By Paul Freeman [1999 Interview]

A rock pioneer, Grace Slick made history in the 60s, joining Jefferson Airplane to sear the scene with such unforgettable tracks as “White Rabbit,” “Volunteers” and “Somebody to Love.” Her powerful, penetrating vocals paved the way for countless future women rockers.

Slick was among the era’s most influential faces of the counterculture. She flew through the 70s and 80s via Jefferson Starship. Starship’s hits included “We Built This City” and “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” In recent years, Slick has focused on creating stunning visual art.

Pop Culture Classics had the opportunity to talk with this icon upon the publication of her 1999 book, “Somebody to Love: A Rock and Roll Memoir.” Like Slick herself, the autobiography is outspoken, honest, brash, entertaining and one-of-a-kind.

POP CULTURE CLASSICS:
The book is really entertaining.

GRACE SLICK:
Yeah, I was hoping it would be a fast, kind of fun read. Nothing too serious.

PCC:
In the process of putting it together, did you get any different sort of perspective on your life?

SLICK:
Not really. I’m just surprised I’m alive. That’s a nice surprise I’ve got there.

PCC:
Yeah, a lot of the people you mention in the book are no longer with us. As far as surviving, do you see that as being just fate or your constitution or mental toughness?

SLICK:
No, I think that’s probably just luck. I don’t attribute it to any particular… well, it’s also I think that because it hurts too much to really be a raver on a consistent basis. So I had to pull back… or somebody else would make me pull back, which may have made me save my ass.

PCC:
But would say that sex and drugs are integral parts of rock ’n’ roll? Are they really inseparable?

SLICK:
Well, I don’t know about sex. I don’t think you have to have drugs. I don’t know if you even have to have sex. Probably you could have neither and do rock ’n’ roll. I’m not sure what kind of an effort that would be, but you don’t have to have sex and you don’t have to have drugs.

PCC:
But it makes it more fun?

SLICK:
[Laughs] It does, if you don’t die.

PCC:
Was the fun primarily what attracted you to rock music?

SLICK:
Well, primarily. Also, I went to see the Airplane play, at a club called The Matrix in San Francisco. And I was modeling at I Magin [a high-end department store]. And they were making more in one hour than I was making in a week. And they were having more fun doing it. And I thought that looked like a better job. So primarily, I wasn’t like this big person, studied at Julliard and I’ve always wanted to be a musician and all that kind of stuff. I just thought it was like a much better job than the one I was doing.

PCC:
It seemed like, in reading the book, you had a happy childhood, well-adjusted. There was no great rebellion you had to satisfy.

SLICK:
No… until I start reading newspapers and hearing about what’s going on in the world, that people thought it was a real good idea to go in and stomp people to death and so forth. I just thought it was kind of silly. I thought it was a stupid way to try and accomplish things and that, if making love made two people feel good, who else’s business is it? I mean, including the President of the United States. He has a problem with perjury. That’s another thing.

But as far as making love, the problem that kids have nowadays is that it’ll kill you, because all the diseases that we had at the time could be either waited out or you put some cream on it or you’d do something and it goes away. They don’t have that now.

And if they don’t stop testing on animals, they’re never going to find one cure for one goddamn thing. They’re different than we are. You can’t use animals for testing. They keep testing it on rats and stuff with AIDS. They aren’t going to find anything. They haven’t found anything yet.

PCC:
How old were you when your family moved to Palo Alto?

SLICK:
Oh, I was about eight, nine.

PCC:
And you enjoyed that environment?

SLICK:
Oh, yeah, I like pretty much wherever I am, unless it’s really hot. Palo Alto is flat. I know that sounds like a funny thing to say, but it’s flat. And you can ride a bicycle anywhere. And bicycles when I was young, and cars now, mean freedom to me. I can go anywhere I want, do anything I want and nobody can get at me, because I’m moving [Laughs]

PCC:
It was surprising to see that Betty Grable was actually an early inspiration.

SLICK:
Oh, yes, for sure. People think of Betty Grable as this pin-up in the second World War, in the barracks, which she was. But her movies, there’s one called “The Shocking Miss Pilgrim,” which was particularly feminist - that’s not my favorite . But there was “Lady in Ermine,” which was very fanciful.

There was another one called “Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend,” in which she wore fabulous outfits, looked good, told jokes, could shoot, was an amazing shot with a pistol. She was a school teacher, so she was bright. She didn’t like what a judge had to say, so she shot him in the ass. I mean, I thought that was a fabulous film. I mean, you can dress up and you sing in saloons, you have a good time, you look great, you’re bright and can pretty much get away with anything, because she shot the guy in the ass and left town. It was a lot more free and feminist kind of thing - although that wasn’t what they were pushing - that movie in particular, than anything I’ve seen since.

PCC:
When you were sifting through all the possibilities for the book, how difficult was it to decide what to include and what to leave out?

SLICK:
Well, that’s when a co-write comes in. She would come over and talk to me and put it down on tape, ask me about this, ask me about that. She would write down what she thought would be good and then fax it back to me. But it didn’t sound like my voice. It sounded like this nice, kind of regular person. I love her. She’s my good friend. But it didn’t sound like me, so we flipped it around, where she would suggest, “Okay, tell me about so-and-so.” And I would write it. And then it sounded like me, because it’s that sarcastic kind of voice. So she would refresh my memory. She would say, “What about this time, when you were with so-and-so. Tell me about your childhood. No, I don’t want to hear about your school, because nobody… Tell me about the da-da-da.” She was the one who got that organized.

PCC:
At any point, was there a split second where you thought, “Do I want to reveal this about myself?”

SLICK:
No. I like to go around in the universe assuming that everything I do can be seen by somebody or something, because then you don’t have any secrets. Then you don’t think of yourself as this big jerk and you’re hiding all of this stuff. I really don’t care at all what people know, because whatever they think is their business and whatever I’m doing, unless it affects them, is my business. And if they want to know about my business, fine, I don’t have anything to hide.

PCC:
What about family and friends, any concern about what they might like to see or not see in print?

SLICK:
Oh, of course. And that’s why some of the names were changed in there, because I don’t want to trash people. But some of the stories involved people where the story wouldn’t make any sense if I didn’t put them in, but it would make them look foolish or it would make them look like whatever, that they might not like. Or that their family might not like. Or their children or something. So I would change their name.

PCC:
There are so many people nowadays who romanticize the 60s, particularly the San Francisco scene. Do you view it that way?

SLICK:
Well, it pretty much was that way for probably about a year-and-a-half or two years. The ideals that you can have either when you’re young or old or whenever, and if you have a number of people who feel that things can be changed either right here, with us, meaning that particular group of people we were all hanging out with, or maybe we can also help to change the rest of the world, so that nobody wants to go around and drop bombs on people and that sex is not a bad thing, it’s a good thing, all that make love, not war stuff.

We thought maybe people would understand that, through education. And if the education were interesting, like rock ’n’ roll music is kind of interesting, rather than a history book, we thought maybe we could do it that way. And, to a certain extent, those things happened, and are happening. It just takes a lot longer than we’d like.

PCC:
You don’t see the current music scene as being totally barren, then?

SLICK:
No, not at all. Some people say, “Oh, well, there haven’t been any good musicians since Beethoven.” That isn’t true. I mean, genetics don’t work that way. You’re going to have certain people who are born to be fabulous musicians, in any era. And you just can’t say the music scene is barren. Maybe the recognition of certain people is barren.

In other words, a great musical form, which is not very much recognized now, an almost semi-classical form, is soundtracks. But nobody pays much attention to soundtracks. I’m not talking about compiling a bunch of rock ’n’ roll music. I’m talking about when composers write soundtracks like James Horner for “Zorro.” The guy’s amazing. People don’t pay much attention to that. But that’s another form that gets little recognition. You don’t hear a whole hell of a lot of Chinese music either. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff we don’t know about or don’t recognize.

PCC:
But the mainstream music scene has become so corporate.

SLICK:
Well, there’s no way out of that, is there? I mean, everything is corporate. Who owns you? I’m owned by, right now. Warners. Warner Brothers [Warner Books published the memoir] - big corporation. The last record I put out - Sony, big corporation. Everybody goes through a corporation, that’s the way it is. You can go live in the woods and not be part of a corporation. But you’d pretty much have to go live in the woods to not be.

PCC:
With things like the Lilith Fair, there’s a lot of attention to women in rock lately. Some people have tried to dismiss it as a fad. Does that bother you, when you hear that kind of thing?

SLICK:
No, it tends to turn me off, when people say “women in rock.” It’s like “pigs can count.” It’s demeaning. I’m not all that crazy about it. I’d rather just have a festival where you have both women and men. The minute you announce that you’re a woman doing something, you announce that maybe you can make it and maybe you can’t. Oh, gee, isn’t she adventurous? It never occurred to me. People in the 60s were like, “Oh, well, we’re going to go burn our bras.” Well, I think it’d be better if you went to law school. You want to be a lawyer. Don’t burn your bra, go to law school.

PCC:
But were you conscious of opening doors back then?

SLICK:
No, I was very naive. I just figured everybody did what it is they wanted to do. And if you want to stay around home and raise a bunch of kids, that’s an art form. And make it an art form. I didn’t realize people were doing all this stuff and they didn’t want to do it. I thought people had more balls than that, including women.

PCC:
The aborted visit to the Nixon White House, it certainly conjures up a lot of possibilities. What did you hope to accomplish with that mission?

SLICK:
We just wanted to get Nixon loaded.

PCC:
What did you think that would lead to?

SLICK:
We didn’t know. Just make it different. We didn’t like it the way it was and we thought, “If the guy took enough acid, maybe he’d get so nuts they’d take him out of office. Or, the positive side was, maybe he’d see, as we did, when we took acid, things weren’t exactly the way you thought they were… and maybe he’d make some adjustments to his policies [chuckles].

Or maybe he’d just get real nuts for about eight hours and that would change somebody else around him’s view of him and lead to some other things. It would definitely have changed things. He was nutty enough anyway. We found out later that he, on the natch, used to walk around, talking to the pictures. So maybe if we’d given him acid, no one would have noticed.

PCC:
Do you look at all these memorable incidents in your life and think of it as a great adventure?

SLICK:
Yeah, but all of life is like that, if we’ve got our eyes open. It’s only when we’re frightened and pull back and in fear that life seems to be hideous. But there’s so much stuff to appreciate, so much stuff to do, so many people to love. It’s just so full. And the only time I don’t see it is when I’m afraid of something.

PCC:
You seem to be fearless. What are you afraid of?

SLICK:
Death. I don’t know what comes after it. I love the storyline going on here. This is one big, living soap opera. And I don’t like the business of, “Okay, you get to watch it up to this point. Okay, now you can’t watch anymore.” [Laughs] That really annoys me.

PCC:
But you’re open the possibility of reincarnation?

SLICK:
Oh, yeah. But reincarnation does not guarantee that you’re going to see the continuity. Like there was a story about a woman named Bridey Murphy, in the 40s, who remembered everything about this Irish village that she’d lived in 100 years before that. And she couldn’t have possibly known about it. And that got a real interest going in reincarnation for a while in this country. But the problem is, most people don’t remember. There’s no continuity. In other words, if I could remember what my last reincarnation was and the one before that and see the continuity of what I’m trying to do, it seems like it’d be a lot easier to figure out the path you’re supposed to be taking - what kind of crap are you doing that you’re supposed to be cleaning up?

Now, I am Norwegian, but I have a tremendous affinity for everything Spanish. And I’ve known certain things - I mentioned in the book, I went to a movie one time and they cut from one scene to another and they started pulling the camera back and before they came back and said anything, I knew it was San Juan Capistrano. I knew it was a mission in San Juan Capistrano. And I’ve never been there.

I have this thing about going through a specific canyon down here, Malibu Canyon. And I feel like I’ve been there before. And I was Spanish. And I feel like I came from a Spanish family. Not Mexican. Spain. I was on the wrong side, meaning the conquering conquistadors. It’s very clear. But that’s the only continuity that I know of. And that sounds really bizarre - Shirley MacLaine time.

PCC:
There must be some comfort in those kind of feelings.

SLICK:
No, because maybe there’s an area in the brain that is capable of creating what it wants to create and makes it so strong that you just do stuff like that. I don’t know. If it were comforting, I wouldn’t be annoyed with dying.

PCC:
Do you feel healthy now?

SLICK:
No. I’ll be 60 in a little over a year. I’ll be 59 on October 30th. And you notice that you are decaying. And you can feel it. And it keeps reminding you that you are dying. I don’t go around thinking about this kind of stuff all the time, otherwise I’d be miserable. But it does occur to me. Dying and decaying and death occurs to me a lot more now than it did when I was 25, which is reasonable. That’s the way it is. It is natural. But that doesn’t mean I like it a lot…

You’re the one that’s asking the questions. if you print this article, so that I am constantly talking about death, they’ll think, “Jesus Christ, what’s the matter with her?” I didn’t bring this stuff up, you did.

PCC:
Right [chuckles] Does being clean and sober give you more energy?

SLICK:
Not really. You just don’t have hangovers.

PCC:
You’ve said that alcohol is really the most insidious drug.

SLICK:
It’s the most powerful, yes. It can turn you into an asshole right this second… or at least in 15 minutes, on an empty stomach. I mean, it’s just really powerful. Very few other drugs turn you into that big of a jerk that fast. Looking at some of the prisoners in our prisons, these are alcohol or drug-related crimes. They’re committed while they were loaded. But it’s mostly alcohol.

PCC:
How difficult was it to leave that behind?

SLICK:
Oh, it’s never difficult to leave it behind. It’s difficult to stay stopped. It’s easy for me to stop, because I don’t drink every day. I’m periodic. Be loaded for a couple of days and then not for a month. Loaded for one night and then not for six months. So I go for very long periods of time just on my own, because it’s hard on me. Alcohol is real hard on you. But I don’t think that. I like being sober and I like being drunk. I get bored with being any one way. I like experimenting with getting my head somewhere else. It’s not because I’m miserable. It’s just because I enjoy it.

I mean, you don’t go to a movie because you’re miserable. You go to a movie because it’s different. You’re going to think about Charlton Heston perhaps for two hours or Antonio Banderas or some Trainspotter, whatever you’re going to see. You don’t go to a movie because, “Oh, I’m really miserable, I want to get away from my life.” The same things with drugs. That can be entertainment. Unfortunately, they’re kind of deadly, too.

PCC:
Have you found new ways to take your mind to a different place?

SLICK:
Oh, yeah. I can do that with any of the arts. I like any of the arts. Doesn’t really matter which one - music or drawing or sculpture. I make jewelry out of hardware. There are different ways of doing it. It’s just that drugs are faster. In other words, that’s a real fast way of getting from point A to point B. But again, like I said before, it’s like Russian Roulette.

PCC:
So you’re still very active creatively, though not so much musically?

SLICK:
I have pretty much done that since I was a kid. I’ve always had something going on with one of the arts or the other. There’s something always going on.

PCC:
Any second thoughts about stepping away from the rock world, when there are so many 60s and 70s artists still out there performing?

SLICK:
No, that’s fine. In other words, people never ask me, “Do you have second thoughts about stepping away from the fifth grade there and going into the sixth grade?”

PCC:
So how do you view those artists who are in their 50s and 60s, still rocking out on stage?

SLICK:
Well, that’s their problem. Or their choice. If they want to do it and people want to show up, fabulous.

PCC:
But it’s not like the blues, where performers can just get better with age?

SLICK:
You can tend to get a little silly-looking, if you’re 55, trying to look like you’re 25, singing the same songs you sang when you were 25. It’s a little rough. It’s hard to do… for me. And harder to watch.

PCC:
Was it difficult making the transition to Los Angeles from the Bay Area?

SLICK:
No. I was born in Chicago. I don’t remember it, but my parents moved to Los Angeles. I was there for about a year-and-a-half, then San Francisco for about seven years, Palo Alto for nine, New York for one, Miami for one then came back and started going on the road. I’m used to moving around.

PCC:
You’re near your daughter now?

SLICK:
Yeah, she lives down here, too.

PCC:
And that bolsters your relationship?

SLICK:
Oh, I’m sure it’s a lot tighter. If I’d stayed in San Francisco, I’d talk to her on the phone and then see her once every four months, when one of us went to the other city. China and I both have the same pattern, are sober together. I love her. And I also like her. Usually you love your kids, but you may not like them. But she’s also very interesting, a funny little person.

PCC:
You’re still involved in animal rights?

SLICK:
What I did for four years, when I was in Northern California, from 1990 to 1994, I was studying medical books and medical papers, AMA white papers, an amazing array of research about biomedical research. And then I’d go on radio or television and argue with the guys from the University of California about whether or not you can extrapolate information from animal to man, whether it’s scientifically feasible, whether it’s a good idea scientifically, not morally - that’s a whole other thing. That’s - don’t kill animals, because they have feelings. That’s one area. The other are is - does it work scientifically?

Apparently not, because we haven’t found a cure for one goddamn thing, really, like treat symptoms. And some diseases just go away, anyway. But if they don’t stop working on animals and start working on prevention, we’re just going to have the same diseases and more. But it’s a very lucrative business - animal research. It’s not science. The reason they use mice is not because they’re so much like us. It’s because they’re easy to handle. Any moron who steps back from that one a minute can see that easy to handle, cheap and reproduce fast is not our good scientific theory.

PCC:
With all the adventures you’ve gone through, what are you looking forward to, down the road?

SLICK:
Whatever comes up. Whatever’s going on right now, that’s what interests me - with me, with my friends, with the world, with art, with anything. So whatever comes up is what I’m going to do… or not do, whatever the choice is.

PCC:
So other than writing the book, you don’t like spending time reflecting on the past?

SLICK:
Not really. It was suggested to me by a friend of mine who’s a lawyer, lives in San Francisco, his name is Brian Rohan [of Fillmore Management; his clients included Ken Kesey, Neil Cassady and The Grateful Dead]. He came over to visit me in Malibu. He said, “What are you doing there?” I said, “I’m drawing.” And he went, “Oh, well, you really ought to write a book,” as if drawing doesn’t exist or something [laughs].

And I said, “Brian, I don’t want to write a book.” “You ought to write an autobiography.” I said, “I don’t like going backwards. I like what I’m doing now.” And he said, “Well, just talk to this friend of mine.” “Okay, I’ll talk to her.” I talked to her for seven hours. Finally at the end of being badgered by her, I thought, “Well, it is an experience I’ve never had. I’ve never written a book. Go ahead, write a book.” So I did. The experience of writing was great. It was a lot of fun, putting it together. Going around the country now is not as interesting as it once was, because airports are hideous and air travel is kind of repulsive. But apart from that it’s nice.

PCC:
Any plans on making your artwork available to the public?

SLICK:
If people want to buy it, as it is, that’s fine. There was an art dealer in San Francisco who apparently talked to my book agent and she showed him copies of a bunch of stuff I’d done. He said, “Well, I really like this and this. And I wish she’d draw this kind of style and then we’ll show it.” Because art dealers don’t know what to do with you, if you don’t have a style. And it just cracked me up. Yeah, I’ll be drawing like an art gallery owner tells me how to draw? I don’t think so. So I don’t really care. If somebody wants to buy one, fine. If they don’t want to buy it, that’s okay, too. I’ll keep doing it anyway. I just do it, because I like it.

At age 77, she’s still creating. You can find news about Grace Slick and her artwork by visiting: www.limelightagency.com/Grace-Slick/news/news.html