Grace Slick on sex, drugs and Jefferson Airplane: ‘I was sober in the 80s. That was a mistake’

She topped the charts, dropped the F-bomb on US TV, was ghosted by Jim Morrison and planned to spike Richard Nixon’s tea with LSD. Now 85, the legendary singer tells all. Rock’n’roll might not be advertised as being good for your health, but it’s worked out all right for Grace Slick. The former Jefferson Airplane singer is talking me through a life story that spans psychedelic drugs, free love, alcoholism, house fires and a high speed car crash. And yet, even at the age of 85, she sounds as perky, full of mischief and hilariously coarse as any interviewee I can remember.

“Rock’n’roll people are spoiled brats,” she says at one point with a throaty cackle. “We don’t know anything about anything except having fun, how much money we can spend and who we can screw.”. Slick may have done all of these things but she also helped to define the sound of the 60s. Does any other track sum up the trippy Summer of Love quite like her song White Rabbit, a hypnotic two and a half minutes stuffed with references to pills and mushrooms? That song cleverly evaded censors, taking hallucinogenic drug references into the homes of millions, but then Slick has always had a thing for breaking the rules. She was the first person to drop the F-bomb on US television, for instance, when the band performed their song We Can Be Together on the Dick Cavett show, complete with its rallying call “Up against the wall, motherfucker”.

Yet the woman born Grace Barnett Wing has no idea where this rebellious streak came from. Her father was an investment banker, her mother looked after the home, and her upbringing in Illinois and then around parts of California was nothing out of the ordinary. She even attended Finch College, which she describes as a finishing school for young women in New York. A stable life had been mapped out for her. But there was something about that stifled 1950s way of living that just never appealed. “Don’t offend anybody, dress a certain way, get married, have children, stay at home and cook pies,” she snorts with disdain. “A whole bunch of women I knew at that time thought: ‘Don’t think so!’”.

It was a report in the San Francisco Chronicle that changed everything for Slick. She had been modelling clothes and wondering how to escape a normal life when she read about a band called Jefferson Airplane who were making waves in the city. Whatever it was that was going on, she wanted a part of it. And so, with her first husband, Jerry Slick, she formed a band called the Great Society. They soon got a gig supporting Airplane, and when that band’s singer Signe Toly Anderson left, they came calling for Slick to replace her.

Who wouldn’t have wanted Slick to front their band? That voice – deep, powerful, utterly captivating – still sounds like the unravelling of an era, when peace-loving hippy platitudes spun off towards something darker and more foreboding. Slick also brought stage presence to the group and, of course, two era-defining songs. Somebody to Love, a Great Society track written by her brother-in-law Darby, was transformed by Jefferson Airplane into a terrifying psych-rock stomper. As for White Rabbit, well, it was rock’n’roll, but not as anyone had heard it before. Slick grew up listening to classical music rather than Elvis, and her strange, Spanish-sounding march emerged from a love of Ravel’s Boléro.

The lyrics, based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, shocked parents across the US. And they were supposed to – after all, they were written about them and their slack parenting. “People kept saying: ‘Why do you young people use these chemicals now?’” she says. “Well, didn’t you notice the stories you were reading to us? Alice takes at least five different drugs in that book. Even Snow White was knocked out by some kind of chemical!”.

Today, Slick is speaking from her home in Malibu, Los Angeles. When the California wildfires broke out in January, she was all packed up and ready to leave for a hotel that had been booked, but it didn’t come to that. Still, Slick is no stranger to fires. In 2018, the Woolsey fire reached the outskirts of her property. At her previous home, a fire started by welders working on a gate nearby in 1993 was not so merciful – it destroyed her property and all Slick’s possessions, including her music memorabilia. The only thing left after the blaze, she says, was a ceramic white rabbit. They seem to have followed her around. Fans still send them. She paints them, too, these days. She remembers one riotous gig in the 1970s when a fan put a live rabbit on stage.

“We were worried because what do you do?” she says. “We actually took it home. I remember it had one ear that wasn’t working, it didn’t stick up like rabbit’s ears do. And, oddly enough, he liked marijuana seeds. So not only were we loaded, but the rabbit was loaded too!”.