Somebody to Love?: A Rock-and-Roll Memoir

by Grace Slick, Andrea Cagan

Overview

A candid autobiography of the great rock diva of Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship, revealing her wild life at the forefront of the Sixties and Seventies counterculture.

She has been called rock and roll's original female outlaw, as famous for her bad behavior as for her haunting singing voice. In her 25-year career as a musician, Grace Slick charted dozens of hits and sold millions of albums. From "White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love" to "Sarah" and "Miracles", the songs she performed became the anthems of a generation.

Whether describing her antics at the White House with Abbie Hoffman or the unforgettable experience that was Woodstock, Slick's recollections have the same rich imagery found in her lyrics. In this provocative narrative, readers will discover the many sides of Grace Slick: as artistic pioneer; she records songs with Jerry Garcia and David Crosby; as practitioner of freedom and rebellion; she sleeps with Jim Morrison and gets arrested for DUI on three separate occasions (without actually being in a car); and as a loving mother to actress China Kantner, she tries to balance casual friendship with parental wisdom.

Slick offers a revealing self-portrait of the complex woman behind the rock-outlaw image, and delivers a behind-the-scenes, no-holds-barred view of the people and spirit that defined a quarter-century of American pop culture. Wildly funny, candid, and evocative, Somebody to Love?tells what it was really like during, and after, the Summer of Love-and how one remarkable woman survived it all to remain today as vibrant and rebellious as ever.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780446554428
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	12/14/2008
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

Read an Excerpt

Somebody to Love?

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By Andrea Cagan and Grace Slick

Warner Books

ISBN: 0-446-60783-5

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Chapter One

The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend

It's Chicago, 1973. Jefferson Airplane is tuning up and I'm standing onstage getting ready to sing. Some guy in the audience stands up and shouts, "Hey, Gracie-take off your chastity belt."

I look directly at him and say, "Hey-I don't even wear underpants." I pull my skirt up over my head for a beaver shot, and the audience explodes with laughter. I can hear the guys in the band behind me muttering, "Oh, Jesus."

My response to that particular heckle was actually pleasant compared to what I did in Germany, four or five years later, when I was so drunk, I went up to a guy sitting in the front row and picked his nose. It was the night before I left the band for the first time. To be more accurate, I fired myself. Fed up for a variety of reasons I'll discuss later, having ingested the entire contents of the minibar in my hotel room before I arrived at the venue for the show, I stuck my fingers in this guy's nostrils just because I thought they'd probably fit. Luckily, the majority of that particular German audience had never seen us before, so they must have figured we were some kind of punk band and just let it go.

Why did Grace Wing, a well-educated, contented girl who grew up in a Leave It to Beaver household, ultimately embrace such a maverick persona?

Well, sarcasm was always a family trait, but the real reason for my tendency toward raucous behavior can best be explained by a 1949 film that I watched when I was a young girl. I recently saw a rerun, and it was all right up there on the screen: a combination of humor and fantasy that was especially appealing to a young child looking for a Technicolor reality.

TV Guide listing in May 1997:

11:40 (DIS) movie, Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend-comedy (1949) 1:35 Betty Grable.

Love the title.

When I was between the ages of five and nine, the soldiers of the Second World War wanted to have Betty Grable, but I wanted to be Betty Grable. She was the epitome of an alluring woman; she had it all as far as I was concerned.

My mother told me, "She's got caps on her teeth, bleached blonde hair, and no talent." Mom, being a natural blonde with a mouth full of perfectly straight teeth, was feeling some resentment. But Miss Grable could have been head-to-toe Styrofoam for all I cared. Whatever it was, it worked for me. When I saw that movie, I figured I had all the information I needed to ride through life like an armored blonde goddess.

The opening shot of The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend takes place in 1895 in a small western town. Betty's in jail, still in the fabulous outfit she was wearing for her evening's saloon singing. She's only slightly put out by being in the slammer, and a friend tells her, "Don't worry, you'll be out in minutes. Nobody liked the guy you shot, anyway."

After a rousing evening of performing for assorted drunken cowboys in a saloon and shooting a rabble-rouser, she shows up for her trial the next morning, where she speaks out of order and then winds up shooting the judge in the ass.

A comedy.

The point is, what nine-year-old Grace saw was a woman who looked like a princess, behaving in a primarily offensive, often masculine way and producing slapstick results. No heavy feminist stuff, no serious reprimands. Just a series of entertaining events, showcasing the character's comedic qualities and instinct for following her whims.

In scene two, Betty's character, as a little girl, is being coached in sharpshooting by her grandfather.

"Can I go play with my dolls now?" she asks.

"Young lady, the frontier is a wild place," says her grandfather. "Nobody's gonna take care of you; you gotta take care of yourself-and nobody argues with a gun. You get good enough with that piece, you won't find no trouble you can't get out of."

Little Betty blows ten bottles off the wall from twenty paces, and says, "Can I go play with my dolls now?"

"Okay," says Gramps, mumbling under his breath, "Boy, she's an amazing shot."

In the following scenes, Betty's adult character continuously lets fly with sarcastic remarks, takes no guff from children and adults alike, and lets her various suitors know she's charmed by their attention but not available. A class A gunfighter, she hikes up her skirts and plows into the fray with John Wayne-style resolve. When she falls in love with Cesar Romero, she has to save him-both from winding up on the losing end of a gunfight and from his own confused thinking.

Significantly, she takes it all on with no whining or lobbying against sexist attitudes. She just tackles one problem at a time, always with a sense of humor, always self-possessed, always unruffled. At the end of the film, when she discovers that Romero has a woman on the side, she dumps him with a few well-chosen remarks and shoots the same judge in the ass again-this time hitting both cheeks.

"Feminist comedy," practically an oxymoron, had a couple of good years after WWII. Chalk it up to the forced female autonomy that occurred during wartime, when Rosie the Riveter went to work in the factories, constructing the Allies' war machines while taking charge of the finances, the home, and the children. Those movies gave little girls in the audience the green light for self-reliant, admittedly-leaning-toward-violent behavior. No preaching, no bra burning, just facing and enjoying the humor of life as it was, wherever you were, whatever was going on.

All those images on celluloid filled out a picture of how I wanted to be.

Even though the fifties seemed to regress into the pocket of a fluffy Doris Day apron, I clearly was influenced by the do-it-yourself heroines I'd watched as a child. They took it all on without viewing "it" as something that needed a great deal of support to handle. Consequently, in the early sixties, when women started telling me I should join "the Cause," that we should stand up for each other, march in D.C. and so forth, I thought that was about as interesting as joining the Daughters of the American Revolution. It seemed like a new slant on an old Tupperware party.

By the time I was old enough to consider how I wanted to live my life, I'd read about and heard of Golda Meir; Indira Gandhi; Babe Zaharias; Clare Boothe Luce; Eleanor Roosevelt; Marie Curie; Cassandra of Troy; Cleopatra; Elizabeth Taylor; Melina Mercouri; Anna Pavlova; Moira Shearer; Isadora Duncan; Maria Tallchief; Mary, Queen of Scots; Queen Isabella and Queen Victoria; Mary Shelley; Louisa May Alcott; Betsy Ross; Susan B. Anthony; Marian Anderson; Ella Fitzgerald; Carmen Miranda; Tokyo Rose; Sarah Bernhardt; Georgia O'Keeffe; Gertrude Stein; Annie Oakley; Amelia Earhart; Joan of Arc; Mother Teresa and Guru Ma; Julia Child; Pamela Harriman; Catherine the Great; Evita Peron; and Snow White.

The above-listed women collectively represented every attitude and occupation, so I figured my field of possibilities was wide open. I assumed that women who lived for the home front-housewives, homemakers, whatever the euphemism was-chose to do that; otherwise, they'd be doing something else. I couldn't imagine anybody doing something they didn't want to do.

Apart from rectal examinations and dental visits, why do something you don't like?

Financial circumstances might have demanded certain unpleasant activities, but if you did decide to specialize in the homemaking arts, I thought it should be because you were fulfilling a dream, not bowing to societal pressure.

At the time, that wasn't the accepted way of thinking, but since adults had made the Betty Grable films, I figured some people somewhere knew it was possible to experience life on a grand scale. They knew you didn't have to acquiesce, didn't have to be drab.

For years, I've followed the Grable credo: say what you mean, mean what you say, and throw a joke and a song in the mix now and then. (Continues...)

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Excerpted from Somebody to Love? by Andrea Cagan and Grace Slick Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

Grace Slick performed at Woodstock, recorded with Jerry Garcia and David Crosby, hung out with Abbie Hoffman, and, during an affair with Jim Morrison, found an innovative use for strawberries. She knew Jimi Hendrix, Ken Kesey, and Janis Joplin. You'd probably guess that she'd have some pretty interesting stories to tell, and you'd be right. She tells those tales with an engaging frankness in her memoir, Somebody to Love?

bn.com

[Slick exhibits]. . .a caustic candor that makes her book miles more appealing than the standard aging rocker's autobiography. . . .Slick [gives] self-pity a wide berth . . . .The book's punchline. . .is that Slick is now probably straighter than your mom. . . . But she's not ready for the rock & roll nursing home yet.
—Entertainment Weekly

Tom Sinclair

Rock chanteuse Grace Slick was a sophomore at the University of Miami when, in 1958, a friend from her Bay-area hometown sent her an article about the new San Francisco scene--a world of "marijuana, rock music and strange but pleasantly artistic beatnik behavior." Intrigued, Slick returned home and threw herself into a counterculture that was distinctly at odds with her post-war middle-class upbringing. After playing in a popular local band for a few years, she joined the front ranks of '60s rock icons when she was invited to sing for the already-prominent band Jefferson Airplane, recording hits like "White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love" that helped to define the kaleidoscopic rock world of the 1960s. Here, Slick unabashedly details her long flirtation with psychedelic drugs; her dalliances with Jim Morrison ("like making love to a floating art form with eyes") and lesser rock luminaries; her many run-ins with the law; and her experiences of marriage and motherhood as her band evolved from rebellious trailblazers into the florid mainstream radio acts Jefferson Starship and Starship. Her present-day dedication to animal-rights causes, visual art and spirituality are also recounted. There are few revelations here, and Slick's penchant for elliptical, hippie-ish pronouncements ("Life, the constantly mutating funeral party") won't win her many new fans. But the appealingly wry good humor she brings to her own life story makes this an engaging trip through two turbulent decades of rock 'n' roll. Photos. Editor, Rich Horgan; agent, Maureen Regan. Audio rights to Warner. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

As lead singer of the Jefferson Airplane, Grace Slick fired the imaginations of a generation. In this frank, often crazy memoir, she does not disappoint those who remember her direct, off-the-wall wisecracking. She provides a highly entertaining insider's report of many of the psychedelic era's major events, including Woodstock and Altamont, seen through the proverbial haze of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll, as well as her liaisons with Jim Morrison and various members of her band. Eventually, the years of extravagant living and self-abuse began to take their toll. After three DUI arrests and periods of drug rehabilitation, she now lives in Malibu and is active in animal rights causes. The era of free love has never been better chronicled. Slick's appealingly blunt and funny narrative nicely complements Barbara Rowes's Grace Slick: The Biography (LJ 2/15/80). Recommended for public libraries and all music/pop culture collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/98.]--Richard Grefrath, Univ. of Nevada Lib., Reno

Library Journal

[A] messy, mudled, indulgent and occasionally amusing autobiography. . . .toward the end, Slick's tone turns positively self-punishing. . . .if you remember hearing her wrenching voice over the radio or in concert. . .it's hard to imagine that this memoir came from that same woman. -- The New York Times Book Review

Kuczynski

Jefferson Airplane singer Slick delivers a bouncy, somewhat hectoring account of her 25-year career. Raised by comfortable WASPs in Palo Alto, Calif., Slick married young and moved to San Francisco, where she and her husband saw an early incarnation of the Jefferson Airplane perform in 1965 and figured that starting their own band, the Great Society, would be more fun than their boring day jobs. Slick soon drifted into the Airplane and out of her marriage. Her lively descriptions of the close-knit musical community revolving around Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditorium successfully evoke both the highs and lows of the Summer of Love. Slick was never one to shrink from the highs, and she gives us a few entertaining psychedelic vignettes. Uniquely, the Airplane played all three of the pivotal rock festivals that, respectively, inaugurated an era (Monterey), defined it for posterity (Woodstock), and ignominiously ended it (Altamont). Slick cheerfully and explicitly details her sexual liaisons with all but one of her bandmates and an encounter with Jim Morrison involving a bed full of smashed strawberries. In the '70s, Slick had a child, tried to slip acid into President Nixon's tea, and got drunk often, finally quitting the revamped and renamed Jefferson Starship in 1978.

A few years later she re-enlisted, at this point the only original member; this version of Starship was a soulless commercial enterprise that commissioned its songs from top Hollywood hacks, but the aging Slick liked the easy ride. Since retiring several years ago, she's been campaigning to end medical testing on animals, but co-author Cagan (Marianne Williamson's co-author for A Return to Love) doesn't help herexplain the cause very coherently. Slick's swaggering, unapologetic persona gets a little irritating by the end, but her progress from hippie queen to cranky rich liberal makes for a fun and emblematic trip.

Kirkus Reviews

"CANDID, UNPRETENTIOUS...REFRESHINGLY IRREVERENT...A CAUSTIC CANDOR MAKES HER BOOK MILES MORE APPEALING THAN THE STANDARD ROCKER'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY".

-- Entertainment Weekly

From the Publisher