SF Chronicle September 7th, 1998

1960s icon Grace Slick releases autobiography

    Decked out in black from her eyeliner to her platform sandals, Grace Slick is chain smoking and pondering the cosmos.

     ``Charles Manson has almost the same birth sign as me. He has about five signs in Scorpio and I have about four,'' TheJefferson Airplane singer told the San Francisco Chronicle.
 ``So I'm real close to being Charles. Except I can't think of anybody I care enough about to kill. I'd rather keep them alive and torture them. Call them every morning at 4 a.m. for the rest of their lives,'' she said.

    Slick's life has often resembled a sideshow populated by geniuses, psychopaths, drug addicts, rock stars and any number of edgy outsiders.

     Slick, 58, spearheaded a psychedelic scene that grew from a San Francisco phenomenon into an international movement. She took Yippie founder Abbie Hoffman as her date to a White House tea and plotted to dose Richard Nixon with LSD. She then became one of the few 1960s stars to weather the '70s by helping to transform the band into Jefferson Starship.

    And she's lived to tell the story in a casual autobiography, ``Somebody to Love?,'' published this month by Warner Books and written with friend Andrea Cagan.

     She admits, though, that the whole literary venture wasn't her idea. ``I didn't want to write a book. They made me do it,'' she said.
 

And here's the editors's review of that interview

An Explosive Personality

There's a famous theatrical dictum that if you show a gun in the first act, it needs to go off by the end of the second.

In Neva Chonin's interview with Grace Slick, the gun shows up about halfway through the story, and it never goes off. But Slick certainly does.

``If I were gay, life would be a lot simpler. I'm kind of annoyed that I'm not,'' she told Chonin during a long interview in Malibu. Chonin went to discuss Slick's new autobiography, ``Somebody to Love?'' but wound up hearing about everything from vile local architecture to potential plastic surgery.

``I'd like to have a whole head transplant,''offered Slick, ``and I'd do it in a New York second if they could promise me there'd be no pain.''

Chonin's story starts on Page 34. And Joel Selvin weighs in with a critical look at ``Somebody to Love?'' on Page 3 of Book Review.

We've written a lot about Grace Slick through the years, from her stint in the Great Society, her pre- Jefferson Airplane band, to the fire that burned down her home in Marin County and caused her to move to Los Angeles in 1994.

Through it all, Slick has given great quotes --``I'm very fond of drugs,'' she told us in 1981 -- and today's story is no exception.

Chonin describes her as ``an explosive personality.'' Finding the gun, which wasn't loaded, amounted to an ``aha moment'' for her. ``I was wandering around taking in the place, counting off all her stuffed toys, and suddenly there's this handgun sitting there,'' Chonin says. ``For some reason, I wasn't surprised. She was very blase about it, like having a handgun on the coffee table was the most pedestrian thing in the world.

``Her book prepped me for her -- it's so off-the-wall,'' Chonin continues. ``But I wasn't prepared for how timelessly eccentric she is. She could've been famous in any era, just for being Grace Slick. She just happened to land in the '60s.''

LIZ LUFKIN, EDITOR