Somebody to Love?

by Grace Slick

  Although it was raining outside the White House, staining multiple pairs of Gucci shoes, the security boys detained everyone, thoroughly checking their identification and giving them an appraising eye.

  “Excuse me, miss, but may I see your invitation?” one of the guards said to me. “And your ID.”

  He took my invitation with the name Grace Wing on it, and my driver's license, to the security booth and came back. “I'm sorry, Miss Wing,” he said. “You can't go in.”

  “But I have an invitation,” I argued.

  “Look. We know you're Grace Slick and we consider you a security risk. You're on the FBI list.” I hadn't done anything subversive that I knew of—it must have been some of my lyrics. And God only knows what they'd dug up on Abbie.

  The guards finally agreed I could come in, but only by myself. Abbie would have to stay out. I told them I never went anywhere without my own security guard, and Abbie added, “I wouldn't let Miss Slick go in there alone, because I understand they lose a president every three years. It's a dangerous place.”

  Abbie and I left, and Mrs. Busby went to the tea sans revolutionaries. But to everyone's surprise, the social secretary said, “Go back and find them. Mrs. Nixon and Tricia really want to meet her.” Unfortunately, we were long gone. I read that Tricia later commented, “If she had to come with a bodyguard, I feel sorry for her. She must be really paranoid.”

  Not as paranoid as your daddy was when McCord, Liddy, and Dean copped out on his unsuccessful wiretapping trick.

  Nixon never got the ride of his life, but Abbie and I had vivid images of reading in the newspaper that he'd suddenly taken ill and was spending a few days at Walter Reed, the army hospital where the CIA would have hidden him away until they figured out what made him crack. Of course, from what we later learned about Nixon, he walked around the White House talking to pictures anyway, so maybe nobody would have noticed much of a change.

  I'll concede it now, the LSD thing was an irresponsible and dangerous plot. At the time, though, we were so fired up about Vietnam, so incensed that some pitiful malformation of mental functions was making the old men in power assume we should kill our young, able-bodied boys for no reason, we didn't care what it took to get the president's attention. We'd hoped that after he got through acting crazy, Tricky might contemplate his navel for six hours and decide that government just wasn't the way to go. What if he really saw the truth, shifted gears, and left politics? It was a good thought, but ultimately, we didn't have to dose him. He overdosed himself on love of power, driving himself out of office without any outside help.

  30

  Small Busts

  Nixon wasn't the only asshole to get busted. Yours Truly and friends have had ample opportunities to enjoy the accommodations offered by police departments from Florida to Hawaii. I don't know why, but any time I saw a badge, something in me would snap and all I could see was some goof who took smelly shits just like everyone else, having the unfair advantage of firepower. All the haphazard violence of nature, illnesses, fires, and accidents never bothered me as much as someone pointing a Magnum at me and telling me to STOP!

  Streetlights going red—that kind of stopping was okay. But when cops pulled out guns on my property (Tiburon), on our stage (Ohio), and on my friends (Paul, in San Francisco), I immediately turned into some Wild West character.

  The problem with “justice” is that if you have the money and the attorneys, you can very often skip the time behind bars that most people have to serve. Classic case in point: the O.J. double-murder scenario. The members of Airplane went to jail, and relatively often, but never for long. The lawyers would converge, the bail would be paid, and we would walk—usually within twenty-four hours. Sometimes we were at fault, sometimes not.

  You decide.

  Busted in Florida

  All cities have different curfews, and on this night in Florida, we played too long. When the cops turned the power off in the middle of a set, Paul picked up a battery-powered bullhorn and exhorted the audience “not to let the heat take control of the show.” He went to jail, and as usual Thompson arrived with the bail. But while Paul's freedom was being negotiated, he slipped a shitload of LSD into a bottle of bourbon that was sitting on an officer's desk. When the bail was paid and Paul was free, the cops were about to experience the total disintegration of life up to and including the unfortunate decision to bust someone who was holding a lot of acid.

  Busted in Dallas

  I said the word fuck onstage and the cops got it on tape. I'm sure you would agree that it was a good thing we had uniformed individuals protecting the nation from that sort of insurrection. Inundated by compliments on their live recording techniques, they decided to let it go if I cleaned up my language. Of course, I agreed.

  Yeah, that'll happen.

  Busted in Ohio

  They knew we remembered Kent State and they didn't trust us. All along the front of the stage stood a row of twenty-five officers, arms linked in riot style, creating a barrier. Their heads covered with bulletproof visors, their hips loaded with clubs and guns, they formed a line between the audience and us like a bizarre group of armored, hairy chorus girls. After the show, Chick Casady objected to the cops' overzealous handling of an unruly fan. I saw them mace Chick, so I went over and objected to their treatment of my friend. They maced me. Paul came over to object to their treatment of me. They maced Paul. The three of us were escorted to jail where the bail was set and the attorneys were called in to rectify the situation.

  Busted in Ohio, again

  They loved us in that state. Paul saw someone in the audience being roughed up by security, so he jumped off the stage to investigate the reason for the pounding. In the ensuing fracas, Paul, who was still carrying his “hard body” guitar, swung around and accidentally (?) jammed the security guy with the business end of the guitar. We went on playing, promising the powers that be that we'd deal with the matter after the show, but as soon as the set was finished, we hid Paul in the bottom of a van and drove him out of state—FAST.

  Busted in L.A.

  A patrolman saw a ladder on the side of a wall at the Tropicana, aka the Howling Morrison Hotel. What it was doing there, no one ever found out, but it looked suspicious, so they investigated the area closest to the top of the ladder by peeking in the window of a room that happened to be registered to Airplane. The hookahs that had been purchased earlier that day were clearly visible through the thin hotel room curtains, so when Jack Casady came back, he was greeted by patrolmen. He was taken to jail for possession of both hashish and the colorful paraphernalia that went with it.

  Busted in L.A., again

  Twenty-four years after the hookah incident, Jack ran afoul of the law again. Sitting behind the wheel and acknowledging that he'd had too much to drink, he pulled over for a curbside power nap. When the flashlights lit up the red-eyed bass player smelling of barleycorn, the cops turned on their red lights and took him for a second visit to the West L.A. police department.

  Busted, almost, in San Francisco

  Paul and I were on our way to play tennis (what?—yes, he swears it's true, although I don't remember ever willfully deciding to do something as physical as playing tennis) and a plainclothes cop with his plain car decided he didn't like the particular speed at which Paul had chosen to drive. When the officer began pursuit, Paul didn't know it was a cop, so he sped up and began to lose the guy. After some harrowing intersection moves, we came to an impasse. Boxed in at a dead end, Paul spotted a black-and-white and went over to tell the “real” cop that there was a screwball following us. While Paul was discussing the chase with the officer, the incognito fuzz jumped out of his car and stuck a gun through the window on my side. Aimed at Paul's head, the weapon got pushed aside by the black-and-white, who told Columbo, “Don't get fancy, it's only Paul Kantner and Grace Slick.” They let us go.

  That was before the mere mention of Paul's or my name caused the cops to start putting on the handcuffs as soon as they
realized they'd stopped either one of us.

  It was good while it lasted.

  Busted in Monterey

  Owsley, “the people's LSD chemist,” gave Paul and Jack a horse dose of a drug called STP, supposedly a powerful psychedelic, which turned them inside out and backward. Paul got into a car and managed to get home to San Francisco, where a couple of hits of Thorazine brought him down to a semblance of normalcy. But Jack had the misfortune to be found by the local constabulary thrashing around in a mud puddle doing his version of the Jim Morrison wolf howl. He didn't remember anything after that until he came to in a Monterey jail cell, totally nude, clinging to the top of the bars like a monkey.

  Better living through chemistry.

  Busted in Hawaii

  In order to publicize our concert in Honolulu, Paul did an interview with the local newspaper. The reporter came out to our big rented Spanish home and made notes of the location of the house, while Paul smoked weed during the conversation. When our address and Paul's drug use appeared in the newspaper article, the police sent out three large individuals to sneak up over the seawall and come in on the ocean side for a mass arrest. They simply couldn't pass up the opportunity to bust the entire group in one fell swoop. Paul, who was strolling on the sand, saw the cops lurking, they saw him strolling, and the hula began.

  While they tried a choke hold on Paul (his formidable chin prevented them from getting a good lock on his neck), he managed to let out a 150-decibel yell to let us know all was not well and we should hide the dope. We got the message in time, they didn't get us, but they did claim that Paul was smoking the joint that they were holding in evidence. Paul was taken to the precinct where he was given a free night's lodging in a holding cell. Paul's cellmate was a black man who had no money for bail, so when the Airplane lawyers showed up the next day, Paul had them pay his new friend's bail and brought him back to the beach house for dinner that evening.

  More (or less) busts

  I got nailed three times for drunk driving without ever being in a car—I'll explain that later, along with a 1994 shotgun incident. Back in 1969, however, I was actually guilty for driving under the influence—of speed (the velocity, not the drug)—but I avoided getting arrested. I'd taken my Aston Martin up to about 150 mph on the straight road near Soledad Prison, when the black-and-whites started chasing me. Since their engines weren't quite as tweaked as the machine I was driving, they had to radio ahead for a roadblock. When I reached the point where two squad cars were stopped in the middle of the highway, it seemed like a reasonable idea to pull over. The blues got out and came over and, to my surprise, completely ignored me. Unable to take their eyes off the fabulous machine I was driving, one of them said, “We'll give you a ticket for eighty mph if you let us look at the engine.”

  No problem.

  I popped the hood latch and the CHP stood around pointing and chatting about the James Bond car that had just outrun their Dodge Darts or whatever the copmobile was that year. Amazing what a good movie star car could do for your traffic tickets. Probably not anymore, though—the fuzz have gotten blasè.

  So if you're wondering what the Airplane members did (besides getting arrested) with their new fast cars, fast women, fast drugs, gold albums, and gold credit cards, it went like this:

  Jack and Jorma took plenty of pharmaceutical speed and went speed skating in Finland.

  Marty went off to be an “honest” artist—creating art that suited his muse.

  Spencer was fired for incessant complaining.

  And Grace and Paul moved to the “one-horse” hippie community of Bolinas, California.

  31

  China

  Paul and I were spending the night at the Sheraton in New York (although Paul swears up and down it was some other hotel) when I decided that having a baby would be a good thing. The sixties had come to a close, the seventies were dawning, and music had taken up residence in the smaller areas of my brain, far overshadowed by purchasing power. Paul and I were living together in our new beach house, acquiring lots of expensive accessories: a hand-tiled pool, a geodesic dome, a gold Mercedes, a black Porsche, and a small recording studio in the lower floor of the beach house. It was the right time for a baby.

  I imagined that the combination of Paul and me would be pretty interesting, since both of us are fairly strong and obnoxious, and it turned out that, for better or worse, our daughter China did end up inheriting both of those characteristics. When we were getting ready to make love in New York that night, I told Paul, “I'd really like to have your child. You don't have to marry me or take care of it or any of that kind of stuff,” I added, “because I can do that myself.”

  Paul gave me that smile, the one where only one corner of his mouth goes up. Clearly, he was game, and he loved children. I had no idea if I was ovulating that night, but we knew we were making love to get pregnant, which made it very sexy. Later, when I counted back the days, the timing would have been just about right for it to have happened that very night.

  I was comfortable having sex during my pregnancy; I viewed it like feeding the baby. You know, sperm must be healthy. It's protein. So I just went ahead and did it, because what are you going to do, poke its eyes out? I don't think women are set up that way. I've seen pictures of the way a baby sits in your stomach, so I always figured, as long as you didn't bonk the fontanel in the wrong spot, it was okay with me.

  So, pregnant and planning in our Bolinas house, I arranged the brass crib next to the antique wooden cradle (a gift from Bill Graham) in a pink room that was already filled with infant necessities and other presents from family and fans. It was a peaceful and expansive time during which we tried to build the “perfect” atmosphere. A child was coming.

  As part of the preparations, I bought a small house down the street from our main residence to accommodate the baby's nanny, Pat Dugan. A wonderfully easygoing woman, she was recommended by Bill Graham, who had hired her to oversee the food concession at the Fillmore Auditorium. She was exactly what we needed; she was great with children (she had four of her own) and she had a talent for cooking that would make Wolfgang Puck's grub taste like a bad day at Burger King. Besides her unusual desire not to learn to drive, she was one of the most normal, wonderful people I've ever met, before or since. To this day, she still has never driven a car, preferring to find her way to places with the help of friends or public transportation, a rare behavioral pattern for any Californian.

  I wrote some lyrics and a few pieces of songs during the time I was pregnant, but most of my energy was focused on what I was determined to be: the atypical mother. This child would see it all, I promised myself. She'd have the education and the freedom to investigate all cultural forms. No religious or social imperatives would be imposed on her Aquarian mind. No instructions on how to make the perfect Martha Stewart melon balls—unless she asked for that kind of silly domestication. And I'd ask her, “What fascinates you? What do you want to do when you grow up?” Not, “Whom do you want to marry and how many children will you have?” She'd travel and learn, love and laugh, and experience all of it with an extended family of artists who'd show her, by example, that anything was possible.

  Before my daughter arrived, I went on two rock-and-roll road trips, fat with child, trying to sing some budding right-wingers out of their my-country-right-or-wrong mindset. At the time, I really thought (hoped?) that the Republican party would just break up and dissolve in its own denture cleanser.

  Youthful optimism and determination.

  Riding high, sometimes literally, I was living a sixties romance novel. Paul and Grace, the unmarried romantic harbingers of “the Dawning Age of Aquarius,” were touring, saying it like it is, and waiting for a child to arrive. Some people probably thought that touring while I was pregnant was a foolish idea, but I thought it was fine. In fact, I couldn't imagine not doing it.

  Since performing was such a huge part of who I was, I saw no reason to stop. I wore those big Middle Eastern caftans to free u
p the expanding gut, I ate for two, I flaunted my radical unmarried status, and accepted all the “May I carry that for you?” assistance I could get. People become very pleasant and helpful around pregnant women. Open the doors, fire up the torpedoes, let's cover the planet with the greediest species on earth.

  At about 10:00 p.m. on January 24, 1971, while Paul and I were entertaining a coke dealer and his wife at our home (no, I didn't do cocaine while pregnant), I said, “Paul, saddle up the mare, we're going to Jerusalem.” It was time. We drove forty-five minutes from Bolinas to French Hospital in San Francisco, where they took me to a cell with a gurney in it. When they offered me a three-milligram Valium, I almost laughed out loud. For a person like me who'd literally wallowed in a pharmacopoeia, three milligrams of anything was not about to do the job. And incidentally, that was the last drug of the evening, not by any choice of mine.

  I'd previously told my doctor that when I was ready to give birth, I wanted an anesthetist to administer copious amounts of whatever they had in stock to kill the pain. But the anesthetist never showed up. In the spaces between the contractions that were turning me into a rictus-faced gargoyle, I inquired as to the whereabouts of the missing drug dispenser.