This Week in 1973, Jefferson Airplane Was Banned From Performing in San Francisco, Leading To Divisive Hit “We Built This City”

Long before Starship would release “We Built This City,” Jefferson Airplane had plans to perform a free concert at Golden Gate Park in their native San Francisco when the city informed them of a ban on electrical instruments within the confines of the park. According to rock ‘n’ roll legend, city officials told the psychedelic rock band that San Francisco was “built on orchestral music.”

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Just over a decade later, a new evolution of what was once Jefferson Airplane, known as Starship, released a song that refuted the idea that orchestral music built the Golden City.

The Banned San Francisco Performance Of 1973

Jefferson Airplane was a leading figure of the psychedelic rock movement on the West Coast in the late 1960s. Their native San Francisco was the cultural center point of the Summer of Love in 1967, and the psychedelic rock band helped provide the soundtrack with cuts like “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love.” Several years later, in May 1973, the band wanted to give back to the hometown that helped make them famous by offering a free concert in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

While that might have been a dream for rock lovers at the time, it was a logistical nightmare for the park. The city had already passed an ordinance banning the use of electrical amplification in the park—something still in effect today, with exceptions for shows put on in collaboration with a local production company sanctioned by the park. But back in the early 1970s, the only option was not to have the concert at all. According to rock legend, an anonymous city official told the band that orchestral music had built San Francisco.

Accounts vary as to whether this interaction ever took place or whether it was a clever marketing tactic for Starship, a later iteration of Jefferson Airplane, to promote their 1985 track, “We Built This City.” From the song’s very first lines, the band refutes the idea that orchestral music built the Golden City, stating, We built this city on rock and roll.

A New Version Of Jefferson Airplane’s Divisive Hit

Shortly after San Francisco officials banned Jefferson Airplane from performing for free at Golden Gate Park and in an unrelated turn of events, the psychedelic rock band renamed themselves to Jefferson Starship in 1974. From there, the band evolved once more to Starship, the group that released the song allegedly inspired by the incidents in California a little over a decade earlier. “We Built This City” was the lead single off the new band’s debut album, Knee Deep in the Hoopla.

While “We Built This City” is an iconic track from the 1980s, it’s also quite a divisive song. Even some of Starship’s members, notably vocalist Grace Slick, have expressed their disdain for the song. During a 2012 interview with Vanity Fair, she called the track “the worst song ever” and said she only sang to appease her bandmates. GQ writer Rob Tannenbaum seemed to agree, calling the song “the worst of all time” and comparing it to a “barnacle made of synthesizers and cocaine” in 2016.

Bernie Taupin, who co-wrote the song with Martin Page, defended the song slightly in a Rolling Stone interview, if only for the financial stability it provided the writers. Interestingly, he described the original version of “We Built This City” as a “very dark kind of mid-tempo song. It was a very dark song about how club life in L.A. was being killed off. All the acts had no place to go.”

While the idea of every club in Los Angeles shutting down is a bit of an imaginative stretch, at the very least, we know those amplified artists weren’t going to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

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