No Protection, by Starship

When making No Protection, the band Starship was in a strange place. The first album of this group, the third and final iteration of Jefferson Airplane/Jefferson Starship/Starship, Knee Deep In The Hoopla, had been an immense success, spawning two number one hits. That album, though popular, was not a critical success and the band went on to record its second album with their third #1 hit already baked in, “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” from the Mannequin soundtrack. This album, though, marked a pretty steep commercial decline for the group. If this album wasn’t exactly a trainwreckord, like their next album, it wasn’t nearly as successful as the first album and Grace Slick departed the group after this album, marking a real ending point to any sort of commercial success for the group. Where does this album rank, though, in terms of enjoyable music?

The album begins with “Beat Patrol,” which has a spare introduction and then transitions into a rather basic and nonsensical but upbeat song with odd production that appears to be a sequel to We Built This City proclaiming their desire to dance. This is followed by an obvious standout here, “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” which is a rousing duet between the group’s two lead singers. This is followed by another hit single from the album, “It’s Not Over (‘Til It’s Over),” which is a decent song and nearly hit the top ten that shows a certain defiant attitude that would be belied by the future fate of the group. “Girls Like You” is not a lost Maroon 5 original but is instead a middling rock track of the kind that would have been a Foreigner album track on “Agent Provocateur,” albeit with more interesting instrumental production. “Wings Of A Lie” is a spare but rather touching ballad that finds Thomas singing about the devotion of a partner who puts up with his lack of complete honesty. This could have been a hit. “The Children” has a Harrisonesque Indian intro followed by a reflective mid-tempo that views the hope of society as being in children, a fairly common 80’s musical sentiment. It could have been titled better but this is at least decent as well. “I Don’t Know Why” has a gorgeous and soulful intro with Indian touches leading into a love ballad led by Grace Slick expressing her puzzlement at the effects of love in making her feel like a child again. This is another song that could easily have been a hit ballad. “Transatlantic” follows as a mid-tempo song about trying to send a message across the Atlantic, a sentiment better expressed by ELO in their contemporary song “Calling America.” This is decent album filler, but not more than that. “Say When” is a decent song of love and devotion, this time with a Mickey Thomas lead. It’s about the fifth best love song on the album but that’s still not bad as they are all good. “Babylon” begins with an intro straight out of Law & Order before a somewhat blocky instrumental production before an unnecessarily complicated pre-chorus, chorus, and post-chorus that compare a failing relationship to the biblical fall of Babylon to Persian armies. It’s not a great song by any means but it has to get some points for ambition. The album then closes with the absolutely gorgeous “Set The Night To Music,” a bit rougher than the top 10 version by Roberta Flack and Maxi Priest but still a beautiful song that may be my favorite ever Diane Warren-penned tune (and that is no faint praise). How was this song left until the end as a throwaway sort of bonus track to fill out space?

I listened to this album in full in part to answer the question of why it was that Starship had a song as beautiful as “Set The Night To Music” and didn’t do anything with it, not release it as a stone-cold obvious hit. The album answered that question, but in a way that I didn’t expect, in that the album was split mostly evenly between generally mediocre uptempo songs and good to great love ballads, of which only one was released as a single. Throughout the album there are little jabs (in songs like “Transatlantic”) about the radio being too slow because of playing too many love ballads when almost all of the best songs here are the love ballads. This album is a classic case of a band not realizing what their best material is in and trying to pretend to be a rock act when all of their good material was the slower and softer material. Rather than playing to their strengths and getting what could have been an easy half a dozen ballad hits. Since the band broke apart between this album and the making of the next album (a story best left to Todd In The Shadows), it’s not like the group would have been sacrificing any credibility to have an album cycle full of hits like “Set The Night To Music,” “I Don’t Know Why,” and “Wings Of A Lie,” which would have been a pretty amazing collection of love songs. As it is, this album is a missed opportunity. Starship may have opined that their band had No Protection from critical backlash, but they didn’t do themselves any favors by backloading their album with its most interesting material and leading off and following its two biggest hits with the album’s worst two songs. Bad sequencing and not recognizing the relative strength of one’s material is a sign of serious problems in an album cycle.