What city are they talking about in We Built This City?

Songfacts®:

• This song came from an assemblage of top-tier songwriting and production talent. Elton John's songwriting partner Bernie Taupin wrote the lyrics, which he gave to Martin Page, who put music to the words and made a demo. Page, who later had a hit with "In the House of Stone and Light," garnered attention after the Los Angeles radio station KROQ started playing "Dancing In Heaven (Orbital Be-Bop)" by Martin's group Q-Feel. Taupin, who needed someone other than Elton John to write music for this lyric, asked Martin to do it.

  Once the demo was made, Starship's producers Dennis Lambert and Peter Wolf (not the J. Geils frontman) decided to record the song with the group on the condition that they make some changes. The most significant alterations were more repetitions of the chorus and the addition of the DJ/announcer who placed the song in San Francisco ("Looking out over that Golden Gate bridge..."), where the band formed in the '60s as Jefferson Airplane, becoming key contributors to the vibrant and eclectic music scene there. This provided a handy backstory for the band, who when asked about the song would sometimes say that it was based on an incident in 1977 when Jefferson Airplane was not allowed to play a free concert in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park (a more compelling answer than "our producers picked the song from some demos").

  As part of the arrangement, Lambert and Wolf received composer credits on the song along with Taupin and Page. Even though they had to share their writers credits, both Taupin and Page have said that while the changes veered the song away from their original vision, Lambert and Wolf gave it tremendous popular appeal, and they appreciate the hit. "It will probably help send my children to college," Taupin said. Page added, "It was very wise, because I know they wanted to have a hit. Our thing is a little bit more esoteric."

• By opening this song with Grace Slick and Mickey Thomas singing the chorus together, Starship's producers used those two powerful voices (check out Thomas on the song "Fooled Around And Fell In Love") to create an immediate impression. Few bands have the vocal talent to pull this off, but by getting the chorus (with the title) up front, it allowed for more repetitions, which is a key component when structuring a hit song.

• The disc jockey interlude was not part of the original demo. In that spot, the song's co-writer Martin Page had put a police report broadcasting news of a riot in Los Angeles - something that came on when he turned on the radio looking for something to fill that part of the song.

  The police report made the song far more ominous and stuck to the original vision as written by Bernie Taupin. Starship's producers replaced this part with a sunny announcer taking about "another gorgeous sunny Saturday" and delivering standard DJ patter ("the city that rocks, the city that never sleeps!"), changing the complexion of the song.

  The DJ on the song is Les Garland, who was an executive at MTV at the time - a good guy to know if you want your video played. Garland not only put the video in hot rotation on MTV, he gave Grace Slick and Paul Kantner's daughter China Kantner a gig on the network, making her the youngest VJ they ever had. Slick and Kantner were early members of Jefferson Starship, and Slick was still with the band when they recorded this song.

• This was the first single released under the name Starship. The band formed as Jefferson Airplane, releasing their first album in 1966. After going through some personnel changes in the early '70s, they began recording as Jefferson Starship. When Paul Kantner left the group in 1984, legal entanglements led to the band dropping the "Jefferson," and moving forward with Grace Slick as the only original member.

  Considering the shift in band dynamics, the line in this song, "Say ya don't know me, or recognize my face" was quite appropriate.

• The song changed drastically from its original demo, which Martin Page composed using Bernie Taupin's lyrics. The song was a cry of rebellion against a corporation trying to ban rock and roll in an imaginary future, but by the time Starship was done with it, it sounded more like a celebration of rock music in San Francisco, although a keen listen to the lyrics does reveal its distrust.

  Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2013, Taupin said: "It was a very dark song about how club life in LA was being killed off and live acts had no place to go. It was a very specific thing. If you heard the original demo, you wouldn't even recognize the song."

  When we spoke with Martin Page in 2014, he explained: "To me, 'We Built This City' is live music's been pulled away from the streets of LA. We want to get back to rock and roll and play it live. When I wrote it, it still had that feeling to me like something's wrong here. The corporations had taken away great live music. We're being stamped on, the rock was being stamped on.

  The line, 'we just lost the beat' reiterated to me the wrecking ball. It's knocking down live music, it's being tramped on by corporations and commerciality.

  So it's an interesting thing. The song is such a commercial song and was made that way, and takes a lot of stick. But if you look at the lyrics deeply - and one day people will take it and listen to the demo we did - it has an ominous feel about it. As Bernie says, the song was jury-rigged to make the chorus come home, which I think was a very, very wise decision by the producers. I agree with what Peter Wolf did. He was a very good supporter of my music, and I think they really made 'We Built This City' a hit.

  But if you stop and listen to the lyrics and the verses, you're not listening to 'Mama Weer All Crazee Now' by Slade. We're listening to something that is quite sophisticated and oriented towards keeping back some of the dark side of corporations. So it's very interesting that if you look deeper into that song, you'll see a that there's a darker strain going through it."

• When Bernie Taupin asked Martin Page to write the music for this song, he supplied him with anther lyric as well. That one turned out to be "These Dreams," which went to Heart and also became a #1 hit. Page had more success a few years later when he co-wrote Go West's hits "King of Wishful Thinking" and "Faithful."

• In 2004, Blender magazine named this the worst song of all time, saying it is "a real reflection of what practically killed rock music in the '80s," and lamenting "the sheer dumbness of the lyrics." The article got of lot of attention when it was touted in USA Today.

  Much of this vitriol can be attributed to the transformation of the band, which delivered socially relevant protest songs in the '60s and was a voice of the antiwar movement. By the time they were Starship, they were motivated by mass appeal rather than political action, and this song was an expression of that change.

• When this hit #1, Grace Slick was the oldest woman to sing the lead vocal (shared with Mickey Thomas) on a #1 single. The title had been previously held by Tina Turner for "What's Love Got To Do With It," and was later claimed by Cher for "Believe." >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Paul - Detroit, MI

• Some radio stations played versions of this song customized to their call letters. One example is the San Francisco station 610 KFRC; Les Garland did some customized patter inserting the station name. Some radio stations replaced Garland's voice with their own DJs to get local flavor.

• This returned to the UK singles chart in 2014 after being used for a commercial for the 3 mobile service.

• This was the first Top 10 hit Bernie Taupin wrote without Elton John. He had written with Elton before, composing the #12 "How You Gonna See Me Now" with Alice Cooper and Dick Wagner.

• The album title, Knee Deep In The Hoopla, came from a line in this song.

• The line "Police have got the choke hold" is a reference to a controversial issue in Los Angeles. Legal action had been taken against the Los Angeles police department, claiming that their tactic of choking suspects was dangerous and should be outlawed. Eventually, choke holds were banned by the department in most cases.

  This part of the lyric goes along with the dark underpinnings of the song and its connection to Los Angeles.

• This received a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group but lost to "Money For Nothing" by Dire Straits.

• A social media sensation named Mark Hoyle reworked this song in 2018 as "We Built This City… On Sausage Rolls," releasing it under the name Ladbaby. It proved quite popular and earned the coveted Christmas #1 in the UK that year.

• Grace Slick is not a fan of this song. "We built this city on rock and roll? There isn't any city built on rock and roll," she scoffed to Uncut magazine in 2020. "If you're talking about LA, that's built on oranges and oil and the movie industry. San Francisco, that's built on gold and trade. New York that's been around way longer than rock and roll."

  "Bernie Taupin wrote the songs about clubs closing in LA," Slick added. "But clubs are not going to close forever in a city like LA. So it was a pretty stupid song. And anyway everybody thought we were bragging about San Francisco which we weren't. We had three songs that went to #1 in the '80s. I didn't believe the lyrics of any of them."

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