Most people older than 35 know the songs “Jane,” “Find Your Way Back” and “No Way Out,” “Layin’ It On The Line,” “We Built This City, “Sarah,” and “Nothing’s Going To Stop Us.”
Those are top hits from the group Starship, with lead singer Mickey Thomas.
Starship, featuring Mickey Thomas will be performing at Ho-Chunk Gaming – Black River Falls at 6 and 9 p.m. on April 23. Tickets are $35 each and are still available by calling (800) 657-4621 Ext. 4060.
Thomas is the lead singer for the group and he got his start in music when he was just 16.
He got that inspiration to become involved in music after attending a Beatles concert in 1965 in Atlanta with his friends, Charles Connell and Tommy Verran.
“I loved and I was a huge Beatles fan, like most kids of my generation, but once I actually went to the concert and experienced that, and saw all the excitement that was going on, and the girls screaming and everything else. My best friends and I were looking at each other and saying, ‘Wow. We got to try this.’
“So, we went home and the next week we started our own band. We got out the Beatles records and got some cheap guitars tried to pick out some cords and learn some Beatles songs. That’s how it all got started,” Thomas said.
He started out playing guitar and singing.
“I still strum the chords. But I learned early that my future was going to be in singing, rather than in playing the guitar,” he said.
For a brief time, he was the vocalist for the “Lords of London,” a garage band from Douglas, Georgia. He then became involved with a group called the “Jets.”
In 1974, while he was still with the “Jets,” he joined the Elvin Bishop Group as a backup vocalist. Gradually, he made it to lead singer and made a huge smash hit with “I Fooled Around and Fell in Love” in 1976.
“That was our first big break. I was lucky enough to be the vocalist for that and it opened a lot of other doors for me – like getting into the Jefferson Starship group,” he said.
Jefferson Airplane was the original band, a famous group in the 1960s, which spilt up in the 1970s. Half the guys went to another band and the other half formed Jefferson Starship.
Grace Slick was originally with Jefferson Starship, but she had quit just before Thomas joined in 1979.
 “This was the main reason I got an opportunity to get into the band in the first place, because Grace Slick and Marty Balin had left the band and they needed a singer. They were based in San Francisco and I lived in San Francisco and they found out about me and I went and met the guys. We started jamming out a bit and hanging out and then I kind of just segued into the band,” he said.
“And after I had been in the band for a couple of years, Grace Slick came down while we were recording the second album and started hanging out at the studio. She saw how much fun we were having and how much the band had changed in a positive way, so she asked if we needed a female background vocalist. So she rejoined the band. And then we went on and recorded and toured together all through the 80s.”
Starship was nominated for a lot of Grammy awards, but unfortunately the group didn’t win any of them, he said.
“We were nominated and we did perform at the Grammys,” Thomas said. “This was a real treat and one of the highlights of my career was performing live at the Grammys. We were also performing live at the Academy Awards in 1988.”
Thomas has a busy schedule these days, performing at about 75 shows a year across the nation.
“So, I am touring quite a bit, staying busy, touring with the Starship, and then I do a few other things on the side,” he said. “I have had a few blues projects that I’ve been involved in. I’ve been getting ready to do some new recordings for a new blues project. I’m keeping pretty busy.”
He’s also opening new restaurants, named Bowl of Heaven, in the Palm Springs area, where he lives.
Their newest album, “Loveless Fascination,” came out a couple years ago. They plan to perform a couple songs from that album at the Black River Falls concert, but a large part of the show will be all the hits from over the last 25 to 30 years.
They plan to perform their biggest hits, “Jane,” “Find Your Way Back” and “No Way Out,” “Layin’ It On The Line,” “We Built This City, “Sarah,” and “Nothing’s Going To Stop Us.”
“But I do perform ‘I Fooled Around And Fell In Love’ every night from my Elvin Bishop days because it’s a real nice change pace in the show and people like to hear it,” Thomas said. “And, even to this day, whenever we do it live, we get some looks on the faces in audience like, ‘Woah, I didn’t know he did that song.’ It’s always a treat.”
Also, they play through the entire history of the band, so they cover all the bases during the show, he said.
His two favorite songs are “We Built This City” and “Jane.”
“’We Built This City’ was our first number one single ever and, not just with the single but with the album, ‘Knee Deep in the Hoopla,’ we had just reinvented the band, so we just kind of shook it all up and we decided to take a big risk and a big chance and hope, in reinventing the band, that’s it’s going to work,” he said.
“And so, when ‘We Built This City’ came out, and because it was our first number one single, it validated all the changes that we had taken on and all the risk that we were taking with that album,” Thomas said. “We said, ‘Oh wow, it all worked out. It paid off.’ So that was very fulfilling.”
Jane was the first song that they recorded, and it was the first single from the first album of Jefferson Starship and everything was a big hit, he said.
“So, Jane is very special to me as well,” Thomas said.
He has a very busy schedule and a lot on his plate, so to speak, so during his time off, he loves to cook.
“That’s probably what I spend a lot of time doing when I’m not on the road,” Thomas said. “I have to eat in restaurants and on the go so much, so that when I’m home, my favorite thing is to get in the kitchen, open a good bottle of wine and to cook up a great meal. My wife and I love to spend time in the kitchen.
“We say, ‘Okay what’s for dinner tonight?’” he said. “Dinner for us, when I’m home, is kind of an event for us every night, where we always plan it out and it’s kind of like the highlight of the day.”