Earworms: Miracles by Jefferson Starship
Risking all my accumulated Rock Critic Credibility because I love this song
Certain songs take hold in my head, sometimes old, sometimes new, for reasons which may or may not be obvious. So, I’ll write stuff about them.
I get it, haters. Six years before this, the three principal songwriter/singers of the Starship were in the Airplane, shouting “Up against the wall motherfuckers” and “Start the Revolution” on the Volunteers album. They’d been feeding their heads for a few years and seemed the epitome of the counter culture. So, what were they doing on this slick as nails love ballad?
Well, times change, and people do, too. Marty Balin had left the Airplane, leaving Grace Slick and Paul Kantner to fly in different directions. Eventually, the band was gone, and Kantner did a solo project that he called Jefferson Starship as a nod to his past. Slick was aboard, of course, and he roped Balin in to sing one song. Suddenly, they were a band again, playing in a harder rock style.
But Balin was always a crooner at heart, and he came up with this song that has always reminded me a bit of Smokey Robinson,, who had his own Miracles. oSmehow the song it most recalls for me is “Being With You,” which didn’t even come out until six years after “Miracles.” The one thing that Balin, Kantner, and Slick always had was a willingness to try anything. So, they went into the studio and just loaded up the tracks for this song until they had created a powerful, swirling, passionate, intense recording that might as well be the dictionary definition of the intoxicating fever of love.
Or is it? I mean, there are those two words, “if only,” that keep appearing over and over in this song. “If only you believed in miracles, so would I.” “If only you believe like I believe, we’d get by.” And don’t forget these lines – “I picked up your vibes you know (I’m having a fine time)/ It opened my mind but I’m still dreaming / And you’re right where I found you / With my arms around you.” As Queen would ask that same year of 1975, “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?” Comments on the youTube video would indicate that most people who loved this song took it as a declaration of commitment. It was quite ubiquitous at weddings for a while there, and stories of people dying with this as their last song wish are touching in the extreme.
The song itself sounds like there’s no question about believing. David Frieberg on bass and John Barbata on drums drop a tight but gentle r&b groove below softly swirling strings, organ and piano (presumably also played by Frieberg), Kantner’s snappling rhythm guitar, Craig Chaquico’s most tasteful guitar part ever, and then the vocals. (I don’t hear any fiddle by Papa John Creach on this cut, which surprises me a little.) Balin is in complete control of his voice here, and Slick and Kantner egg him on by either responding to or finishing his sentences, or sometimes offering their own view before he’s done. These three used to fly all over the place around each other in the glory days of the Airplane, but here, they are in lock step. Balin jumps off the others plenty of times, but it’s always knowing they are there to allow him to land safely.
I love the way Balin slides out of the chorus right into the next verse, setting up our expectations until subverting them with the uber-seventies saxophone solo (played by Irv Cox, whose other Discogs credits include multiple Louis Jordan cuts from decades earlier) coming out of Balin’s soaring climbing notes on the word “I.” It gets me every time I hear this, from the first time back when I was 16 until this last time just shy of being 64. It’s a master class in conveying powerful, conflicting emotions – real love mixed with the wish for love, or dreams mixed with memory mixed with right now. If only you believed in miracles, so would I.
Wow. I’ve had this song stuck in my head for a month now, which came out nearly two years before my birth. My parents weren’t fans as far as I know.
But for the reasons you stated, this song sums up so much for me. It’s the conflicting emotions, like you said, but I wouldn’t have been able to correlate that without you, so thanks.
It embodies wanderlust and longing as well.
Listening to it again now with my more ‘seasoned’ tastes it still sounds pretty good. Never got much of a handle on the lyrics, then or now, but the memorable selling point of the song for me remains the back and forth vocals between Balin and Slick. Closest they ever came to recreating their best collaborative work of the 1960s Airplane.
Digging up some of the older, more contemporary, reviews, I see the 1983 edition of the New Rolling Stone Record Guide called Red Octopus one of the best albums of 1975 AND ‘proof positive that rock musicians can age gracefully.’ However, the revised 2004 edition of the guide says “with Marty Balin's 'Miracles,' Octopus′s massive hit, the band began shifting toward schmaltz. Balin now sounded like a lounge singer ...." Christgau’s Consumer Guide, meanwhile, has high praises for the quality of Balin’s voice but felt the lyrics of Miracles showed the singer was nevertheless a ‘mushbrain’.
I do hear some strings on the single, near the opening, but they don’t sound like what we’d expect from Papa John Creech. His electric violin is in the recording’s credits, so maybe he was just in there to get things started?