Better Living Through Chemistry

"So this night Grace Slick is on Tom 'Big Daddy' Donahue's famous San Francisco radio show. But she's taking sulfa due to a kidney complaint, so when she necks down a couple of beers, she gets totally wiped out, blanks and does ten varieties of weird shit.
"She and Paul Kantner are doing an interview for Starship's Dragonfly album with Donahue. After which Paul leaves the studio. But Grace doesn't. In fact, Grace refuses to leave. Tom's reading commercials and traffic updates while she's wrapping her legs around his neck. Now Van Morrison comes in, and Grace starts in on him, yelling stuff like 'you can't sing your fucking way out of a fucking paper bag'.So he goes 'Grace Slick? I don't give a shit if your name is Daphne Dildo, get the fuck out of here!'
"Tom and Van escape into the studio to do an interview. They lock the studio door, but of course Grace wants in too...! Meanwhile, one of the station's other jocks is picking up on the thing in his car, and all he can hear is these crashing sounds and someone mumbling obscenities in the background. It s all KERRRRASH ! KABLANGGGG!!! 'Open this fucking door you ass-holes , KER-SMASH!!! He thought construction work was going on in the studio...!
"Finally, a couple of gay guys come into the station to listen in person to what's happening.'Cos they just can't believe what they're hearing on their radio. And Grace grabs one of them and hauls him off into the station rest-room with her. Some considerable time later he comes out sobbing I've never had a woman before. I only came in here to listen...!

EVERY GENERATION HAS A LEGEND . . .
This is Bill Thompson, some-time Starship manager getting nostalgic in Oui magazine. But Grace Slick stories all tend to be like this one. So I ask her about it now, across this transatlantic hook-up, as careful as I can, so as not to fall from grace with Grace. And she goes, "Actually WHAT!?!? I can't remember ever meeting Van Morrison!," she retaliates genially."I can't remember doing Tom Donahue's show either. But I could have done that. I mean - it sounds like something I might have done. It sounds reasonable to me, I just don't remember. Maybe I was drunk as a fart - who knows?"
She's in her front room, looking out over the Malibu beachfront, mist coming in over the Pacific softly blurring definitions, while her fax-machine subversively whispers messages from her publisher. Grace Slick - singer and writer with Jefferson Airplane, then Jefferson Starship, then finally just Starship was - the original Acid Queen. A self-celebrated "Rock 'n' Roll Slut".She had hits in the 1960s. She had bigger hits in the 1970s. And then she had even bigger hits than that in the 1980s. Now she makes what she claims are her final entries in the flight log in book form. For Grace, her new book Somebody To Love? is a product of "my old fart" years."I don't like old people doing Rock 'n' Roll," she asserts dismissively."It's kind-of pathetic. I'm sure if the person doing it likes to do it, then that's fine. It's just that I'd feel sappy at age 59, singing "UP AGAINST THE WALL MOTHER-FUCKERS!!!!". It's stoooo-pid. Or as a non-practising alcoholic, singing feed your head - it's not pertinent."
As you'd expect, her book tells it all in intimate, often startling detail. It's a psychedelic swirl of perception and sex, mind-crunching drugs and laser-bright humour.She was born Grace Wing on the 30th October 1939, to a former Hollywood movie understudy and sometime nightclub singer, and her investment-banker husband Ivan Wing. Both were graduates of the University of Washington, Seattle. And young Grace's childhood was a self-confessed "WASP caricature of family life". Look in vain for early symptoms of radicalism. On her first day at pre-school in LA she pissed herself, leaving a trail of yellow liquid across the classroom floor. Her first exploration of pre-pubescent sexuality was a tryst with a watering-can, inserting the spout carefully up her vagina. Then she got hit by the big "blasts of hormone-driven shrapnel", and there were Kleenex-in-bras dramas and heavy petting in the backseat of a 1955 Oldsmobile. Until she got 'poked for the first time' for real while double-dating with David 'who wasn't (even) really my type'. Meanwhile Grace goes to private school, and Finch College in New York, "a finishing school for girls from wealthy or prominent families", later also attended by President Richard Nixon's daughter Tricia.
This is 1957. Things were different then. But she never quite adjusted to the suburban mould and lifestyle mapped out for her. She met Jerry Slick in Sixth Grade, aged ten, and married him eleven years later, a big formal white affair after which they honeymooned in Hawaii. But "was there passion? Nope. Just cultural imposition...it was probably inevitable that my first marriage would be temporary." Indeed, already there were station-wagon trips 'south of the border' to Mexico's Baja Beach to score dope. And from that first marriage she got a song (Jerry s brother Darby wrote Airplane's first US Top Ten hit 'Somebody To Love'). And she got her first band - Jerry, Darby and Grace were the nucleus of Great Society.And she got a name. 'Slick' is a good Rock'n'Roll name. But then again, so is 'Wing'. Just that 'Wing', although her given name, would've sounded made-up as part of Airplane - geddit?
But the big turning point for Grace came in 1965, when she saw a band called Jefferson Airplane play at the Matrix, a small San Francisco club co-owned by the band's co-vocalist Marty Balin. Even though the resulting equation seemed to be more financial and lifestyle than it was artistic."I was working as a model at a Department Store when I saw Jefferson Airplane play. But it wasn't so much a big deal, as it was just, hey! - what they're doing looks like a lot more fun than what I'm doing, and if you're gonna work 'that looks like a better job to have'. It looks like a good way to make a living and goof off at the same time."
Like the new Star Wars trailer has it, "every generation has a legend, every journey has a first step, every saga has a beginning". And by joining Airplane she not only first-stepped into a hedonistic anti-materialist lifestyle uniquely attuned to her wacked-out talents, but ignited the Hippie Dream too.
"The '60s idea of sexual freedom was something I actually related to quite easily, despite my earlier programming," she admits."In the '50s the girl never got to ask the boy out. Ask them out?" protests Grace, "how about asking them if they want to fuck!?!?!"
Still technically married to Jerry Slick, she had sex with Airplane's "extremely well-hung" bassist Jack Casady. Then drummer Spencer Dryden - she later wrote the tragi-comic 'Lather' about him. Nevertheless, Spencer was eventually 'fired' from Airplane for his "incessant complaining". So she had a one-off night with guitarist Jorma Kaukonen. And finally, as the "acid was clarifying some aspects of our friendship that I'd been previously unaware of" she got around to group leader Paul Kantner.
That's pretty much all of the original Airplane - except for Marty Balin. He once told an interviewer "Grace? Did I sleep with her? I wouldn't even let her give me head!" But, no regrets - "loving the people you work with is wonderful," she insists now. "Fun. Interesting. A way of connecting, y'know. It's hard not to love people. It's a very good thing to love people. But possessiveness gets in the way. People are very possessive. It's too bad that we have the possessiveness that we do. That's what gets us into trouble. But loving people is a whole hell of a lot better than hating them!"
Outside of working her sexual way through Airplane members, there was also a "strawberry fuck" with a stoned immaculate Jim Morrison in which "I was, again, the perpetrator." It occurred during a joint Doors/Airplane European tour, but was so memorable an event that when writing it up for the book she had to 'phone Doors biographer Danny Sugarman to work out, by a process of tour-date elimination, where exactly it had happened.
Meanwhile Airplane's album Surrealistic Pillow, which cost just $8,000 to make, sold eight million copies."Tonight," wrote Richard 'Oz' Neville, "I rest my head on Surrealistic Pillow, praying it weaves its magic warmth..." And there's Grace, looking directly and provocatively out at you from the sleeve, long black hair, supernaturally piercing eyes, the perfect Hippie-chick dream incarnate, mocking all of 'straight' America's phoney aspirations with her beauty, her intelligence and her ascerbic subversive wit. And despite Airplane's "lazy and somewhat sloppy attention to cranking out the hits" their splintered muddle-headed flight-logs kept them there as underground America's top band through to the end of the decade. The Airplane was on glide path, Eight Miles Higher than high. They even got to hook up with Jean Luc Godard to shoot a short underground film (One American Movie) live on the Manhattan rooftops, a stunt that resulted in arrests for 'disturbing the peace'."U2 did the same thing in LA in the process of shooting a video.There were no arrests," she adds tartly.

EVERY JOURNEY HAS A FIRST STEP...

We record buyers have been inculcated with the belief that the holy grail of now-ness, of hip-defining leading-edge socio-musical quintessence, is a vinyl commodity purchasable across the counter. Sometimes, just sometimes, that vision comes true. Jefferson Airplane was a psychedelic confection, a game of musical beds, a trip down the rabbit-hole, a barbaric divinity, and a band always way ahead of the curve. Everything you read about them was already out of date. Looking like "a Pimp and a Go-Go-Girl" in a mini-skirt that "went all the way up to the beaver", Grace and Yippie Activist Abbie Hoffmann went to a White House reception organised, bizarrely, by Grace s former Finch College, with an invitation addressed to 'Miss Grace Wing'.
"When I went to the White House it was with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek," and with the intention of dosing 'Tricky Dicky' Milhous Nixon with LSD, she recalls now. In the event the hip counter-culture intruders got muscled away by alert security gorillas, but "we didn't have to dose Nixon. He overdosed himself on love of power, driving himself out of office without any outside help."
With acid the perceptual centres of the brain go into hyper-stimulation. But it was the pivotal ingredient of the scene, and sometimes, when you wish upon a star, no matter who you are, it all works out in the final edit, sort-of.
"Yeah. It's a real powerful drug," she agrees."It's not like just getting kinda loaded on alcohol and putting a lampshade on your head. It's not an easy drug to take. But if you're in a good frame of mind - which fortunately I was when I took it - then it's very exciting and very eye-opening and mind-altering, and all those other sort of clichés."
Are there similarities between that '60s psychedelic scene and today's Ecstasy and Acid House cultures, which take E's like Hippies took acid? Are there similarities or only differences in attitude to say, the spirituality, or the hedonism of it?
"I haven't taken any of those drugs, so, no, I can't make a comment on something I haven't experienced. I've never had Ecstasy, and unless I've taken a drug, I don't make comment on it because I can't do it coming from an experiential place. I can only make broad comments the way everybody else does - 'Oh, you're gonna kill yourself' (in hectoring Mum-voice), and y'know, some people will. But we just figured - LSD is a new chemical. Young people generally figure 'Uh - hey! Let's go dere and do dat (in moronic brain-dead voice). It's not that unusual. Nothing we did is that unusual. The things that we were saying and doing are the same things people have always done and talked about. We want peace. We don't want to kill each other. We like to fuck a lot. We like to have a good time... what else is new?"
With the arrival of the '70s, commercially, Jefferson Starship went stellar, becoming "a veritable gold-record machine", while Grace hooked up with their lighting manager - Skip Johnson, a "good-looking dark Irish Catholic boy... a cute goofball with a foul mouth". And by the mid-'80s, in those lush days of digital seduction and market-driven manipulation, she was back in the Starship fold, as the only surviving link to the original Surrealistic Pillow line-up. Starship was by then an MOR sell-out, a congenial "musical Shopping Mall".
"The people in Starship had families," she explains carefully, "and there was a lot of fear around money. They didn't want to experiment with weirdo songs, because they were afraid they wouldn't sell. It was a commercial band, and Starship actually sold more, had more no.1 singles and all that kind of stuff, than Airplane ever did. We'd all played our instruments and sung long enough to know what we were doing. So it was relatively easy to go into a recording studio and make a hit song. But they weren't as interesting. There was a no.1 we had called 'Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now' which was written for us by Diane Warren. And I like her - as a person. She's amazing. But 'Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now'? I don't believe that. I don't believe that nothing's gonna stop you! That comes from Diane. I'm cynical. A truck will stop you in five seconds flat. I think it's possible that this romance is not gonna last more 'n six months. I would not have written a love song in that way. So I m basically singing something I don't believe. And I don't like that. It's a good song. But not for me.
"There's another no.1 song we had which is 'We Built This City On Rock'n'Roll'. And everybody assumes we're talking about San Francisco. But it was not written by us. It was not written about San Francisco. It was written by a British guy, Bernie Taupin, about a grey time in the early '70s when cops were closing clubs or something in LA - and I couldn't give a shit whether they close the clubs in LA. They're gonna re-open them all in a month anyway. So OK, it's a good song. But it doesn't have anything to do with me. I'm singing songs that I really don't care about, and lyrics I don't believe in. And that's a mistake. You shouldn't do that. I had fun during the '80s. It was OK. I can do it. It's not like I can't do it. I'm a professional in the sense that I've been doing it over a long time, but I would prefer to sing songs where I know the lyric, I know what I'm talking about because I wrote it.
The final get-out came around 1987 when Starship's co-vocalist Mickey Thomas began cold-shouldering her out of sessions: "Singing with the old broad clearly wasn't his idea of the ultimate Rock band line-up." She felt it was a good moment to quit and, finally dis-Graced, Starship vanished from commercial visibility. Simultaneously her relationship with Skip effectively ended - he went on to work on projects with Prince.
Subsequently, there was a brief reunion of the original Jefferson Airplane line-up (minus Spencer Dryden, who was replaced by Kenny Aronoff).They toured and produced a single album called Jefferson Airplane (Epic - 1989). "No-one bought Lear jets on the proceeds," she jokes. After which you only heard about Grace Slick through her involvement with the twelve-step Alcoholics Anonymous Rehab programme. Or the 1994 shotgun incident (read the book, dummy!)
"I haven't been in a rock'n'roll band for ten years," she reflects. "And I don't even think about it," she says now. Doing promotion for the book is "a little like going around representing an airline company when you don't fly anymore - it's like 'huh, what am I doing here?' But if I were to write an album of songs talking about the way I feel and am right now, it would be rude to an audience, because they'd go, understandably, 'why don t you play 'White Rabbit', why don't you play dada-dada-dada'.But I don't want to do that. And you can't go out and say to an audience 'I'm not gonna sing that...(in bratty little girl voice).'Well then don't sing'. So I don't."
The Doors and Velvet Underground are universal Rock Esperanto. Joplin's dead. So is Nico. We've still got Courtney Love - but she has yet to write anything as powerful as 'White Rabbit'. And that Grace is still around should be a cause for celebration.
Somebody To Love by Grace Slick with Andrea Gagan (Virgin Publ, £16.99, ISBN 1-85227-738-6).