Trouble Girls

HISTORY IS THE STRAIGHT YARN OF TIME KNIT ON A CIRCULAR NEEDLE. WANDA Jackson wasn't the only person to abandon rock & roll in the early sixties. In college towns across the country, girls grew their hair and calloused their fingers learning bar chords. Teens on Top Forty could harmonize about their boyfriends all they wanted; but it was Joan Baez, keeing over ancient betrayals and protesting diverse injustice, who'd made the cover of Time magazine. Baez's success proved that what abolitionist had discovered in the nineteenth century held true in the twentieth: Americans can be peculiarly receptive to the notion of a woman revolutionary- especially is young, beautiful, and comes from a well-connected family.

Anti authoritarian by tradition, and anticomercial by default, folk became the alternative voice of the 1960's. Like later scenes, it was a place where women and other non-mainstream voices- such as Dylan's prematurely withered rasp- flourished, especially as a growing antiwar movement began questioning traditional masculine roles. By 1966, it seemed that half the hip new bands out of California had a muscular-voiced woman in their midst: Tracy Nelson, Janis Joplin, Cass Elliot. It was as if their presence mirrored the music's fusion of previously separate categories- folk and rock, poetic lyrics and cranked amps, dance-hall rhythms and utopian dreams. And suddenly the dreams were elsewhere.

The lone female on a stage full of long-haired men strode between speaker towers like an empress, porcelain-faced and brilliant in her Chinese robes. Even her name was perfect. Grace Slick: Willowy Metal, Classical Plastic. What began as an accident of marriage had become a mind-expanding zeugma for the age. She raised the microphone and the crowd looked up expectantly. Jefferson Airplane was San Francisco's pioneering psychedelic band, so she might be going to tell them about flowing with the changes or beginning to see the light. Instead her question crackled like a whip above their heads: "which one of you has the biggest cock?"

It was the Summer of Love and the newest Queen of the Teens was almost thirty. But Slick's California childhood featured professorial Palo Alto and a father in investments. And among the many privileges of upper-middle-class life in the 1960s was the freedom to join the generation of one's choice. If that generation remembers Slick uncertainty, it may be partly the fault of the drugs of the time. "Sure, I saw the Airplane," you say, but what remains in memory is a cloud of strawberry incense and the hole in the shirt of the boy in front of you, torn threads waving like tiny hands. That, and Slick's voice.

A pipe organ crossed with an electric drill is one way to describe it. Another is: She was the first singer to cut through a mix with a sustained steel authority of an electric guitar. Vulnerable she was not. Joplin offered ragged pieces of her heart with every breath; Slick rarely sang love songs and when she did, she might be found coolly suggesting, "why don't we go on as three" It was a solution that had proved useful in her own marriage.

In fact, two decades before a truthful and daring Madonna emerged in gangster suits and conical bra, Slick was flouting expectations and exploiting images of female power and sexuality. In New York, always a tough town for a lady, she changed her silks for Hitler drag- trench coat, tight little bun, and fake mustache- and  conducted her songs as an interrogation. "Do you vant somebody to luf?"  Male rockers had racks of outlaw archetypes to choose from- stardust cowboy, slinky devil, gypsy king. Women had to sew their own. Among the personas Slick pioneered were acid priestess, mother superior, revolutionary warrior, and alien queen. But the role she's most remembered for is bitch.

in 1966, shortly after the release of their first album, male members of Jefferson Airplane told critic Ralph J Gleaon that they were hoping to replace soprano Signe Anderson with Slick. Gleason, though a champion of the San Francisco sound, objected. Not on Anderson's behalf- her new baby had already distracted the Airplane on tour- and not on account of Slick's mesmerizing voice or purple miniskirts. Rather, he reportedly argued with Jurassic logic, "every band with a female singer has had problems." In fact, Grace's problem was not only her gender but the self-conciously alternative culture she came to represent.

She was never a folkie. after tea-serving lessons at Manhattan's Finch College, marriage to Palo Alto neighbor, and a stint of fashion modeling while husband Jerry attended film school, her life was changed by rock & roll- specifically, the echoey mutation she heard the newly formed Airplane play at a San Francisco club in the summer of 1965. inspired, she formed a band, the great Society, with her husband and brother-in-law. Their show stoppers were "Somebody to love" and Grace's improbable synthesis of Ravel's Bolero and Alice In Wonderland. ("White Rabbit", she told one interviewer, was written after tripping to Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain.) not coincidentally, they were the songs that put Jefferson Airplane on the map and established Grace as the official trips guide for a generation.

Lysergic Acid was only one of the revolutions she preached. In 1968 Tricia Nixon's fellow finch alumna could be seen giving the black-power salute on national TV. On 1969's Volunteers, Slick's "up against the wall, motherfuckers" soured above the guitars like a banner: if nothing else, grace and her cohorts had stormed the barricades of corporate censorship. What we took for granted seems remarkable now: a fearless, authoritative, frankly female voice claiming rock & roll as a political force- arguing the case, even, and not just on paper. When Slick laid out her case, you could- if you didn't mind a back beat- dance to it

But after the frenzy- the be-ins, the riots in the streets, the communal house with the pharmaceutical coke in the factory-sealed bottles- there were the times when the gimlet-tounged guru in the ankle-strap shoes sounded, well, didactic. There were alot of Artemis in her Aphrodite- or maybe it was just that her style has honed at outdoor concerts and acoustically challenged dance halls. She ended up with a voice made almost exclusively for anthems, whether that meant doctrinaire through lusciously choral declamations like "Crown of Creation" or millinaiian visions like "Wooden Ships." But as the seventies stretched into the eighties, doctrine and visions both fell into disrepute, and the notion of music animating social action quickly came to seem antique.

It also became clear that female voices had become identified with any wordy melodic contrast to rock's mindless thrust. Oh, there were women playing in lots of bands- Fairport Convention, Fleetwood Mac, Slick's post-Airplane incarnation, Jefferson Starship- most of them bands with folk roots. True rock was felt to be deeply metal and wholly male, and a woman who stopped hoped to storm it's ranks i the early part of the decade id so in drag: Suzi Quatro and Joan Jett in black leather jackets; Patti Smith in a tie. In the end, though, their voices gave them away: They weren't strong enough to rewrite rock's de facto definition. Blue jeans were blue, even when they were black.