Grace Slick spoke candidly with Plum during her show at Masters Gallery in Vail on Jan. 22, touching on everything from politics to old friends such as Jimi Hendrix.
It’s not every day that one gets the opportunity to exchange words with an American rock icon of the sixties. Most of them are dead, after all.
But here we have Grace Slick, making an appearance at Masters Gallery in Vail Jan. 22 and 23 to promote her latest art form – psychedelic paintings.
Before meeting the 68-year-old Slick, one wonders which subjects of the many from her rich history of rock n' roll and its various shenanigans, can be breached in conversation. For example, is it too bold to ask about how she planned on spiking Richard Nixon’s tea with LSD during a trip to the White House in 1969? Or about how much she misses her dead friends – Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jerry Garcia, and others whom she’s depicted in paintings in the last decade?
How will she react upon being asked if “White Rabbit,” one of her most notorious songs written in Jefferson Airplane, was, as speculated, all about heroin? How about how she almost died last year when she was in a medical induced coma for two months?
It takes about 30 seconds of sitting down with Slick to discover that no subject is really off limits, because there are just no holes barred with this woman. As they say, once a rock star, always a rock star.
But Slick isn’t making any claims about being a rock star. In fact, she’ll be the first to say that “nobody wants to see an old rock star.” Mick Jagger? He’s ridiculous, Slick said. Keith Richards? Well, he’s still got something.
“About the only one who probably could get away with being a rock star at 90 is Janis,” Slick conceded.
And speaking of …
Does she get nostalgic when she paints portraits of these friends long passed?
Nostalgic isn’t the word, she said.
Is it sad? “Yes ... Only because it’s a loss of so much talent.”
"White Rabbit," by the way, is not a song about heroin, but Slick feels the white rabbit in "Alice in Wonderland," represents Alice's curiosity, and white rabbits have sprung up, along with Alice here and there, in dozens of Slick's paintings.
Slick said the only thing she’s able to do is art. And since she sees no charm in aging rock stars, painting is her new focus.
“And if I can’t do that anymore, I’ll find something else I can do,” she said.
When you’re young, she said, you want to show people what you’ve got on the outside, because that’s what you’ve got more of. When you’re old, you want to show people what you’ve got on the inside, because that’s what you’ve got more of.
Aged or not, Slick is not about to stop living life exactly the way she wants. She doesn’t do drugs like she used to, she said, “because I don’t have a dealer anymore.”
She doesn’t sing, because that’s part of her past. She does however, wear sandals in 10-degree weather because of a condition in which her feet get overheated, and she lights up a cigarette upon the first opportunity.
“Never mind the tracheotomy I had last year,” she said. “I’ll burn my lungs if I want to.”
“I’m doing the Frank Sinatra,” she added, and in what could be one of the last times she may ever be heard singing in public, she broke out in a long lost strain of raspy harmony …
“I’ll do it my way.”
Be sure to shift your eyes below for the exclusive video and interview with Grace Slick.
Video
The former front woman of Jefferson Airplane may spend more time painting rabbits than she does singing about them these days, but she sure hasn't lost any of her juice. Plum sat down with the one and only Grace Slick during her art show at Vail's Masters Gallery in January 2008.
I loved her then and love
I loved her then and love her now
I kissed her once at a
I kissed her once at a concert in the late 70s...I've told this story a MILLION times.
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