“Grace Slick: she drove people crazy! But give her a mike and you couldn’t stop her.”
PSYCHEDELIC SAN FRANCISCO'S SARCASTIC SIREN, GARCE SLICK FLEW OFF THE MAP, CRASHED THE PLANE, DID JAIL AND AA, BUT SOMEHOW MADE IT THROUGH, SANITY AND SENSE OF HUMOUR INTACT. AND IT ALL BEGAN WITH SKETCHES OF SPAIN. "I WAS REALLY STRAIGHT UNTIL I WAS 23,"
Grace Slick iS 78, Sober and happy with life. “i’ve got a house, a car, i can pay for my food, buy paint and canvases,” she says. “i mean, what more junk do you need?” it’s five decades since Slick emerged from a bohemian enclave of San Francisco to become, with Jefferson airplane, the elizabeth taylor of the psychedelic set. beautiful, sharp-tongued, liberated and mischievous, she had a voice made for those times, an unusually loud eastern-scaled wail that could lift a melody to the intoxicated heights of acid rock bliss. it could also drip pure poison. “Grace Slick,” sighs Marty balin, her singing partner for much of the ’60s and ’70s. “She drove people crazy! but put a microphone in front of her and you couldn’t stop her.” Jefferson airplane had originally been balin’s band. an early San Francisco scene hipster, he’d opened the formative Matrix club in august 1965 to showcase the band; he designed the posters and generally called the shots. he also sang the ‘cr y guy’ songs. ever ything changed when Slick joined in october 1966, replacing balin’s co-singer, the similarly dark-haired, low-voiced Signe anderson, who’d found motherhood incompatible with recording for rca and touring. Somebody to love and white rabbit, which Slick had written and performed with her previous group the Great Society, shook Jefferson airplane from their folk rock orthodoxy. both songs were top 10 US hits during the first half of 1967.
By the summer, San Francisco had become the psychedelic capital of the world. Unknown to most, moves were afoot to bring the Airplane crashing back down. “I was romanced by Elektra,” says Slick. “They figured, ‘She’s got the hits,’ thought I was this hotshot.” Elektra already had ‘Queen Of The Beatniks’ Judy Henske, whose High Flying Bird was an Airplane set regular. They had bigger ideas for Slick. “I didn’t wanna be like Linda Ronstadt [would become] and carr y a whole band,” she says. “I didn’t even wanna be Grace Slick! I like a band where ever ybody’s equal. Besides, I’m partly lazy.”
TODAY, SLICK CAN BE AS LAZY AS SHE LIKES. SHE LIVES in Malibu, Los Angeles, close to the ocean she loves. Daughter China and her husband live next door. She rarely gives inter views (“What, to talk about the ’60s for the ninetieth time?”), and seems to have granted this one on a whim. A new edition of Sunfighter, her 1971 album with Paul Kantner and heavy West Coast friends, is imminent. But she barely remembers it. “All I know is that my daughter’s the fat guy [ie the baby] on the front cover,” she says. “I have a real good 24-hour memor y. But the other stuff? It’s arbitrar y. I can sing you a dog food commercial from 1945 but don’t ask me to sing one of my songs.” That said, Slick is full of gusto. It’s 4.30am her time and she’s already threatening to wallop “stupid, racist” Trump on the nose. “I never sleep for more than an hour and a half at a time,” she explains. “They say you can’t think straight if you don’t sleep right. I’ve never thought straight anyway.” As you might expect from someone who once sang “Up against the wall, motherfuckers”, Slick is bang up to date with world politics. “CNN is iffy,” she says. “It does what the sponsors want. I watch latenight guys like Bill Maher if I want the real thing.” It’s a habit that goes back to when she first heard Lenny Bruce in the early ’60s: devastating, anti-establishment satire that turned her upbringing on its head. “I was really straight until I was about 23,” Slick says – and already too old for The Beatles: “My girlfriends asked me over to see them on Ed Sullivan, with their cutesy hairdos and matching outfits, singing ‘I wanna hold your hand’. I thought, That’s stupid.” The Stones, especially “defiant” Jagger, were more her thing. Lenny Bruce inspired one of Slick’s first songs, Father Bruce, a regular in The Great Society’s set. Sarcasm, probably the defining Grace Slick trait, was afoot in the band’s name too, which riffed on President Johnson’s recent initiative to combat poverty and racial injustice. Many, Slick included, felt it didn’t go far enough. “There were all kinds of reasons not to like what was going on,” she says. “Birmingham, Alabama, the war in Vietnam, Nixon…” Born in 1939, the eldest daughter of a banker father and a mother who once doubled for Hollywood actress Marion Davies, Grace Barnett Wing was steeped in The American Dream. In the kind of twist that Slick revels in, the seed of rebellion was planted by one of the D Dream’s great achievements, a good postwar public education. “The Eisenhower ’50s were so sterile,” she says. “When I read about turn of the centur y Paris – Gertr ude Stein, Diaghilev and Picasso, smoking dope, having interest interesting conversations and turning art on its head – that sounded a lot more fun.” If the Belle Epoque lit up an alternative lifestyle, Miles Davis’s Sketches Of Spain (1960) provided the soundtrack. “I could listen to that thing 24 hours straight,” she says. “When I first heard it, I thought, God, I’m in heaven.” Sketches Of Spain was
worlds away from Slick’s affluent family home in Palo Alto, California, and from bebop too. Folding Iberian folk song and classical influences into jazz, it created a new musical language. Slick swallowed it whole. Her songs, especially during Airplane days, sounded offbeat and beyond genre, unlike Kantner’s hymns to hippydom, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady’s acid rock blow-outs and Balin’s heartbreakers. And the moody semitones of Moorish/ flamenco music stayed with her (though Slick discovered her affinity with flamenco scales during an acid trip). The bolero beat that underpins White Rabbit came direct from Sketches Of Spain. “Genetically I’m Nor wegian, so I’m not sure what that Spanish thing is,” says Slick. “I also love Spanish art and architecture, so it’s probably because the Spanish built California.” Her hometown Palo Alto translates as ‘Tall Tree’. White Rabbit will always be her defining work. Whereas The Great Society played it long, Indo-Jazz style, Jefferson Airplane tightened it up and stripped it back, creating a stealthy-sounding backdrop for Slick’s Alice In Wonderland acid fantasia. Her climactic “Feed your head!” was a clarion call. The Summer of Love saw San Francisco awash with dosed-up pleasure-seekers. Surrealistic Pillow, the tie-in album, went Top 3 in the US. Only The Beatles and The Monkees were selling more. “It was a big cultural moment,” Slick says. “For a couple of years there, it seemed we were headed in the right direction. There was this for ward motion of people wanting peaceful solutions to a lot of issues.” The Beat Generation had merged with the Beatles generation, with LSD blurring the boundaries. “Dr ugs in the ’60s? There wasn’t anything abnor mal about that,” Slick insists. “Marty and I drank, Jack and Jorma did speed, our drummer [Spencer Dr yden] did alcohol, and Paul was marijuana. It was nothing.” Slick maintains she never saw anyone freak out on LSD. Musically, though, acid was all over late ’67’s After Bathing At Baxter’s, the third and most freaked-out Airplane album. Its title was a euphemism for tripping. Baxter’s opened with a howl of feedback and wound up with an ensemble salute to an afternoon of “acid, incense and balloons” in Golden Gate Park. But Slick’s contributions were seriously strange. Two Heads was a clockwork-paced oddity dipped in a Dali landscape and subjected to serious stereo panning. Rejoyce merged James Joyce’s Ulysses with flyaway Sketches Of Spain horns, leaving psychedelia far behind. “I loved writing songs and taking them to the band,” Slick says of Jefferson Airplane’s heyday. “I’m not a great piano player but I’d play the chords and sing so they’d know what’s happening. When the band got hold of it, I’d be like, Wonderful, I love that!”
BY THE END OF 1967, GRACE SLICK was a leading voice – and face – of the rock counterculture. At the Monterey Festival that June, D.A. Pen ne baker’ s camera remained focused on her throughout Today, blissfully unaware that the song was a Balin showpiece. Grace, a strangely beautiful tribute that concluded Country Joe& The Fish’s debut, Electric Music For The Mind And Body, did her reputation no harm either. “I’d seen her at the Fillmore with The Great Society ,” says‘ Country’ Joe McDonald today. “I thought, Incredible voice but the material was bland. I went home and wrote something I thought was worthy of her, something that would show off her voice. I was thinking Yma Sumac art music. But I was too shy to tell her, her so we ended up recording it.” On 1968’s Crown Of Creation and 1969’s live Bless Its Pointed Little Head, Head recorded at the Fillmore East in November ’68, Jefferson Airplane sounded like the best band in the world. “We had it all,” says Slick. ““Jack and Jorma’s American blues. Paul’s ‘let’s all go to outer space’. I’m kinda dark and sarcastic. And Marty’s love songs. That’s fabulous – until the musicians start saying, ‘My shit’s better than your shit.’” In November 1968, New Wave cinema’s enfant terrible Jean-Luc Godard filmed the Airplane performing on the roof of the Schuyler Hotel in New York. He thought they were the most revolutionary band
in North America. They duly obliged with a version of The House At Pooneil Cor ners that was relentless, almost ter rifying. Slick and Balin traded lines like doomsayers welcoming the apocalypse. “Sometimes, we’d be like two saxophone players,” says Balin. “We’d take off and the band would follow.” Here they sounded like three – Kirk, Coltrane and Coleman. It was a performance for new times, a song that railed against “all the bullshit around us” in a year marked by burning cities, political assassinations and Vietnam blackening ever ything. After a long winter lay-off, the band regrouped in spring 1969, only to find various factions pushing for prominence. Frustrated by the lack of playing-time, Kaukonen and Casady – soon calling themselves Hot Tuna – started to open for the Airplane. “I liked all the differences in the band,” says Slick, “but the guys were not appreciative of each other’s stuff.”
AT WOODSTOCK THAT AUGUST, SLICK IGNITED the Airplane’s early morning set by declaring, “It’s a new dawn.” During Volunteers, the title track from their forthcoming, highly politicised album, the band barked “Gotta revolution!” at the sleepy crowd. But those ‘Make love, not war’ banners were already in tatters. Four months later, on December 6, 1969, they were nowhere to be seen. “The Hell’s Angels had ser ved as a deterrent to stop people climbing on stage in Golden Gate Park many times and they were fine,” says Slick. “So when Paul and I went to England and talked to Mick Jagger about a free concert, we recommended them.” The fateful free festival at Altamont Speedway, which ended in mayhem and murder, turned ugly earlier in the day as Jefferson Airplane were ripping into Fred Neil’s The Other Side Of This Life. Marty Balin leapt into the crowd to stop the violence and was promptly knocked out with a pool cue. “Put speed and alcohol together and something ugly’s gonna happen,” Slick says. But it was more than bad drugs. “We thought, If you give people an education, they won’t fight. But that’s not true. Unfortunately, the ner vous system is more powerful than any education. You can see it today. The big brain is working on going to therMars,Mars,butthenervoussystemstillreactsasifthere Mars, but the ner vous system still reacts as if there was a lion at the cave opening.” No song seemed more apt at the close of the decade than Wooden Ships, a highlight of Volunteers and a Kantner co-write with David Crosby and Stephen Stills. It was, says Slick, “a sad goodbye to a lousy form of life, a ‘We’re out of here’ kind of thing. But it was done with a certain amount of joy. I’d been on CrosCros by’s boat, literally a wooden ship, and it was beautiful. You could feel the freedom, this soft, gentle way of living.” Slick, now dating Paul Kantner, wanted some of that. Making their escape to Bolinas, Marin County, in summer ’70, the new power couple began stockpiling their best material for their own albums. Blows Against The Empire, Kantner’s masterpiece, ran with the Wooden Ships idea, positing a hippy paradise somewhere in the cosmos. Follow-up Sunfighter celebrated the couple’s new daughter China, both in song and on the sleeve. Typically, Grace Slick was partly repelled by the Marin County way of life. Sunfighter had opened with Silver Spoon, a vicious attack on vegetarians that appeared to celebrate cannibalism. In spring 1971, she was arrested for drink-driving after crashing her Aston Martin at over 100mph. Her charge sheet, which already included raps for LSD, saying “fuck” on-stage and attacking cops, ought to have ser ved as a warning “I guess she was a hard woman to be around,” says Marty Balin, who’d walked out on the band in late 1970. The sole Airplane member to refuse Slick’s affections, he has only good memories of their working relationship. “We both sang our hearts out and people used to think we were married. I’d make love to her on-stage and burn her down and she loved it. But offstage I hardly gave her the time of day and it drove her crazy.” “I didn’t do Marty because he didn’t show any interest,” Slick admits. “I thought, That’s fine, there’s four other guys left!” If being a woman in a male-dominated profession ever worked against her, Grace Slick didn’t notice. “It never occurred to me,” she says. “Women have always been singers. Being a justice of the Supreme Court, now that would’ve been hard.” In her autobiography she dismissed ‘the Cause’ as “a new slant on an old Tupper ware party”. Today, she’s delighted men like Harvey Weinstein are finally being called out. “Having to put out to get the job? That’s got to stop,” she says. “When I was in my twenties, I didn’t have that problem. None of the record company heads or
promoters did anything. Maybe the band members would, but I liked it because I liked all of them!” After what was virtually a Jefferson Airplane reunion tour in ’72, Kaukonen and Casady went to Europe to pursue their passion for speed-skating. The band faded from view. Hot Tuna and Slick/Kantner solo projects prevailed. In 1974, Slick released a solo album. She called it Manhole to annoy feminists. It was dominated by an epic love letter to Spain, rich in Iberian flourishes, made-up words and the London Symphony Orchestra. Sales weren’t great. That same year, Slick and Kantner put together Jefferson Starship, a name first employed on Blows Against The Empire. Against all expectations, the project outpaced Fleetwood Mac in the race to corner the AOR market in the States. Key to its success was Marty Balin, back on board on the proviso that he could sing what he wanted. He came up with Miracles, a song filled with all the sex he and Slick never had. It went Top 3. “I got her to sing all these ‘baby, baby, babys’ and she hated it,” he says. “It was like Paul McCartney’s Silly Love Songs,” she says. “Love songs are smarmy. I’m no good at writing them so I don’t.” Offstage, it was a different stor y. Slick, 35, had taken off with the band’s lights man Skip Johnson, 23. “You’re too old, too fat, and too drunk, but I love you,” he told her. On November 29, 1976, the pair were married in Hawaii.
BUT SLICK’S OTHER LOVE AFFAIR – WITH THE bottle – had by no means ended. On-stage in Hamburg in June 1978, during a rare European tour, more drunk than ever, her Third Reich satire – involving Nazi gestures and sticking her fingers up the nose of an audience member – got her sent home. “Then,” she says, “I get into my car, drive real fast, get arrested, yell at cops and go to jail. I turn into an asshole when I’m drunk. It got darker and darker.” In court and out of the band, she was ordered to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. “I didn’t want to stop drinking,” she says. “My idea of hell was living in California without a driver’s licence. But I went along and I liked it. Ever ybody’s equal and there are no hotshots.” Slick got her licence back and, after a few initial slips, has been sober for 25 years. The mid-’80s saw a new Grace Slick: “Sober, smiling and selling out”. Fronting Starship, forming a new singing partnership with AOR-voiced Mickey Thomas, and singing other people’s songs with the sole intention of having hits, she’d embraced the unthinkable. We Built This City, Sara and Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now were all US Number 1s. “I’d damaged the band by being a roaring drunk,” she says. “So I came back, did what I was told, and played the good girl. But it was boring and the songs were stupid.” Slick bowed out, joined Jefferson Airplane for a reunion album and tour in 1989, then called it a day. “The Rolling Stones are the only group that look OK on stage when they’re old,” she says. “Rock’n’roll’s a young person’s medium.”
SLICK REKINDLED HER LOVE OF PAINTING. She’s been exhibiting for years, her interests being vivid portraits of animals, characters from songs and musicians from her past. While out driving, she’ll listen to anything from Grieg to Eminem and Journey. “Old people play CDs in cars!” she says. “Nobody can bother me and I like what the sound does in a car.” She can cr y easily listening to music. “It’s because I’m happy. I never cr y when I’m mad or disappointed.” Before she goes, Slick remembers something. “I do like the new Fab Four!” For the first time in almost two hours, I haven’t a clue what she’s talking about. “William, Kate, Har r y and Meghan Markle!” she says. “We don’t do that over here, so it’s fun and a bit Alice In Wonderland. The nearest we had to a queen over here was Elizabeth T Taylor.” Indeed, you did. The Acid Queen. Ten feet tall, wasn’t she?