STRANGE TIMES AT THE LAUNCHING PAD

by Ben Fong-Torres

Paul Kantner is in his dream house. This is the house, set on an edge of San Francisco near the entrance to the Golden Gate Bridge, that he frequently drove by ten years ago, when he and Freiberg and two or three others shared a flat near Haight-Ashbury. He liked its location and its implied privacy. In April 1972 he and Slick, who had been living in Bolinas, addressed a letter to "occupants" at the house to express their interest in buying it. Two months later, Mr. and Mrs. Occupants divorced, contacted Slick and Kantner, and the following month they moved in. They paid somewhere over $100,000 for it and Kantner just rejected an offer of over $600,000. This is the house he shared with Grace Slick, with whom he lived for six years and had a child, China, now seven. China stays with Paul four days a week and with Grace in Mill Valley the other three.

In a book-strewn room with an ocean view, he sits on his huge bed. China, just before her bedtime, is playing with the back of a battery-operated toy. I ask if she likes her name. "Yeah,", she says. "I wanna change it to Susie, though." Her favorite group, she says, is Kiss, and her favorite boyfriends are Shaun Cassidy and Ace Frehley. Why not Gene Simmons? "Because he's drunk."

After China leaves, Kantner begins to talk. In discussing Bruce Lee, whose Enter the Dragon is playing downstairs on the Videobeam, he reveals that he suffered a cracked skull in an accident some eighteen years ago, "so I can't fight."

Although others in the band may look to him as a leader, he says, "I'm totally nonbusiness. I take some of it onto my shoulders out of necessity, but I could never handle the stuff that Thompson has, maybe because my accident was on the left side of my head. I'm totally right-brained as far as dealing with figures, logic and general organized business. That's what the left brain controls. Right-brained is the more poetic, dealing with abstract things - beauty, truth, justice, air, earth, light, enjoyment, that nonspecific area - judgment rather than order."

I ask about Grace, who, in her interview with me, describes herself as an alcoholic.

"I never thought of it in those terms," Kantner says. "I knew she got sometimes interesting and sometimes strange; sometimes good, sometimes bad. I think she's been eccentric, and I wouldn't call that wrong. There were times of great creativity during what she and others might call drunken revelry."

Kantner could never be protective of Slick, he says. "I could never take on that responsibility. The one time I did take it on - she was being drunkenly abusive - I taped her up with some masking tape, just rolled her up and left her there for about ten minutes, then unwound her. This was when we lived together. It was a very nonviolent approach to dealing with Grace at one of her low points. She thought it was pretty funny."

Kantner's right brain must have been at work.

"Gracie has a problem, a real serious problem," says Pete Sears. "She's such a beautiful person when she's sober, a really sweet woman, but it's like an instant change. It's more than just being an alcoholic...I don't know what it is. I know that Grace is searching for something. She's got all the material things she could possibly want. Same old story - that's not the answer."

"I hate to get into religion too heavy, but I do believe in the spirits of good and evil. You can become receptive to either. When she gets drunk, the evil forces seem to be able to take over.... There's like a demon looking at you or something. She just stares."

And yet, as Sears says, there is the other side. "She broke down at our marriage. We had that big wedding here in Mill Valley and she came up and said something like, 'Goddamnit, Jeanette, you're making me cry.' She got real poetic. It really moved her. She saw something there that she wanted. She wants to be helped so bad. She's miserable."

Grace Slick looks radiant. She and Skip Johnson, her twenty-five-year-old husband (and the Starship's lighting director), are aboard Lightning Weasel, their forty-foot cruiser, docked in Marin County. The interior is decked out in straight-ahead American middle-crass, with little white curtains, a plaid couch, chocolate carpeting and a full kitchen with a butcher-block-topped oven. Grace, who is thirty-eight, wears a granny shirt over jeans, and, as Skip heads upstairs to take the boat on a cruise around Angel Island, she talks about her most recent fight against alcohol.

Her last public dance with the demon was on January 19th, when, in the guise of a celebrity judge for a San Francisco club version of The Gong Show, she abused contestants, fellow judges and members of the audience, broke a couple of microphones and was dragged offstage while the audience cheered. A few hours later, she was gonged again - by the Highway Patrol - and charged with drunk driving. She was actually stopped on the bridge - "My car blew up" - and when the highway patrol came, "I started talking and giving them a load of shit... so they put me in the can overnight." The drunk-driving charges were dismissed. But the incident led to an exchange with Skip, who told her, "You belong in a hospital."

"And I started thinking about it and I thought maybe he's right. Maybe there is some place where they tell you what the hell it is you're doing wrong." She checked in, as a patient, to an alcoholic rehabilitation clinic in a Marin County hospital, where she joined a "discussion group" - of usually six to ten people - led by two counselors, themselves alcoholics.

"I was apprehensive at first - I thought 'Oh, Christ, they're all into gestalt and all this kind of junk, people lying around throwing up.... In my case I was with a bunch of old people. They didn't know who the hell I was, so they weren't after or for or against anything." They would ask Slick to explain why she felt she drank, and what she felt while she was drinking. "I'd make a statement and they'd climb on it. I knew it was coming from an honest reaction. It was fantastic - what people can see and you don't see yourself. Somebody'd nail me with something and you go back to your room and think about it."

Slick believes she found several reasons for her abuse of alcohol - and other drugs. With her, she said, "It's black and white, it's either all or none. I have a big trouble with the middle range, which I'm just trying to find now."

She was also bored. "The group has not worked for about a year and a half - because essentially we want to sing with Marty and Marty was not interested in working. I think people who have worked, particularly at the speed of rock & roll, for twelve years and all of a sudden it stops... you can't really start anything else.... Also, since the group is not working, you have to keep the name in the public eye. I'd do anything - you know, a guy from the gas station'd call and say 'Would you mind going down there and smearing grease on your face and the first guy who picks it off... or something. I felt demeaned after I was doing that, showing up at record stores and twelve-year-old kids were coming up and saying, 'What are you doing this for? This is stupid.' Then I'd have five more vodkas and not care about it."

The Boarding House affair ws a case in point. She didn't want to show up onstage with no set routine, but she couldn't refuse the request. To shore herself up, she drank before the show, and the evening became "a blackout. I have no recollection of the Boarding House at all. I don't remember anything about being onstage except one flash, looking at Country Joe, and he looked really disgusted, but I can't remember saying anything, can't remember breaking the microphones, nothing. And yet I drove home."

Another problem Slick had was her mask of ice, that stare that Sears was talking about. In the nine or so years I've known Slick, I've been on the receiving end of numerous cold, fixed glazes, at parties, recording sessions and interviews. But the stare only means she's nervous. "To Grace, all those things - concerts, parties, interviews, photo sessions - it's all a theater of life," says Bowman. "She has to get all psyched up. So she appears aloof." Grace herself explains: "I'm really closed up. I don't tell people, 'Well, I know this may sound funny, but I want to tell you that I feel this way and it hurts, because blah-blah-blah.' I don't ever tell anybody it hurts 'cause I don't want em to know I hurt. I want them to think nothing bothers me . But that's horseshit 'cause the more you suppress that stuff, it boils up, and I'll have five drinks and go out and murder somebody verbally."

With Grace Slick, it's always five - or "8 zillion" - drinks, never one or two. "With a person who is alcoholic, as I am, you don't ever have one or two drinks. It doesn't work that way. I've never had two drinks in my life.... It's either I drink and I'm totally drunk or I don't drink at all. It's the same way with any drug. I'll snort my brains out till I get so nervous I've gotta have either something to bring it back down or run around the block eighty times or something. That's why I thought, let's find out why and figure out what to do about it rather than just stopping, which I've done before."

With the questions possibly answered, Slick says she feels better now "than I can remember feeling since I was about five." Since the Boarding House, she says, she's had "zero drugs. I haven't been totally straight that long since I was fifteen years old," she laughs.

And, she concludes, she's confident that she can stay off all drugs. "It's just incredible to enjoy things again. I didn't realize that I was being drug-affected because I figured you're either drunk or you have a hangover, then the next day you're normal. But you're not. You're still physically being affected, just being car sick, irritable, stuff like that. I thought that was normal. Now I realize that I'm not normally like that. So it's a whole different thing. I may be corny and say, 'It's like being reborn,' but it is very much like having a new perspective shoved into your brain or your soul or whatever. Also a new body."

Which is about as close to religion as Slick is going to get. "Religion... faith..." she pondered. "It's a little harder for me to grasp than a dome or a pyramid."

Last Updated: 21 October 2000