The Telegraph

Daily Telegraph. Tuesday, December 29, 1998. Page 15 (features)

Grace Slick Still wants to shock

Jefferson Airplane's singer was at the centre of flower power. She talks to Charles Laurence about drugs, drink - and old age.
 

It is difficult to believe that the middle-age woman who is walking rather stiffly, towards me across a sparkling  lifornian kitchen was responsible for one of the most famous druggy anthems of the Sixties - "White Rabbit".
The howling, strident notes of that song - "one pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small" - made the Top 10 around the world . Its writer and singer was Grace Slick, a girl with big oval eyes, a long pale face and gipsy-black  hair,  who belonged to a band with a funny name - Jefferson Airplane (later, Jefferson Starship). Together, they
were the very embodiment of the swirly, hippy values of 1967, the Summer of Love.

Today, Slick's hair is still long, straight and black, although too much so to be natural. Her eyes seem smaller, possibly because her face is so much fleshier, and her chin has all but disappeared. She pulls angrily at  the folds of skin on her neck; one day, she thinks, she might pluck up enough courage to have cosmetic surgery.
It is hard to tell how well she has aged elsewhere ("badly", she insists), because she is wearing a dark, loose ensemble of cardigan-cum-kaftan and leggings.

Today she is stiff and awkward because she has done something to her back. It might have been while she was shifting flower pots, although they weren't heavy - and that is the distressing part; the crick in her neck might be just one more sign of advancing age, she says.

After a struggle, she finds a comfortable spot on a little chintzy sofa in the kitchen den. Her home, which is neither large nor flashy, overlooks the hilly coast at Malibu, north of Los Angeles - a long way from her old headquarters at Haight-Ashbury in ~ San Francisco.

"'Mentally, I'm actually still pretty much the same jerk I was 40 years ago," says Slick, pulling a face. "It's having the body of a 60-year-old that gets to me. I still can't believe I'm going to be 60 next year. A good few of her best friends from the old days are long gone. Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix were the first, followed by Jim Morrison of the Doors. Two of the Grateful Dead have also died - one in the early Seventies, and, more recently, Jerry Garcia.

Slick gave up singing in public only in 1989, although she still warbles to herself in the privacy of her kitchen and scribbles the, odd lyric on file cards. But for most of the Seventies and all of the Eighties, she was only on the road for the money, and nobody  took much notice.

"There is something painful, something sad, about seeing people of my
age performing with a rock band," she says. "I watch Mick Jagger singing
"Satisfaction", and think: 'Boy, if you still can't find satisfaction, with all your money and at your age, there really is something wrong!' If I were still singing "White Rabbit" now, I would be like one of those old women with red lipstick and blonde wigs you see on Hollywood Boulevard."

Now Slick has written a memoir, "Grace Slick: Somebody to Love?", which contains quite a few good rock and roll anecdotes - including the story of her infamous sexual encounter with Jim Morrison, a conquest about which she still boasts. However, as a writer, she has a tendency to be rather vague when it comes to detail - places, dates, names. They say that if you can remember the Sixties, you weren't there, and if her book is anything to go by, Slick was definitely there.

"People have said that the book  could have done with more detail, more stories. Well, my reply is that if you can remind me of parties at which I didn't end up passing out, I'll write about, them..." It is not, she says, that she is ashamed; or has anything to hide. In America, a country consumed by the shame of its President's love life, criticism has been levelled at Slick for her refusal to feel remorse for the excess of her young years. But she remains adamant that she is not about to join any backlash against the Sixties.

"I am getting a lot of hell for not saying sorry in the book, and I am very aware that people think we ought to apologise for over-the-top hedonistic behaviour," she says. "But you know what? I don't think drugs are so bad. I had a great time. The weird thing is that the two dumbest drugs, and the two that really seem to get you, alcohol and tobacco, are legal."

With that, she lights a cigarette: Europeans, she observes, are rather more "balanced" in their attitude to smoking. But, even so, she gives me a challenging look as she sparks up. There is something childish about this; for all her talk of ageing, Slick seems to have retained the urge for petty, in-your-face rebellion. "I never give up anything until it hurts me," she says. "And, so far cigarettes haven't hurt me."

Rather pathetically, she still loves to shock: her book is strong. on intimate physical details of the various stars she has known and loved, and she devotes a prurient section to her single attempt to be fashionably bisexual.

"You know what. I really regret?" she goes on. "I regret not realising at the time the power I had as a rock star to get my groupies. I regret not getting Jimi Hendrix into bed and not getting Peter O'Toole. I realise now I should have called O'Toole up, and invited myself over for a date."

They could at least have shared a few drinks. Even in the days of peace and love Slick was a fairly conventional hell-raiser, forever getting arrested for drink-driving in her James Bond-style Aston Martin. She even kept a gun in her bedside cabinet "Peace and love were concepts to explore," she pronounces, "and they're still not exactly happening on a broad basis."

And for all her defiant talk about drugs, it turns out that she never really liked them  much anyway. Marijuana made her feel woozy and out of control, and she was always cautious when it came to LSD,  taking only a few shavings  from the little yellow pills. Her own troubles have chiefly stemmed from excess alcohol and it is for that more conventional vice that she has followed a galaxy of stars into "re-hab". The last treatment as 18 months ago, when she checked in with her daughter, China, 27, after a four-day binge. China's like me: a binge drinker. We get started and can't stop. It's in the genes."

Slick was born into an upper middle-class San Francisco family, but, as a teenager, she found herself drifting towards  the beatnik culture of the Beach district. "I never really knew why," she says, "there was just something about the lifestyle, the hedonism, that I found really attractive."

However, while her beatnik friends lived in penury and spent their time writing poetry, Slick went to an elite             "finishing" school in New York. After graduating from university in Florida, she seemed destined for a career in law until a friend sent her a newspaper column about the new "hipster" scene in San Francisco. Intrigued, she came hack to see what it was all about.

Once home, she married Jerry Slick, the rich kid from next door, in a grand white wedding, and together they formed a band. It was good enough to get her noticed: Jefferson Airplane recruited her after a show at the Fillmore West, then the epicentre of the hippy universe. The marriage lasted for nearly 15 years - although, for more than 12 they lived apart. During that time she became involved with Paul Kantner, the founder and leader of Jefferson Airplane, and, in 1971, she gave birth to China - now a somewhat unlucky television actress, soon to marry a dentist.

In the late Seventies, she and Kantner drifted apart, and she met Skip Johnson, a stage lighting director and roadie. This marriage lasted until the late Eighties. China seems to have been an angry teenager; who complained that Slick
was a bad mother who messed her up by being away on the road, or chasing men, and never making her a priority. "She was a kid who objected to the life I had to lead," says her mother. "She took it hard when her parents  were away. She was troubled, but we've bonded now; we're best friends. She is a great person with a great sense of humour.

These days, Slick lives alone. Her last live-in lover turned out to be a manic-depressive whose rages led to her most recent dangerous confrontation with the police. While very drunk, she had refused to put down her shot-gun when  they came to the house. She is still on probation.

"I am terrible when confronted with authority, and do stupid things," she admits. "But I also discovered that I don't know how to deal with the real nutty stuff. This (her husband's depression) was way out of control." She has always, she thinks, been too passionate. When she starts a fling with a man, she still gets too caught up, "too focused", and that, in turn, leads to too much "drama". She says earnestly that she is now ready to calm down and live quietly - she has even been attending New Age sessions on learning how to accept the decline of the body gracefully.

She looks solemn as she describes these classes, as if she is really trying to take such ideas seriously. It is hard, however, to imagine her embracing Californian approaches to spirituality for very long. And for all her faults, she is easier to take as the raucous, troublesome, rather naive Grace Slick.

"Actually," she continues, "you never know. I'm bound to run into another man. And as for getting old and wise, I just don't think I am spiritual enough. Perhaps, when it comes to it, I'll just stick a great big needle of morphine in my neck and go out with one last high."  It is a disgusting thing to say, and she knows it. Slick tips back her
head and laughs, all the while keeping her eyes open, looking for a reaction.

Somebody to Love? by Grace Slick (Virgin) is published on January 21 and
will be available for £16-99 from Telegraph Books Direct, 24, Seward
Street, London EC1V 3GB; or call 0541 557222, quoting ref. PT012.