Here’s another group that I loved before I even knew who they were. By the time I was in junior high, the group had morphed into Starship and taken over Top 40 radio with songs like the much-maligned (I love it) “We Built This City”, “Sara”, and, oh yeah, the theme song to Mannequin starring one Kim Cattrall. (Give her a break. She was young and she needed the money.) But I’d been hearing songs from this band on the radio for as long as I can remember. To this day, the three notes that punctuate the chorus of their song “With Your Love” induce a pang of strangely non-specific longing in me. And yet, I don’t think I was ever conscious that the song was called “With Your Love” and that it was a Jefferson Starship song until quite recently when I heard it on a road trip while listening to the 70s channel on Sirius. I get a similar sensation with a number of Jefferson Starship songs – “Miracles”, “Find Your Way Back”, “Jane”… and this one. I love this song so, so much. I don’t know that this band, which Suzanne Somers described in her intro to this video as the world’s longest running soap opera, ever sounded so much in love with each other and how they sounded together as a band as they do on the song’s recording, which appeared on their 1978 album Earth. Sure, lead singer Marty Balin wasn’t long for the group, and given the decade-plus of intra-band bed-hopping that preceded this particular performance, there were almost certainly a few seething resentments present in this particular livingroom. But, for three minutes at least, you get six old friends, veterans of a counterculture struggling with its imminent extinction, sitting around, strumming guitars and laying out lazily lovely harmonies while Marty Balin pours his heart out: “Precious love, I give to you…”