Tripping On The Jefferson Starship:
A Close Encounter With Grace Slick

Sounds, March 1978, Phoenix, Arizona.

By Bill Paige

I'm sure Dick Cavett had no idea what was said until long after it was too late. There were Marty Balin and Grace Slick and the rest of the Jefferson Airplane -- on stage the day after they had played Woodstock -- singing "We Should Be Together," complete with the line, "Up against the wall, motherfuckers . . . Tear down the walls." They also did a fairly wild (for mid-afternoon Amerika) rendition of "Volunteers," while David Crosby and (if memory serves) Graham Nash sang along, unacknowledged.

If I didn't still have it on tape I wouldn't believe it. One of the greatest moments in live rock 'n' roll television history, and it starred the Jefferson Airplane.

Like every other kid at the time, I'd grown up listening to "White Rabbit" and "Somebody To Love," but when it came to buying LPs like After Bathing at Baxter's , who had any money to spend on some weird San Francisco group? However, by the time Volunteers was released, I was ready to 'discover' the complete Airplane, and their appearance on Cavett's show pushed me over the edge.

Unfortunately, this is also when the original Airplane began to lose altitude. Spencer Dryden left the band; Papa John Creach started playing with them; Bark and Long John Silver were released to less than kind critical notices and a plethora of splinter solo efforts began to crop up.

Sunfighter was the first, and it was Grace and guitarist Paul Kantner's celebration of the birth of their daughter, China ("She's a neat little person," boasts Grace. "She has a funny vocabulary 'cause she's around rock 'n' roll musicians all the time."). Baron Von Tollbooth and the Chrome Nun , with ex-Quicksilver Messenger Service keyboardist/vocalist David Frieberg, followed, broken up in turn by various and sundry live/greatest misses collections. The solo cycle finally was capped by Gracie's own Manhole.

"Manhole didn't sound too good because I had too much liquor," reflects Grace. "I mean, any kind of fooling around with your voice, any blow or liquor or any of that stuff you should do on the off nights. Unfortunately, I was doing them on the 'on' nights. In fact, I was doing them on both nights."

After Manhole, something happened to change the direction of the band. A young guitarist named Craig Chaquico was added to the line-up, and Pete Sears, a bassist of session repute, rounded out the new Jefferson Starship, which now included Frieberg, Johnny Barbata (ex-Turtles, CSN&Y), Kantner, Slick and sometimes Marty Balin. The group took to the studio and Dragonfly was born, with the hit single "Caroline" convincing Balin to stay on permanently (more or less). Gracie comments on their absence and heightened popularity:

"I didn't think it was gonna go on this long, but it's hard to get enjoyment out of not playing for an audience and just making records. For several years we were waiting for Jack and Jorma to make up their minds about whether they wanted to come back, so finally we just formed another band.

"I've cooled off a bit to try and figure out where I'm supposed to get sloppy . . . which is not when I'm working. Give me an off day and that's the day I'm gonna wreck myself. This group isn't full of a lot of really hard users anyway; it never was. It's more of a marijuana group. The most Kantner gets past his lips is a sip of Dom Perignon about once a month. It's just not a drug band."

Hey, wait a minute! Aren't you the same guys that used to bounce acid-crazed across the Fillmore stage to your own psychedelic sounds and Joshua light show? What happened to the craziness, the anarchy, the obscenity? Aren't you guys fun anymore?

"They're not too much fun," admits Grace, obviously not speaking of herself. "I'd rather hang out with the crew than the band."

"I like spontaneity coming at me from all directions," she continues. "When I was young (how many incarnations of 'young' has this 38-year-old had?) I would go to a party of people that were so weird that they scared me rather than to a party of people where I knew everything that they were gonna say next. I'd rather see the ones I wasn't sure of. I like the new stuff, the stuff that's odd. I always want to figure out why it's that way."

Whew, that's better! You had us scared for a minute there, Grace. But for all that image maintenance, don't you get a little tired of running yourself crazy-ragged all the time? I mean, you ain't getting any younger. When are you gonna grow up?

"I'm still waiting to get over puberty," she says. "I have not stopped with what people ordinarily enjoy doing when they're about 16 -- which is, fooling around. I'm the latest one up, the most obnoxious, and if somebody says 'let's break into that store right there,' I'm probably the one who would start doing it. I"m awful.

"The last 15 years haven't done shit for my growth," admits Grace. "They haven't meant anything. I'll probably die in a year from overdoing it, but who cares?"

Now I am worried. Here's an obviously dented flower child casualty who doesn't know when to stop. If this keeps up, I'll never find out what the new Starship is up to. Excuse me, Grace, but is there anybody there with you now? Are you gonna last at least until we've finished this interview?

"Oh, I need my keepers," she laughs. "I'm kind of a screwball and somebody has to be around otherwise I could jump off a bridge saying, 'Hey look, I can do this!" There are at least three people out of our group of 30 who will call up to see that I'm not doing anything extraordinarily weird. They'll say, 'Don't have me than 10 of those," or 'Don't put wings on your car . . . that doesn't work."

Well, good. Nothing wrong with a little stability here and there, especially for someone of Grace's volatile nature. But, to business. Any word on the progress of Starship's latest studio endeavors?

"Well, there's a bit of orchestration," Slick vaguely offers, "some violins, some horns . . . we put more background vocals on this record than we ordinarily do. We don't really know that much about backup singing, so it's taking us a long time to do it. And we do it over and over." The new album is titled Earth. So far the Starship has dealt with the other three elements -- fire (Spitfire), water (Red Octopus) and air (Dragonfly), so it was only fitting to complete the theme before moving on to something else.

Grace explains that the title comes from the same concept as Buckminster Fuller's "Spaceship Earth," a closed environment with limited life supporting capabilities that should be carefully conserved. "That doesn't come up in the songs, really," she adds. "We aren't mentioning it on the album."

Songs include "Count On Me," "Dream Motorcycle," "Show Yourself," "Skateboard" and "Heart Attack." In "Heart Attack" Grace answers the critics who say she's been living life too much in the fast lane:

You take your time
Take your time
And I"ll take my own time.

"Show Yourself" is Gracie's first attempt at writing a political song, and she jumps in with both feet. The song is about the mysterious Trilateral Commission (an organization that influences government agencies like the Council on Foreign Relations. Members allegedly include major corporation heads, scholars and politicos).

"Let's see who really runs this thing," she asks in the tune, "because we all know it isn't the puppet we vote for every four years.

"I've never actually written a political song," she continues, "but I do a good part of the interviews, so I always have to answer for Kantner's political side. It annoys me to have to answer for 'Volunteers' -- I still don't know what it means. 'We are volunteers of America.' What are we volunteering for? What does that mean?"

There is a degree of puzzlement and aggravation in her voice, but it turns to calm rationalization when she explains why she finally wrote a song like "Show Yourself."

"I figure if I'm gonna have to answer for 'em I might as well write one so I'll know what I'm talking about.

"I'm not all that nuts about lyrics anyway. 'Hyperdrive' (from Dragonfly) is not an AM single -- it's a screwball metaphysical piece of junk as far as most people are concerned. But it's my favorite. Besides, I'm too close to it tooknow whether anybody's gonna like it or dislike it."

Slick's personal tastes aside, the new Starship formula seems to be working well. Although Spitfire was weak and met with only minimal success compared to Red Octopus' double-platinum status, drummer Barbata is optimistic about Earth.

"It's a winner," he says. "We took a lot of extra time with the tracks and I think we outdid ourselves with this one."

The LP was recorded at Wally Heider's with Starship producer Larry Cox, and although part of their new sound has come from learning how to work in the studio, Grace wouldn't mind a change of place.

"We've been in there for so long," she complains. "I've had six different houses in the time I've been in that one recording studio!"

So all seems well with the Jefferson Starship. After Earth has had a chance to sink in on the collective consumer ear the group plans to tour either Tokyo or the United States, to crowds that were but in cute little corduroy coveralls when the band's first incarnation was making the Bay Area scene. Such longevity and growth in old rock 'n' roll bands has not become unpopular (witness the resilience of Fleetwood Mac), but it is still a minor miracle when it occurs.

New blood has brought new life to the Starship, but the band remains true to its original idea of exploration and melody. That the sound has reached a level of commercial viability has only made it better. A story Grace tells about her parents could help to explain her continued success.

"They have good senses of humor," she says, "but they don't like what I'm doing. I was never married to Paul and when I got pregnant my mother mother said, 'Well, I guess I'm gonna have to tell your grandmother sooner or later.' She called my grandmother up and said, 'Grace is pregnant, but she's not gonna get married' and my grandmother said, 'I think she must be some kind of genius.'"

It must be that a lot of other people think so, too.

Last Updated: 15 October 2000