Grace Slick
Jefferson Airplane’s golden-voiced, Alice-loving pioneer.
Astartling presence, both vocally and visually,” Paul Kantner once remarked of his ex-bandmate and sometime lover Grace Slick. “An Oscar Wilde in drag, who combined insight and sarcasm that was sometimes light, sometimes dark. A provocateur.”
As one of the first female superstars to emerge from the 60s, Slick did more than most to further the remit of women in rock’n’roll. She was the original acid queen, out-partying her male counterparts while remaining an indomitable presence as vocalist with Jefferson Airplane. The ravenhaired Slick adorned the cover of Life and Rolling Stone, was invited to tea at the White House (taking with her some LSD) and became the poster girl of the West Coast counterculture. “I shaved my legs,” she said, “but I talked like a truck driver.”
Slick was working as a model at a San Francisco department store when she first saw Jefferson Airplane in 1965. It proved a profound experience. “I thought: ‘They’re making more than me, they only work two hours a night and they get to drink and smoke dope,’” Slick told Classic Rock in 2005.
Soon afterwards, she and her husband Jerry, brother-in-law Darby and bassist David Miner formed the Great Society. The band began gigging around the Bay Area in October that year. On stage, Slick’s strident voice cut through proto-psych classics like Someone To Love and White Rabbit, the latter an hallucinatory mind-fuck she’d been inspired to write after digesting Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and Miles Davis’s album Sketches Of Spain.
When frontwoman Signe Anderson quit Jefferson Airplane in October 1966, Slick moved in. Her arrival coincided with the band’s commercial breakthrough. Having brought both White Rabbit and Someone To Love (renamed Somebody To Love) with her, Airplane started having hits. Their success also translated to the album market, with 1967’s stunning Surrealistic Pillow and the subsequent After Bathing At Baxter’s and Crown Of Creation. Over a breathless three years, the band enjoyed no less than five gold-selling albums.
As the psychedelic movement grew, Slick found herself at the centre of a cultural revolution. “I was appalled that the San Francisco ethic didn’t mushroom and envelop the whole world into this loving community of acid freaks,” she lamented later. “I was very naïve.”
In the 70s she pressed on with Kantner at the head of Jefferson Starship, although her heavy consumption of booze and drugs finally took a toll. “Everybody knew I was a big drunk,” she said. “Plus, booze and cocaine is an ugly combination. I loved it… Coke was so cheap and we were rock’n’rollers.” Her alcoholism was revealed by People magazine, who broke her anonymity about attending AA.
Slick was the only former Airplane member in the line-up of Starship during the 80s. The group enjoyed several hugeselling singles, but she later confessed that she hated her time there. “Our big hit single, We Built This City, was awful,” she told Classic Rock in 2002.
Salvation arrived in the form of a brief Airplane reunion in 1989. The resulting studio album was modestly successful, but Slick retired later that year, aged 50, spending her time painting, and exhibiting at art galleries across the US. Looking back on her Airplane days, she’s observed: “I was just so tired of all the damn love songs. I was just trying to up the possibilities.”