or form the band, as I was a founding member – it didn’t feel like the age difference was a problem.
Our manager was really down on it. He actually came in with a freaking stopwatch and timed it, and then he said, ‘You’ve got to cut that solo down. It’s just way too long’
Did Paul Kantner ever verbalize to you that he was looking to add a youthful vibe to the band?
He never said it, no. We all got along great. I felt like the band were sort of the antithesis of rock stars. They all felt really down-home, like Northern California hippies I would hang out with if I knew them.
Ego-wise, Paul was cool with this young kid taking on the role as lead guitarist?
Who else was going to do it? Paul wasn’t a lead guitar player. That’s why they hired me. I ended up playing a lot of the rhythm parts, too. Paul still played a lot of acoustic rhythms and stuff – it was a great combination. I felt like there was a natural chemistry when we played together. On Sweeter Than Honey, which I wrote with Marty Balin, Paul and I both played rhythm in a complementary way; we’re not playing the same thing.
![Starship - We Built This City (Official Music Video) [HD] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/K1b8AhIsSYQ/maxresdefault.jpg)
Miracles is epochal, iconic… How was the song presented to the band?
I vividly remember Marty bringing in Miracles. He came in and sat on the couch while the rest of us were all standing around, and we were looking down at this amazing singer-songwriter very humbly playing Miracles on his acoustic guitar from start to finish – a seven-minute song!
We all started looking at each other like, “Has anybody ever heard anything like that?” We rehearsed it with him, and everybody just kind of played what they wanted. There was no arrangement.
Your playing on the track is gorgeous; each phrase says something. Marty gave you no direction at all?
No. That’s always blown my mind about Marty. He always let me do my thing. On Miracles, we went in and recorded the basic track together. I played lead parts from start to finish. We did several takes, all of it played nonstop for seven minutes. When we got a basic track and listened back, it was still pretty raw.
There was my lead guitar throughout the song, and I remember saying I wanted to do it over – it was kind of bare bones. I was kind of doing that same approach as Marty, where he would sing a line and I’d try to do a guitar line to sort of match that imagery. His imagery was amazing – windmills and rainbows. I was trying to do these musical sketches. I wanted to do it over, but I never did.
Did you play a Les Paul on that?
It had to be a Les Paul through a Fender Bassman.
You guys started rocking harder when Grace and Marty left the band and Mickey Thomas came in. That’s also when critics lumped you in with “corporate rock” bands like Boston and Foreigner.
We were using outside songwriters when Marty was in the band, but it wasn’t corporate rock. It was more for ballads like Runaway and Count on Me. We were still all rehearsing songs and writing together. When we did Freedom at Point Zero, that to me was where we started stepping into the more contemporary rock vibe, which I was totally fine with.
I mean, I loved Aerosmith, and I liked Boston, Foreigner, and Bad Company. I liked Free. I thought all of that was great. So when we did Jane and Find Your Way Back and songs like that, I didn’t resent people calling that part corporate. We were playing stadiums. We were evolving with the times. Being a guitar player, I liked those songs that featured more guitar.
Your solo on Jane is pretty seismic. There was an issue because of its length, right?
Our manager was really down on it. He actually came in with a freaking stopwatch and timed it, and then he said, “You’ve got to cut that solo down. It’s just way too long.”
There was kind of a stand-off, but when the voting took place, the majority ruled. Our producer threw his two cents in and said, “Keep the solo.” Now, every time I hear it on the radio, I go, “Right on!”
I’m glad we kept that solo because our manager was saying It’s never going to get played on the radio. I remember the guys in Metallica came up to me at an awards show in the Bay Area. They were like, “When we were in high school, we really loved that guitar solo, because at that time nobody was playing long guitar solos.”
OK, we come to We Built This City…
It’s not a beautiful song, but at the time it was cutting edge. Look, I was just one guy in the band. I wasn’t going to tell everybody, “We’ve got to do it this way. We’re never going to do keyboard songs.”
I remember I had a meeting with [A&R executive] John Koladner – he was a fan of mine. He said, “I think that song’s a hit, but be careful. A song like that could ruin your rock credibility.” Truer words were never spoken.
Look, I was just one guy in the band. I wasn’t going to tell everybody, ‘We’ve got to do it this way. We’re never going to do keyboard songs’
You’ve pursued a solo career in jazz and New Age since leaving the band.
I’m still playing. I’ve got my own studio and I’m writing. I don’t have any tours or anything at the moment. My touring was mostly the instrumental stuff, but I’d like to get back and play all those hits I wrote and played on. What’s ironic is, nobody was supposed to use the name, but now there are two bands using the name [Jefferson Starship and Starship featuring Mickey Thomas].
You should get out there and play those songs.
Does that make sense? I actually had somebody tell me, “Why should we hire you when we can hire the real thing?” And I went, “The real thing?” My idea was to get the real thing. I actually approached everybody – this was when Paul and Marty were still alive – and said, “Why don’t we do what we did? People want to hear those songs.”
Nobody said no, but I guess they started thinking about it. When [singer] David Freiberg heard Marty was going to be in the band, he told me, “I’m already singing a bunch of Marty’s songs, and I kind of like the band I’m in with [singer] Cathy Richardson, so I don’t want to do it. I want to do my own Jefferson Starship.”
Grace licensed the name to them. Mickey never got back to us. Everybody else was up for it. But without the support of the guys using the name… what, are we gonna have three Jefferson Starships?
- This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.
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