Grace Slick
Grace Slick (born Grace Barnett Wing, October 30, 1939) is an American artist, painter and retired singer-songwriter. Slick was a key figure in San Francisco’s early psychedelic music scene in the mid-1960s. With a music career spanning four decades, she first performed with The Great Society, but is best known for her work with Jefferson Airplane and the subsequent successor bands Jefferson Starship and Starship. Slick and Jefferson Airplane first achieved fame with their 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow, which included the top-ten Billboard hits “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love”. She provided the lead vocals on both tracks. With Starship, she sang co-lead for two number one hits, “We Built This City” and “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”. She would also release four solo albums. Slick retired from music in 1990, but continues to be active in the visual arts field.
Grace Barnett Wing was born October 30, 1939, in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Illinois to Ivan Wilford Wing (1907–1987), of Norwegian and Swedish descent, and Virginia Wing (née Barnett; 1910–1984). Her parents met while they were both students at the University of Washington, and later married. In 1949, her brother Chris was born. Her father, working in the investment banking sector for Weeden and Company, was transferred several times when she was a child, and in addition to the Chicago metropolitan area, she lived in Los Angeles and San Francisco, California, before her family finally settled in Palo Alto, California in the early 1950s.
Wing attended Palo Alto Senior High School, then switched to Castilleja High School, a private all-girls school in Palo Alto. Following graduation, she attended Finch College in New York City from 1957 to 1958, and the University of Miami in Coral Gables from 1958 to 1959. On August 26, 1961, Wing married Gerald “Jerry” Slick, an aspiring filmmaker, and after the couple briefly moved away from San Francisco, Grace Slick worked as a model at an I. Magnin department store for three years. Slick also started composing music, including a contribution to a short film by Jerry Slick.
In August 1965, Slick read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about the newly formed Jefferson Airplane. Despite being situated in the growing musical center of San Francisco, Slick only half-heartedly considered music for a profession until she watched the band live at The Matrix. As a result, Slick (vocals, guitar), accompanied by husband Jerry Slick (drums), Jerry’s brother Darby Slick (lead guitar), and David Miner (bass guitar) formed a group called The Great Society. On October 15, 1965, the band made its debut performance at a venue known as the Coffee Gallery, and soon after Slick composed the psychedelic piece “White Rabbit”. The song, which she is purported to have written in an hour, is a reflection on the hallucinatory effects of psychedelic drugs; when performed live, it featured a speedier tempo and was an instant favorite among the band’s followers. Although Slick was an equal contributor to The Great Society’s original material, Darby Slick pushed the band toward becoming a raga-influenced psychedelic act. By late 1965, they had become a popular attraction in the Bay Area. Between October and December 1965, The Great Society entered Golden State Recorders and recorded several tracks under the supervision of Sylvester Stewart. One single emerged from the demos, the Darby Slick-penned “Someone to Love” (the “B” side to “Free Advice”) on the locally based Autumn Records subsidiary label “North Beach”. Grace Slick supplied vocals, guitar, piano, and recorder.
1966–1972: Jefferson Airplane
During the autumn of 1966, Jefferson Airplane’s then singer Signe Toly Anderson decided to leave the band to raise her child, and Jack Casady asked Slick to join them. Slick stated that she joined the Airplane because it was run in a professional manner, unlike the Great Society. With Slick on board, Jefferson Airplane began recording new music, and they turned in a more psychedelic direction from their former folk-rock style. Surrealistic Pillow included new recordings of “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love”, both of which became top 10 singles. Jefferson Airplane became one of the most popular bands in the country and earned Slick a position as one of the most prominent female rock musicians of her time. In 1968, Slick performed “Crown of Creation” on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in blackface and ended the performance with a Black Panther fist. In an appearance on a 1969 episode of The Dick Cavett Show, she became the first person to say “motherfucker” on television during a performance of “We Can Be Together”.
After Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen decided to leave Jefferson Airplane to focus on their project Hot Tuna, Slick formed Jefferson Starship with Paul Kantner and other bandmates, and also began a string of solo albums with Manhole, followed by Dreams, Welcome to the Wrecking Ball!, and Software. Manhole also featured keyboardist/bassist Pete Sears, who later joined Jefferson Starship in 1974. Sears and Slick penned several early Jefferson Starship songs together, including “Hyperdrive” and “Play On Love”. Dreams, which was produced by Ron Frangipane and incorporated many of the ideas she encountered attending twelve-step program meetings, is the most personal of her solo albums and was nominated for a Grammy Award. The song “Do It the Hard Way” from Dreams is one example of Slick’s music at the time.
Slick was nicknamed “The Chrome Nun” by David Crosby, who also used the nickname “Baron von Tollbooth” for Kantner. Their nicknames appear as the title of an album she made in 1973 with bandmates Kantner and David Freiberg: Baron von Tollbooth & the Chrome Nun.
During the 1980s, while Slick was the only former Jefferson Airplane member in Starship, the band went on to score three chart-topping successes with “We Built This City”, “Sara”, and “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”. Despite the success, Slick since has spoken negatively about the experience and the music. In 1987, Slick co-hosted The Legendary Ladies of Rock & Roll, for which she also sang backing vocals on “Be My Baby” and “Da Doo Ron Ron”. She left Starship in 1988, shortly after the release of No Protection.
In 1989, Slick and her former Jefferson Airplane band members reformed the group. They released a self-titled reunion album, and held a successful tour before disbanding.
Following the Jefferson Airplane reunion, Slick retired from the music business. During a 1998 interview with VH1 on a Behind the Music documentary featuring Jefferson Airplane, Slick, who was never shy about the idea of getting old, said that the main reason she retired from the music business was, “All rock-and-rollers over the age of 50 look stupid and should retire.” In a 2007 interview, she repeated her belief that, “You can do jazz, classical, blues, opera, country until you’re 150, but rap and rock and roll are really a way for young people to get that anger out”, and, “It’s silly to perform a song that has no relevance to the present or expresses feelings you no longer have.”
Despite her retirement, Slick has appeared twice with Kantner’s revamped version of Jefferson Starship; the first came in 1995 when the band played at Los Angeles’s House of Blues, as documented on the live album Deep Space/Virgin Sky. The second was for a post-9/11 gig in late 2001, during which she came on the stage initially covered in black from head to toe in a makeshift burqa. She then removed the burqa to reveal a covering bearing an American flag and the words “Fuck Fear”. Her statement to fans on the outfit was: “The outfit is not about Islam, it’s about oppression; this flag is not about politics, it’s about liberty.”
After retiring from music, Slick began painting and drawing. She has done many renditions of her fellow 1960s musicians, such as Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia, and others. Slick has had a passion for art since she was a child, before she pivoted to music.
Slick published her autobiography, Somebody to Love? A Rock and Roll Memoir, in 1998 and narrated an abridged version of the book as an audiobook. A biography, Grace Slick, The Biography, by Barbara Rowes, was released in 1980 and is currently out of print. In a 2001 USA Today article, Slick said, “I’m in good health and people want to know what I do to be this way I don’t eat cheese, I don’t eat duck—the point is I’m vegan.” However, she admitted she’s “not strict vegan, because I’m a hedonist pig. If I see a big chocolate cake that is made with eggs, I’ll have it.”
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