Somebody to Love?

by Grace Slick

  “Oh, he isn't here yet,” the various nurses informed me, something they continued to say all night long. I hadn't taken any La Maze or La Modge or whatever-it-is classes, because no matter what kind of cute tiny breaths you practice, I figured that in the final analysis, you've got a mass the size of a cantaloupe coming out of a hole the size of a fifty-cent piece.

  That simple bit of physics means PAIN.

  I told myself that women had been doing this thing called childbirth forever. Don't worry about it, I kept thinking. Remember that it's only a few hours of hideous groaning and then you have a whole new person to love. So I had my daughter by natural childbirth, an accidental route I'd definitely not chosen.

  I'd been warned that newborns do not look like the Gerber baby. They said “it” would probably be a blood-covered, squalling, blue-faced, wrinkled mess, so I was ready for a remnant of some atomic mishap. But she was a lovely, smooth-skinned, pink-and-white being, content to just lie there and be cuddled and admired by her mother.

  On January 25, as I held my newborn baby in my arms, a Spanish nurse came into my hospital room to attend to antiseptics and linens. She was holding a framed certificate that looked like a high school diploma, and she said, “We give these to all the new mothers. You see, it says where she was born, what time, and the name of the baby goes here.” She pointed to an empty line in the document. “What is your baby's name?” she asked.

  I noticed a crucifix around her neck and spontaneously said, “god. We spell it with a small g because we want her to be humble.”

  It was only a few hours after my baby had arrived, I was holding the miracle of birth in my arms, and I was already messing with somebody's head. The nurse asked me to repeat what I'd said. I obliged her. After hearing it a second time, deciding that the blasphemy was real, she haltingly entered “god” on the parchment, probably expecting to go through her life repeating novenas for her participation in this profanity. When she was through filling in the irreverent name, she ran to the telephone to call Herb Caen, the same beloved San Francisco Chronicle newspaper columnist who'd inspired me to leave Florida many years prior. He published the information about the birth and the supposed appellation Paul and I had chosen, which would, by virtue of the deity's extensive popularity, make it impossible for my daughter to live up to her presumed given name.

  Her real name is China. San Francisco has a large Asian community, and Paul and I had observed that the Chinese follow spiritual practices that seem to offer more equanimity than the fear- and guilt-ridden dogmas of the Judeo-Christian ethic. Thousands of years before the Western Bible was written and rewritten and burned, and rewritten again during the Inquisition, the Oriental people had realized that the yin/yang or 50/50 take on human existence produces more acceptance and self-control. To Paul and me, this seemed a better alternative to the “damned if you do, damned if you don't” ethic that permeates Western civilization. And aside from the fancy polemics, China is the name of a delicate and feminine form of artistic expression in clay, as well as useful eating utensils.

  Seemed like a good combo.

  Since I never paid much attention to the couplings of other celebrities, I didn't know that Michelle Phillips, another rock-and-roll mom, had named her child Chynna. In fact, I didn't know that Michelle even had a child. Several years after the birth of my daughter, when someone asked me if I'd made the spelling different from the name of Michelle's daughter on purpose, the answer was no. In fact, I was so intent on being original with my daughter's name, if I'd known Michelle's kid was named Chynna, I probably would have called mine Xlopdy. Circumstances were such that two of the very limited number of couples in the sixties rock world who played together and loved together just happened to give approximately the same name to their firstborn girl.

  A million to one.

  32

  The Chrome Nun

  There was yet another reason Paul and I developed respect for the Eastern way of life. We'd seen the movie Enter the Dragon, and both of us were completely taken by the ease of movement and calm self-assurance that Bruce Lee displayed through the use of kung fu. A powerful but graceful form of martial arts, kung fu uses all of the body/mind systems, rather than just the upper-body jabbing of Western boxing. Again, because of adherence to the whole, a Chinese fighter must also learn to heal.

  Balance.

  The students of White Crane kung fu, the form that Paul and I studied briefly, were taught both the fighting and the healing arts. Yin and yang. Black and white in one circle. Unfortunately, being on the road most of the time made it extremely difficult to maintain the rigorous “workouts” that produce a martial arts adept. The practice has to become a way of life, and I'm afraid I didn't have the discipline to make it a top priority. I think I preferred watching the hard work of physical and mental training rather than actually doing it.

  Ron Dong, who was both a friend and a teacher of ours, occasionally came on the road with us to perform an intricate grouping of moves using large swords slicing through the air at lightning speeds. He also attended to everybody's medical needs, taking out his acupuncture needles and “magically” erasing problems that could not be fixed by Western medicine. Acupuncture is now becoming recognized as a formidable medical practice, but when we were going to Master Long's studio in San Francisco in the seventies, Westerners still considered it some goofy offshoot of all the other alternative methods.

  Byong Yu, another Eastern master, taught us a martial arts form called tae kwan do, a more direct and leg-focused form of karate. There's a line in one of Paul's songs, “Ride the Tiger,” that synthesizes a conversation we had at dinner one evening, when Mr. Yu was discussing the differences between East and West:

  It's like a tear in the hands of a Western man,

  He'll tell you about salt, carbon, and water,

  But a tear, to an Oriental man,

  He'll tell you about sadness and sorrow or the love of a man and a woman

  I don't think Byong Yu was accusing all Westerners of being coldhearted chemical engineers, but the heavy emphasis we place on technology in this country clearly bothered him. Of course, Korean and Chinese politics didn't seem to reflect the Asian spiritual ethic. Maybe that's why Master Long, Ron Dong, and Byong Yu were here—they were hoping the best of both cultures would somehow join, allowing each continent to benefit from the union.

  Looking back on it, I find it interesting that while many of our contemporaries were studying at the feet of seated Eastern gurus, Paul and I gravitated to a more aggressive physical practice. All forms were headed in the same direction, though. For everyone, the goal was balance.

  Sunfighter: China and me in 1971. (AP/Wide World Photos)

  In my personal life, the balancing act of being a new mother and making records was made easier by the fact that for the first six months after China was born, we didn't tour. While Paul and I made a “duo” album titled Sun-fighter, which featured fat baby China's picture on the cover, I cared for my daughter during the day and Pat, her nanny, took the nights.

  Rolling ocean, small town, new baby, visits with Grandmother, new record, no drugs, and no pressure.

  This too shall pass. When I stopped breast-feeding, the liquor crawled slowly back into my bloodstream. Having help both with the baby and the paperwork at the office, I was able to juggle the remainder of my time in the best rock-and-roll tradition. (“Rock-and-roll tradition” could be an oxymoron, but, God knows, there are plenty of traditional morons in rock and roll.) By the time Paul's and my second duo effort, Baron Von Tollbooth and the Chrome Nun, was being recorded, I was back in full swing and displaying a certain sangfroid.

  The title of the album was taken from David Crosby's nicknames for the two of us. “Baron Von Tollbooth” was a reference to Paul's facetious pride in his German ancestry, while “the Chrome Nun” evoked my tendency to engage in armored dogma. We constantly proved David's nicknames true, so we mounted no resistance to them.

  David had a beau
tiful “wooden ship” called the Mayan, which he had anchored in a remote, pristine lagoonlike pool of tropical heaven about thirty miles off the Florida coast. After Airplane played Miami, Paul and I took a seaplane out to where David and several of his tanned, blonde, voluptuous nymphs were practicing the art of nautical Shangri-la. The guitars, the plates of fresh food, the marijuana, the nudity—I liked everything about it except that last part. Damned if I was going to be the only dark-haired, flat-chested, skinny white geek to throw myself up for the brutal physical comparison. For the remainder of the visit, the Chrome Nun was the only one wearing clothes—a conspicuous cover-up.

  I'm still that way. Ninety-five degrees in L.A., and I'll be the only one not wearing shorts. If you want to let your fifty-year-old cellulite flap around, that's your problem. I find it offensive. I don't want to look at yours and I don't want you looking at mine.

  Keep your city beautiful—wear slacks.

  Archetypal twentieth-century blonde and, coincidentally, my cowriter, Andrea Cagan. (Juliet Green)

  But I must say, I'm getting better at dealing with the blonde mythology that seemed to show up in my life at every turn, and which still does. When I look at a photograph of Andrea Cagan, this book's coauthor, she seems like a composite of every blonde nymph who crossed my consciousness over a period of fifty-eight years. Ironically, these impossible role models with their unattainable beauty have consistently turned out to be among my best and brightest friends.

  And sometimes much more than friends.

  Leave it to the Cosmic Master Painter to give me a blonde child, who went through puberty without turning brunette like me.

  What's a mother to do?

  33

  Fanatics and Fans

  Even when China was a child, I didn't have bodyguards. What for? On tour, I was always surrounded by men, and when I was home, the people in San Francisco were friendly, but not invasive. The exceptions to the rule were strange indeed.

  We were annoyed when a radio DJ who'd lost all sense of proportion jumped Paul's and my fence in Bolinas on a semiregular basis. Sometimes we'd find him standing in the backyard; sometimes he'd be in the house. Eventually, Paul got tired of it. On “DJ's” final visit, Paul asked him to leave by pointing a gun at him. Not to be deterred by a lethal weapon, the man just kept walking toward us. When Paul shot about five bullets around him in a circular pattern, his response was, “We must have a misunderstanding.”

  Uh huh. Fearless stupidity.

  Two other fellows, unknown to each other or anyone else for that matter, decided (independently) they were China's father. The first climbed up the outside of a New York hotel to the nineteenth floor, crawled in the window, then turned on the tube and spread himself out on my bed, waiting for me to return from a concert. Airplane had booked the whole floor for that particular date, but the hotel guard who was stationed near the entrance hadn't seen anyone. When Paul and Bill Laudner walked me to my room that night (I still maintained my own room), there was this guy just lying there.

  “Hi, Grace, I want to see my daughter,” he said, right in front of Paul. The guys were amused; it was so goofy, nobody was taking him seriously—except me. I wanted him the hell out of my room. He was “escorted” out of the building and spent an evening hanging out with NYPD Blue.

  The second stalker, who'd maneuvered himself to a dangerous precipice overlooking the bay in San Francisco, also wanted me to admit he was China's father or he'd jump off the cliff next to our house by the Golden Gate Bridge. Some part of me wondered why we didn't just let him jump, but reason took over. We asked the fire department to bring the suicide nets, and it took them quite some time to get hold of the man without triggering a dive.

  Rather than committed lifetime stalkers, these two were more into one-night stands. Lucky for me. Maybe I should have been nervous about that kind of insanity, but with so many people around at all times, I tended to find it entertaining—pathetically entertaining.

  Of course, it did occur to me that perhaps I should be offended. Most celebrities have stalkers who're more interested in them than in their immediate family members. Did the obsession with China imply that I wasn't interesting enough on my own to stalk? Or might these guys have created the “father-of-China” thing as some kind of proof they'd boinked a rock star? I used to get lots of fan mail from prisoners and people in nuthouses. It was a bit easier to understand someone wanting to correspond with a person who seemed to have a larger area of freedom and mobility, than to make sense of guys who were willing to kill themselves over an impossible (they apparently weren't afraid of DNA testing) claim.

  On the other end of my fanatical-fan spectrum were two benevolent fans who were almost twins but who had no knowledge of each other's existence. The first, Vincent Marchilello, gave me a reproduction antique doll during one of his visits backstage—with the result that I developed an interest in dolls that eventually became so extensive, my house looked like a toy store. Vince was a good-looking Italian man who was always polite, and although he was a persistent fan, he never showed any tendencies toward the stalker-type MO.

  The second benevolent fan was named Vincent, too—Vincent Marino (or Vinnie, as I liked to call him). He was also sweet, good-looking, generous (he sent me every panda article, picture, magazine, and trinket available to Western man), Italian, and East Coast, and eventually he became one of my best friends.

  The moral of the story: Some fans are frightening, some are family.

  Back at the beginning of “Now I'm famous” in the sixties, I'd never heard of stalkers or tabloid journalism. If the lowbrow newspapers or gossip columns focused on anybody in particular, it was probably people in the movie business who were trying to maintain a certain amount of decorum. Rock-and-roll musicians could have cared less if they were caught with their pants down, so to speak—so we were less interesting to the press. But now it's a different story entirely. Constant invasion of privacy is driving people nuts, not only entertainers but notable people from all walks of life. I think paparazzi should have to get a signed release for any picture they take.

  I understand about First Amendment rights, but the First Amendment was written by people who never had a clue that cameras, if used improperly, could cripple freedom. The new photo machinery and zoom lenses that are available to any goofball make it harder and harder to endorse limitless freedom of expression. From the somewhat harmless “organized” chaos I saw in the sixties and seventies, to the nineties death of Princess Diana, the stalking and rummaging around in people's garbage for cheesy information has escalated to insane proportions.

  Supply and demand? That's a big part of it. As long as we read the rags, they'll continue to flourish.

  My personal reaction to one of those in-your-face photographers was to be more disgusting than he was. At a concert back in the sixties, I was in a coed bathroom taking a pee, when I heard a guy ask, “Can I take some pictures out in the hall when you're through in there?” I was through, so I opened the stall door and pulled up my shirt, exposing one of my boobs, and said, “Here you go. The left one's a better shape than the right one, so take the shot now!” He did, and it appeared in the rock magazine Creem.

  Sure, being famous can be fun, but when you have to resort to bodyguards, killer dogs, armored cars, and Fort Knox security systems, it makes you wonder. Today, my own home is situated so that there's no way to get to it except through an electric gate that closes behind anyone who enters. And if they look scary, I press a button and the gate becomes electrified, meaning that if you touch it, you're toast. Nice and friendly, but I was robbed three times in my relatively well protected Mill Valley house. This time around, I've made a vow: no robbers, intruders, paparazzi, or nuts (except me) get in or out without searing results.

  Welcome to the modern world.

  34

  Silver Cup

  Think of Jefferson Airplane as a silver cup. By the early seventies the marks of neglect were showing on the cup. But its owners we
re at once unwilling to give it up and no longer interested in polishing its exterior. Nor did they put it to much use. It waited on a shelf, quietly collecting a streaky tarnish, for someone to restore it to its position at the table of feasts, while each servant in the house thought it was the other's job to tend to the chalice.

  Nineteen seventy-two was a good year for cracks in the wall and shredded documents. It was a year that sent Tricky Dick to a second term in office, and G. Gordon Liddy to prison for his stoic G-man tactics on behalf of Tricky Dick. Those of us in the rock-and-roll community had continued to write and sing our political views to a public that just didn't want to believe that a president could stoop to wiretapping. From our point of view, anybody the Democrats came up with to run against Darth Vader would be just fine. One of the hopefuls was George McGovern.

  Old George, wanting to bridge the generation gap, contacted us, wondering if we'd meet with him in the lounge of the hotel where we were playing, somewhere in the middle of the country. Most us agreed to hear him out, but Jorma was lukewarm about this political get-together. On the pretext of encouraging his participation in the barstool hustle the following night, I went to his room to practice my cajole. In reality, I wanted to go to bed with him, but killing two birds with one stone didn't seem like a bad idea. I began to talk about McGovern while we loosened up with one drug or the other, but I quickly proceeded to forget about anyone's candidacy … at least for that night. As I recall, though, everyone did eventually come down to the bar to listen to the man-who-would-not-be-king speaking in sincere tones about his hopes for our divided nation.

  I slept with Jorma only that one time, but after a long recording session one night, he and I decided to interact in a different way, by racing cars on Doyle Drive. A number of people like me have thought that this straight wide road would be a good place not only to go faster than the speed limit, but to defy its history of brutal accidents. Unfortunately, I found out—the hard way—that it's called Deadly Doyle Drive for a reason.