Every night when he gets up on stage, David Freiberg looks out into the audience.
He sees a lot of older faces, maybe not as old as his (he’s 86), but folks who look old enough to remember when Freiberg and his Jefferson Starship pop-rock band started from the remnants of their predecessor Jefferson Airplane.
“I’m having more fun than I ever did,” he said during a phone call last week to talk about the band’s Tucson show on Friday, Nov. 29.
The band is on the lineup with The Marshall Tucker Band at Desert Diamond Casino in a sold out show that was initially scheduled for July. That show was postponed when a member of Marshall Tucker came down with COVID, Freiberg said.
Pop-rockers Jefferson Starship — with Cathy Richardson, far left, and founding member David Freiberg, center — share the stage with The Marshall Tucker Band at Desert Diamond Casino on Friday, Nov. 29.
Freiberg credits his enthusiasm to the band, from lead singer Cathy Richardson, who joined in 2008, to longtime drummer Donny Baldwin, who joined in 1982.
“The band is like one unit. We just play together,” Freiberg said. “It’s like I always dreamed a band should be and here it is.”
Freiberg’s dream band comes 50 years after Jefferson Starship launched in 1974. Freiberg was there for the first decade before leaving in 1984; he returned in 2005 to pick up where he left off.
In the years since, Jefferson Starship has released just two new albums: 2008’s “Jefferson’s Tree of Liberty” and the 2020 album “Mother of the Sun.”
Richardson said the band is working on a new album, but it’s been hard since all the members live in different cities. They see each other when they go on tour, like the European tour they finished in October and their weekend runs including Tucson.
“We started this awhile ago, but we got too busy to get into the studio,” Freiberg said. “It got kind of put on the backburner so now we’ve got to get back to it.”
Richardson said she would love for the band to write more songs for the project, which includes a new version of “Have You Seen the Saucers,” written by the band’s late co-founder and leader Paul Kantner.
“I’ve always loved it for being this super dramatic, almost a rock opera kind of song,” Richardson said.
They also wrote a new song with Survivor lead singer Jim Peterik called “No Apologies” and Richardson said she would like them to “write a bunch more.”
“It’s just a matter of getting together, doing the time, getting the studio and actually completing it, which can’t be done when you’re on the road as much as we are and you live in different places,” she said.
Country blues rockers The Marshall Tucker Band is headlining a show at Desert Diamond Casino on Friday; 1980s pop rockers Jefferson Starship are also on the bill.
Richardson discovered Jefferson Starship after hearing Grace Slick on the radio, singing Jefferson Airplane’s song “White Rabbit,” when she was in eighth or ninth grade.
She was mesmerized by Slick’s vocals, which led her to Jefferson Airplane’s wink-wink of a greatest hits album: “The Worst of Jefferson Airplane,” released in 1970 when Richardson wasn’t quite two years old.
She ended up buying every Jefferson Airplane record she could find and then turned her attention to Jefferson Starship, with lead vocalists Mickey Thomas and Slick.
“His voice was just so thrilling for me and as a woman, Grace Slick, everything about her was just thrilling to me,” Richardson said. “It was still such a rare thing to have a woman in a rock band even when I was growing up. She was a hero to me.”
Richardson didn’t have joining Starship on her bingo card, but a year after she signed on to sing with Janis Joplin’s original band Big Brother and the Holding Company when they opened for Starship, she was there.
“I never saw that coming or imagined that happening,” she said. “It just happened. It all kind of makes sense to me now. Everything I did led me right there to this band that I love and this music that I love.”
Freiberg said Friday’s audience can expect to hear plenty of the band’s hits, including “Sara,” “Runaway,” “It’s Not Over (‘Til It’s Over),” “Winds of Change,” “We Built This City” and “Jane,” which Freiberg co-wrote and sings. There are so “damn many songs,” Richardson added, that they can’t get to all of them, but “we’re hoping to make everybody happy.”
“It always seems new with the band we’ve got,” Freiberg said of performing. “Even though we’re singing the same songs we did night after night, something different happens. It always feels good.”
Friday’s show at Desert Diamond, 1100 W. Pima Mine Road, starts at 8 p.m. Details at ddcaz.com.
