Stereo Review, 1970

These are excerpts from the article in the cd cover of Grace Slick and the Great Society's "Collectors Item". It was originally published in 1970 in Stereo Review. It is written by Rex Reed

"I was wondering what an all-american girl-next-door is doing in a place like this"

I pressed the bell next to a red heart that said "stop the war". An upstairs window slammed open, and a girl with a scrubbed ivory-soap face and long curly hair leaned out. "Yeah? what do you want?"

"Is Grace Slick in?"

"I'm Grace. I'll be right down."

I had only seconds to recover. She doesn't look anything like her photographs. There she is, on the album covers and in the rock magazines and underground newspapers, looking like a dark purple menace- long straight hair falling seductively about her face and shoulders like raven's wings, deep pools of darkness signaling world-weary indifference from eyes like ripe olives. And here was this girl in neatly tailored slacks and a mexican poncho (I later learned she was pregnant), cautiously opening the bead curtained glass doors for a stranger, like a fourteen year old kid whose mother was gone for the day.

"I just wanted to make sure you weren't the FBI. They're always hassling us, trying to run us for dope. I guess they think because we're rock musicians we have some kind of orgy going on here all the time. The FBI is always phoning us up and threatening to come over and talk to us, and we just say `yeah, we'll call our lawyer first- he's Mayor Alioto's lawyer and he'll have something to say about that` and they leave us alone. Crosby, Stills and Nash live here when they're in town, and The Grateful Dead, so there's always some kind of hassle going on with the cops. Everybody in the group has been busted for dope except Jorma Kaukonen, who plays guitar." "And me" she added. "I've been lucky. The last time the group was busted down in New Orleans I had just left the room to go wash my hair. Come in"

Inside it was about as cheerful as the interior of an egyptian sarcophagus. Dark mahogany walls rose twenty feet high in a room the size of a dance hall. light filtered through stained glass windows above a massive winding staircase, like a Barbary Coast brothel in an old Marlene Dietrich movie. There was no furniture except a pool table over which hung a mock skeleton of a dinosaur. Through a carved rosewood doorway, we entered the living room. The walls were covered with velvet the color of raspberry sherbet. White columns supported raspberry ceilings inlaid with gilt-edged cupids who ginned dopily down on huge marble walk-in fireplaces that hadn't been used since the San Francisco earthquake. We walked through this room quietly which is the only way you can walk through a room like that, as if not to disturb the seance that seemed certain  to commence at any moment. Beyond was another enormous room that was also empty, except for a statue of St. Theresa with a San Francisco police badge on her bosom. "She was kicked out of a church or something, so we like her," Grace explained. "We used to eat all our meals down here like a family, but it's hard to keep it heated in the winter, so now we just go out for pizzas and stuff."

She led the way into the kitchen at the back of the house, also empty except for  a king-size stainless-steel freezer with pornographic comic strips pasted on the door, and walls of cupboards full of cat food and underground newspapers. A dirty window overlooked the back yard, where I could see the rotting hull of a fishing boat. "Lets go up to my room," she said. "We can talk better up there." I followed up the turn-of-the-century staircase, dodging model airplanes hanging from Tiffany lamps. David Crosby (of Crosby, Stills and Nash) came bounding down the stairs, almost knocking over a treetop-tall antique replica of Nipper, the old RCA "his Master's Voice" trademark, with an arrow through it's head and a sign reading "Keep the Indians on Alcatraz". "see ya later," waved Crosby. "Later," said Grace. "Dave's been sleeping in my bed the past week and the place is a mess."

The second floor contains the Airplane's office and Grace's bedroom, and the third floor is devoted to all the pads of the other members of the group, their friends and girls. there were rows of filing cabinets and junk-shop furniture; I counted forty psychedelic posters on the walls. "You gotta see this" laughed grace, pointing to a gallery of high-fashion photographs and magazine covers of beautiful girls in elaborate Aldolfo hats and Dior gowns, beautiful girls smoking menthol cigarettes, all looking as though they had just stepped out of Harper's Bazaar. "Who are they?" I asked, doubtful that they could br friends of the Airplane. She roared. "They're all me! That was my modeling period. Boy, was I freaked out then. That's before I found out where my head was at."
 

The rest of the house is a blur to me now. I remember only a sensual assault of strobe lights, burning incense, psychedelic revolving sculptures, half-naked men with long hair roaming in and out of bedrooms, a room in which the entire floor consisted of a water bed pumped full of water that shook and revolved when I sat on it until I was seasick ("We all lie on it stoned and listen to music," said Grace), ceilings hung with parachute silk, cash registers, a floor-to-ceiling poster of Trotsky with a dart in his forehead, old christmas trees, modern can-vases filled with nails, airplane propellers, and tree trunks.

Grace's pad is like Norma Shearer's bedroom in Marie Antionette: Tad's Steak House wallpaper, victorian satin drapes, flowered carpets and flowered ceilings, cupids and roses and roses and cornucopias, gilt-edged chairs with the bottoms falling out, purses mad of pheasant feathers hanging on wall sconces with melted candles, musical instruments, and suitcases everywhere with clothes hanging out. We sat on box springs covered with red velvet, and when I looked up at the ceiling over her bed, I found myself staring into the horror-filled eyes of a battalion of naked women being plunged into some unspeakable destination in a chariot drawn by rabid wolves with fangs dripping blood. It's the last thing Grace Slick sees before she goes to bed at night.

A morticians pall cloaked the room. She was waiting for the interview to begin; I was waiting for Banquo's ghost to appear. The surroundings didn't faze her. She was as cheerful as a blue jay. "Why are you looking at me so strangely?" She asked, puffing on a True.

"I guess it's just that you surprise me. I was wondering what an all-american girl-next-door is doing in a place like this."

She made a funny face, half-smile, half-yecch. "Black people say `we` meaning their black brothers and sisters. I say `we` meaning Hippies, because I'm thirty years old, and I've been in this freaky-clothes and long-hair scene for twelve years. i may not look like a hippie, but I do identify with these people because the musicians, writers, and painters of today are all called hippies by a stupid society that doesn't understand them. I'm one of the non-conformists, so I'm a hippie too, I guess. But it's the life-style, not the length of hair or the clothes, and we have fun and I'm so much happier now than I ever was working in a department store. So i don't mind being called a hippie because it gives me an identity with a group of people I dig, and then after we get the hippie label, we get more attention and more people listen to their beliefs. Right now, rock musicians think the same way about the vietnam situation as a lot of other people, but we're the ones the kids listen to. The whole point of the rock revolution is to take care of business in the time we live in. Rock musicians ge into the blood streams of more young people than anyone else in this time, man, so they have more influence and power over them than even the politicians or the clergy."

I put down my list of prepared questions. grace Slick is not into forms and formality; formal interviews are out. one does not interview her, one raps. So we rapped. "Then you think rock has turned into something more meaningful than casual entertainment with a beat for dancing? A more serious social statement on our times?"

"Well, you can't hear the lyrics anyway, so I suppose it's dance music to some people. But it's never impersonal. I mean, that's what killed opera. Opera should've been more current if it was to survive. it should've gotten to people faster. As it is, those guys just told stories. Every century's got that stuff happening. People got tired of trying to relate to something that wasn't saying anything. I think of rock musicians are journalists, as musical reporters. The better the journalist the more fandangos he can pull off. The cake's always there, it's how you put the junk on it. In order for people to warm to something,, it has to hit them now, and that's what rock does. Scientific American says the female fruit fly need to hear the male fruitfully at 150 decibels to make it with him. If he sings any lower, she wont listen. That's approximately the volume we play in. That's out-front sex. You can just enjoy it for that, and that's okay, too. It's all groovy. sometimes we get audiences that are uptight and don't respond. We just play for ourselves. It's like guys who come up against a chick- or another guy, or a dog, I don't care- and they get no sexual response and keep working at it. Leave it alone is the Airplane's motto. I remember a town we played once called Grinnell, Iowa. All these kids came, man. The girls had on 1950's dresses and corsages and the guys all had crew cuts to prove their masculinity, and it brought them down to see their way threatened. They couldn't believe what they were seeing! They just sat there and didn't applaud or anything. So two years later we went back there and they were naked in the mud, totally freaked out on LSD. The whole country is changing, becoming more involved, and rock is the music that's changing them."

"Have you deliberately tried to inject social comment into the songs you write?"

"Not really. Your music has come from your own experience. mine was not a ghetto experience. I guess the closest I came was on the recording of White Rabbit. I read Alive In Wonderland as a child, and it wasn't until later, after I had tried drugs, that I began to get into it. I like Lewis Carroll, because it was obvious he was into opium."

"Lewis Carroll was into opium? Hmmm..."

"Oh sure. Alice has never been for kids, it's for adults. But I know adults read it to their kids, so the point of the song was to warn parents that Carroll was into the drugs scene, so don't put your kids down because they're into it. It was snide, I suppose, but I've always had a sarcastic mouth."
 

"But what I don't understand is why the kids need drugs to dig rock. It seems that if you need to get stoned to appreciate something, it must be flawed in the first place."

"Well, it's like, if you had the dough and the custard but no chocolate, you'd be missing part of the eclair. Drugs help the way aspirin helps get rid of a headache. Since we're still killing people, we haven't figured out a way to love each other, so drugs help. Pot is a very peaceful drug. The Airplane condones the judicious use of drugs, but that doesn't mean we want people to go out and harm themselves physically or blow their tops of their heads off with LSD. It's up to the individual to decide whether he should or shouldn't. I used to take acid myself because it was a wonderful, groovy experience, but I haven't been on a trip in a long time. I can't take drugs while working. One joint puts me to sleep, then I've gotta take speed to wake up, and that's like rotting you're brain out too early. I can't handle fifty things at once. The only time i get stone snow is when I'm writing music. It depends on individual needs. I know people who don't take anything and they're more stoned than I am. Van Gogh, Salvador Dali, people like that. They're crazy already, so they don't need it. I tried peyote and I was amazed at the amount of concentration I could put into and get out of a leaf. I sat in a room for four hours and i got more into textures and fibers than ever before. but I've never seen telephone poles turn into snakes, or anything like that. My main advice to kids about acid is don't drive, because you wont notice when the lights change. The steering wheel starts waving, and you stare at it and everybody starts honking behind you. The only time acid is really harmful is when it's preceded by fear. if you are afraid you are going to have a bad trip, you probably will."
 
 "I guess I'm not convinced."

"That's cool. You're not into that scene. I don't put that down. The best thing about the rock-drug scene is that nobody tries to force anything on anybody. That's why Peter Townshend of The Who hit abbie Hoffman over the head with a guitar on-stage at Woodstock. It wasn't time to try to force anybody into politics. I don't think I'm narrow-minded about music just because I sing rock. Listen, the only two records I owned for eight years were Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite and Irving Berlin's Say It With Music. On my recording of Rejoice I even patterned one horn section after Gil Evans. I used to play all of the arrangements he did for Miles Davis over and over. I played Sketches of Spain about eighty times a day. Now I don't listen to anything. I don't own a tv set, a telephone or a record player. The group usually buys a good record as a business expense, so I know I'll get to hear it somehow. Crosby, Stills and Nash are around the house singing everything anyway, so who needs to buy records? I like every kind of music, except country and western. I wasn't always into rock, you know."

True, she comes from a very straight, middle-class background that would probably consider her music noise. Her real name is Grace Wing. she was born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1939, her mother was "a pop singer-very square-sang Tea For Two a lot," and her father was an investment banker. She attended high school in Palo Alto, then spent a year at New York's fashionable and exclusive Finch College studying costume design  and merchandising, and a year at the university of Miami majoring in art. The revolt against formality and he Establishment was beginning about that time. "I hated all those rich debutantes at Finch," she says.

After two years of college, Grace dropped out and returned to San Francisco "To find out where my head was at." She had already studied classical guitar and found it a bore so she started hanging around the hippie folk-singers in Haight-Ashbury and learned how to accompany herself on the guitar and sing ballads like Barbara Allen. She hadn't yet broken entirely  with the establishment. She married a photographer named Jerry Slick and helped put him through school at San Francisco State College by modeling designer clothes at I. Magnin. "I was no-where. My old man was very square, I hated my job. I made extra money by growing pot in our backyard. We had a next-door neighbor who used to hang over the fence and say `Hey, Gracie, how's your plants?` She watered them for us when we were away. She never knew what she was watering.  Haight-Ashbury was a friendly place when I lived there. That was before it got overcrowded and violence broke out and the hippies started killing each other."

Eventually she quit her modeling job, tried LSD, bought a steel-string guitar and some cheap sound equipment at Sears Roebuck, and started singing with a band called the Great Society. "I looked around and saw how bad the competition was, so I decided what the hell." She insists that although rock has become big business, she is not in it for the money. "Everybody thinks we're rich and I suppose some of the rock groups are, although they tell me the Airplane has made millions of dollars, we're all broke. We have never been businessmen, so none of our earnings have ever been invested, and all of our money has been tied up in legal problems for years. We have no idea how much money has been stolen from us by bad managers, insensitive managers and crooks. Each member of the band gets $250 a week to live on, and everything else we make goes back into the group for expenses, sound equipment, lawyers. Nobody has any money in the bank. This house is all we own. The money from royalties and publishing is and all that is tied up in an old contract, and we never get a dime from any of it. We are always in trouble with the government over taxes. We're fighting it in court to get some of our money, but we've lost four times already."

So what are you into now, Grace Slick, with this new freedom? Ecology? "I would've been into it fifty years ago, but it's too late now. Nobody's going to give up their cars . Space is the only thing left, and there's not much of it. That's why Haight-Ashbury's dead. One cantaloupe rind doesn't smell as bad as forty cantaloupe rinds. All the hippies are moving into the mountains now."

Women's Lib? "It's pretty dumb. I mean, in the face of other things that are more important, it's flippant. It's like a lotta chicks suddenly decided `Hey, I don't like to cook!` and they're making a lotta noise about it. Well, theres a lotta things chicks can do that wont force them into a home. I've been around a lotta guys, not one of them has ever asked me to cook! I say `Hey, I don't cook, man I do this` and they say `Cool` I've never had some guy come up to me and say `Hey, how come you can't tell me how to tear apart a car?` I don't care if I can't sew either."

Religion? "I believe there's a lotta stuff going on out there, whether it's molecules or mud or whatever. But I don't believe in all that God junk. I've never talked to spirits, either. Never had any flashes. Man is the only animal that knows it's going to die, so we invent a heaven to keep from going crazy. Most people are hypnotized by organized religion from childhood; only a few really have the stuff. I don't think it's Billy Graham who has the stuff though."

I asked her if rock had taken the place of religion in the society of the young. With drugs to keep it going, wasn't it creating a new style of worship through the same hypnotic effect on the minds of the young she had just accused organized religion of doing? "I don't want to get philosophical about rock. It's just entertainment. Thirty years ago they went to Copacabana with their drug, which was cocktails, and they turned on for a few hours. We're doing the same thing. The one thing rock does is promote peace. If I go out and demonstrate with Abbie Hoffman and Jane Fonda, twenty-nine people sit around on their cans. So we stick together and promote peace through publicity, out interviews, and our music."

"Do you think rock will survive?" I asked.

"Well, the hardest thing about surviving is the outside influences, the dumb censorship from executives, and the right-wing jerks who get uptight about nudity and dirty language and all that junk. The cops and even record companies figure we take drugs and fornicate all the time, so they watch us pretty closely. Adults think it's a bunch a noise and the kids don't care anyway, so who do they think they're kidding?"

Grace has had many offers to be a star at ten times the money she's making now. he's not interested. "I don't know one entertainer I would ever watch for more than two songs. That whole Judy Garland package is a bore. Even Streisand- one or two tunes and I say `Okay, I've heard you baby! Three hours of Sammy Davis, Jr would be like They Shoot Horses, Dont They? So I wouldn't want to look at Grace Slick for three hours either."

The only thing left dangling is the future. "You can last longer in rock than you can in opera because so few technical demands are made on your voice. Also, the fans don't judge you so harshly. If an opera singer hits the wrong half-note she gets murdered. If they took out my vocal chords altogether, they'd probably say `Oh wow, far out- she's singing through her ears now!` But I've had three operations on my vocal cords already. My vocal structure is already weaker. I can't sing as long as I used to and my voice goes out fast. Five years ago I could go over a song fifty times in a recording session. I can't do that anymore. I used to sound like Joan Baez, now I sound like Louis Armstrong. My voice gets lower all the time- it gets used, abused, knocked around. My days are limited. But if I blow it completely, I'll just do something else. Rock is not my life's work. I've been drawing lately, and writing a lot too. If I stop singing it won't mean a thing to me. I'll get into another scene."

Like what? "I'd really like to do a film. The Airplane was in a Godard movie, but i'd like to do a project on my own. I was sent a script for a movie called Big Fauss And Little Halsey, but it stank, so I said no. Now I learn Robert Redford and Michael J. Pollard are in it. Damn! I blew it. But I still don't want to do anything that means backing up. Mary looks at John, John kisses Mary- that's bull. Too many other things to say and do. That's why nobody show dances or writes love songs anymore. People are getting killed, so who cares if John gets Mary in the end?"

I don't know who will get grace Slick in the end, but as we rode the electric elevator-chair down a back staircase, it occurred to me he might have his hands full but he'll never be bored. "I'm crazy," she was saying at the door, "but I'm at peace with myself. The way we live in this crazy house, we're all nuts, man. But it's fun. We're too lazy to hassle anybody, even each other. That's why I don't shoot heroin. I'm too lazy to get into it. Like paying taxes, I just don't bother to keep receipts. I guess I'm also a bit old-fashioned. I still drink liquor, which is probably a throwback to the Establishment. It's legal and easier to fool with than dope. Either way, I know where I'm at."

There was a noise at the front door and two hippies came in looking like the grave-diggers from Hamlet. The one with the red beard did all the talking. "Hey, Grace, we got a parade permit from the mayors office to celebrate the Age Of Aquarius. We got a ton of acid and we're gonna drop it on everybody in the street. We want you to be in the parade!"

She shot me a look: "Do you believe this, man?" Then she turned back to the hippies. "Far out, but we'll be on the road then. Try The Quicksilver Messenger Service or Pacific Gas & Electric."

Crestfallen, they shuffled past the broken toilet seat  on the front porch and headed off down the street. They didn't want The Quicksilver Messenger Service or Pacific Gas & Electric. They wanted Grace Slick.

Frankly, I don't blame them. But give her time. If I know Grace, she can start her own parades.