by Grace Slick
36
Jefferson Starship
Paul was in the process of putting the “new” band together. John Barbata, a drummer for The Turtles, replaced Joey Covington, and we had Pete Sears on keyboards, David Freiberg on bass, Grace on Blue Nun wine, Paul on twelve-string guitar, the occasional hot licks violin from Papa John Creach, and Marty Balin came back into the fold, crooning. Marty was in top romantic form right then, and produced several hits (“Miracles,” “Caroline,” and “With Your Love” among them), putting us back into No. 1 position on the charts.
On that first Jefferson Starship tour, a positive turn of events happened that would affect my life forever. Coming back to the hotel after one of our concerts, an incredibly beautiful dark-haired woman asked if she could chat with Paul and me for a while. She came up to our room to hang out, stayed for about a half hour, and then decided to leave. I knew the rest of the crew and the band would be milling around in the hall and I peeked out the door, waiting to see who'd be cool enough to entice this gorgeous woman into his room. As she walked down the length of the hallway we all occupied, the clever remarks and invitations came flying at her from all directions, but it wasn't until the end of the rock-and-roll gauntlet that she stopped and turned into somebody's room. A man whom I'd never seen before, Skip Johnson, our new lighting director, apparently had said just the right phrase or made the winning move that drew the woman into his one-man party.
When we all converged the next morning for the ride to the airport, I made sure to see what this hustle master looked like up close. It was easy to figure out what it was about him that won him the previous evening's prize over all the other drooling competitors. Skip stood six feet tall with long black hair and green eyes surrounded by thick black eyelashes. Add to that his laid-back, cocky attitude, and I felt like I was once again at a Judy Levitas pool party, having my heartstrings tugged by Alan McKenna. Skip was twenty-two; I was thirty-four. Another good-looking dark Irish Catholic boy had overwhelmed me with nonchalance and young man enthusiasm.
The next day in Phoenix, Arizona, the entire group, including the crew, took over the hotel's outdoor area, filling most of the tables with loud rock banter and lousy margaritas. Everyone except Paul, that is, who'd flown to L.A. on our day off to talk to the RCA suits. Some of the guys were sitting down by the diving board, discussing the best way to make moves on several ladies seated across from us at the pool's other side, when suddenly Skip stood up, waved, and shouted, “Girls—could you come over here, please? You wanna fuck?”
The other hotel guests were shocked, we were cracking up, but damned if those girls didn't smile, get up, and come over to sit with this cute goofball with the foul mouth.
I decided to join them.
Later in the afternoon, Craig Chaquico, our new lead guitar player, and I had several interviews to do, so Skip offered to drive us around the city to the various radio stations. By the time the three of us got back to the hotel, I was determined to spend the night with this young man, who was friendly but seriously unimpressed with my fame. He'd worked for The Who and a lot of other top groups, so this Starship job was just one more entry on his rock-and-roll resumé. He was so unimpressed, in fact, that he actually said to me once for no particular reason, “You're too old, too fat, and too drunk. But I love you.” The best backhanded remark I'd ever heard.
Okay, so now what? I was living with Paul, I had a beautiful daughter, and the band was pulling in the crowds again. But I was lost in romance land with this bright troublemaker who had no ties, no restrictions, and no regrets. Speaking of regrets, there's an old maxim that says, “It's not what you did that you regret, it's what you didn't do.” So go for it.
I did. As everybody watched the seduction escalate, it became clear that the Grace/Paul duo was in for some trouble. And since Paul thought Skip was gay, it was easy for me to hang out with Skip pretty much whenever I wanted to, without creating concern. Why did Paul think Skip was gay? Probably because of the short red dress Skip wore to his own twenty-third birthday party in a sedate hotel bar on April 28, 1975. With the dress (borrowed from Yours Truly) he'd decided to wear sweat socks, high-tops, his mustache, and his hairy legs.
Knowing how much midwesterners love the big-city drag queen look, we all took advantage of their hospitality and celebrated as if there were nothing unusual about a member of our entourage sporting West Hollywood chic. Paul didn't think any heterosexual man would do that. But my father used to do it once a year, when the San Francisco bankers had a men-only party. Everybody not only dressed like women, they actually rehearsed for the shindig and put on an entire musical, each showing up in his own version of a RuPaul chorus girl. So much for gay-only cross-dressing, but the humor was lost on Paul. As it probably was on most of the local crowd at the bar that night.
At the time, rock and roll was predominately a world of heterosexual male musicians. The loose morality of the times made experimentation an option, but gender differences were generally not the favorite topic of conversation or behavior. With one exception on my part. My friend Sally and I were goofing around getting loaded one night when Paul was out of the house. After we'd played some David Bowie records, we began talking about David's bisexuality and how cool it would be to go to a party and have one hundred percent of the room at your disposal. We decided to give it a go in the spirit of widening our possibilities. If it worked, that would be cool. If not, no harm done. We drank a little more champagne, we kissed a little, we touched each other's breasts, and then we burst out laughing.
“Let's get serious,” we said, trying to keep in mind how expanded our dating world would be if this worked out. But in five minutes, we were laughing again. We finally gave it up as a lost cause and resigned ourselves to forty or fifty percent of the room. I never tried it again, figuring that Sally was cool, bright, and beautiful, and there was nothing wrong with her that I could determine, so if I couldn't get it on with her, I couldn't get it on with anyone. At least not a woman.
The truth is that I'm just not into vaginas. Because they're pretty much a mucous membrane, gushy and hot, and they can develop an awful lot of strange bacteria, my idea of hell is putting my face in somebody's pussy. If it's nice and clean, of course that's better, but I'm still not into it. That's not to say that I'm judgmental about lesbianism or that I think pussies are bad. I just happen to love the way men are built, that you can see when they're aroused and that everything is on the outside. With women, it's all inside and men have to figure out whether we're pretending to be aroused or not. We have to let them know what we want or just enjoy whatever's going on.
So much for Grace's lesbian possibilities. Skip was a far more realistic fantasy for me and a lot more dangerous. After the tour was over, and we settled back into San Francisco, Paul hired a publicist for Starship named Cynthia Bowman. Every man has his own distinctive expression of pleasure when he sees a woman who appeals to him, and I remember the look on Paul's face when he met Cynthia. I figured it wouldn't take long for the tall blonde ex-model to engender more than silly facial expressions—at least, that's how I rationalized my own faithless behavior with Skip. But Paul is a guy who can take his time; it wasn't until about five years later that Cynthia gave birth to China's little half brother, Alexander. That made two children out of wedlock for Paul (that he knows of)—one by Cynthia, one by me.
I'm still friends with Cynthia to this day, and we engage in some of our best sarcasm tournaments with Paul and the kids on Thanksgiving or Christmas. I also call Sally Mann in Texas and hang out with Darlene Ermacoff in Malibu. One of the strongest bonds you can have with a person is love of the same man. Jealousy is useless. The attraction both of you have for the same individual means you have a strong interest in common, so why not create a friendship instead of sucking on old resentments?
37
The Brandy Twins
In 1974, about a year before I met Skip, I'd announced through my lyrics (the same prescient way Jorma had in “Chelsea”)
that I needed to be figuratively unshackled. The words escapar (escape) and libertad (freedom) kept appearing in the Spanish section of the theme song on my solo album, Manhole.
Look up—the roof is gone
And the long hand moves right on by the hour.
Look up—the roof is gone.
La música de España es para mi como la libertad…
Convenir resueña para escapar.
That title, Manhole, was meant to shock the women's libbers, and the lyrics—half-Spanish, half-English—were meant to please me. It was recorded, in part, at Olympic Studios in London with a symphony orchestra and a group of bagpipers in kilts—the real thing. The head bagpiper, a quintessential Scotsman, healthy, robust, and bearded, pulled a small bottle of Scotch out of his high socks, which he sipped a little bit at a time, from sunrise to sunset, without getting soused. It was good fun; the album was a heteromorphic success and a commercial flop.
It was a year later, when I was still thrashing around, wondering where to aim myself, that I allowed Paul to steer me and some other loose-cannon musicians into Jefferson Starship—a veritable gold-record machine, as it turned out. The drug-fueled, anomalous lyrics of Jefferson Airplane smoothly shifted into the more languid boy/girl laments that made up the critical mass of popular songs in the post-hippie decades. Now it was Marty's turn to be the focus of attention, while I turned my passion toward our young lighting director.
For some reason, John Barbata felt it necessary to tell Paul that not only was Skip heterosexual, he was interacting with Yours Truly in more than a “touring bar pal” sort of way. I suppose Paul had been in denial of the obvious, but with John's sobering words, he understandably lost it and fired Skip. While he did his best to replace Skip (it's not that easy to find a lighting director who knows your songs well enough to cue a hundred lights exactly in time with the music), I was on the move. I'd stay in Detroit one night to perform, then fly to Chicago the next day to be where Skip was doing lights for someone else. Then I'd fly immediately back to New York to sing with the band again. After that, I was off to Washington to fit myself into Skip's tour schedule. Basically I was throwing a lot of money at the commercial airlines for about three months.
In one of the hotel rooms along the way, I sat down on the bed to think. How long could I keep the game going, I wondered, without creating the inevitable confrontation?
When Jefferson Starship got back home to San Francisco, Skip was on the road with Stephen Stills's group, and Sally and I decided to go to Alaska where they were playing. Good ole Sally, it turned out, was interested in Stephen and his keyboard player, Jerry Aiello, so we told Paul that we were going to stay for a while at the Boar's Head Inn, a quaint establishment in Carmel owned by Clint Eastwood. Neither one of us knew Clint, so I don't know why we thought that sounded plausible. But it worked. The problem—or fun, depending on how you look at it—was an airline strike. We had to take four different flights on five different airlines (I don't know, you figure it out) to get to Anchorage. Each time we boarded a different airplane, Sally and I cleaned out their liquor supply, so by the time we finally got to the hotel, we were plastered.
When we checked in and called Skip, our crocked condition didn't seem to bother him at all. He arrived at our room and leaned casually on the door frame, wearing a fireman's helmet with a swirling red police car light on top. Even though Sally and I could be formidable jerks when we were liquored-up, Skip was a veteran, having worked with some of the champs at overindulgence.
When he'd first come on board as production manager for The Who, they all got ripped one night and decided to initiate him into the fold by asking him to get the fire extinguisher and move the couch from the hotel room out into the hall—using nothing but the spray from the hose. Skip had taken up the challenge and had actually started the redecorating, but when he broke the glass on the hose box, an alarm went off and Hyatt security was on the scene before the couch could be adequately relocated.
Sally and I were ready to trash the tundra when we arrived in Alaska, but Skip did have to work. While he was at the concert hall doing the setup, Stephen's drummer, Joey Lala, Sally, and I went out in the twenty-below blizzard to check out the Call of the Wild territory. As we were walking along one of the snow-covered streets, a large man came flying out of a bar, landing facedown in the gutter. The even larger bouncer stood at the door looking like he'd just tossed out a small bag of rat turds. I made a remark like, “What if the guy freezes to death?” But Joey reminded me that this was still frontier land as far as the tough guys were concerned. Besides, the alcohol would probably keep him from turning blue until he came to and found another saloon to inhabit.
Skip more than proved his ability to handle almost anything on that tour by taking care of three difficult situations at once. The first was looking after the Brandy Twins (Sally and Grace); the second was taking on the job of road manager after the first guy suddenly freaked out and quit. The third was in Seattle, on the way back down the coast, when Skip saved one of the boys in the band from committing suicide, by tackling him when he tried to drown himself by diving off the hotel balcony into the Puget Sound. All that and lighting director, too—I was getting more impressed by the minute.
Sally and I made it back home on Christmas Eve, just in time for us to flip into mother mode for Jesse (Sally's son by Spencer) and China. Jesse was about the same age as my daughter, and Sally and I were about the same age as Beavis and Butt-head. We loved our kids, but we hadn't quite finished being children yet ourselves.
“No rghuofmr!” (Roger Ressmeyer/© Corbis)
For a while, the sneaking around was exciting, but I finally had to admit that it wasn't fair to anybody. After making a decision to put an end to it, I got out the want ads and found an apartment in Sausalito. I then called Jefferson Starship's trucker, Mike Fisher, and asked him to meet me at the Seacliff house with the truck. Finally, I talked to Paul. I told him I couldn't pretend anymore, and I moved out and into the new apartment—all within a period of about twenty-four hours.
Sadness, yes. Regrets, no.
Although it was an unpleasant time for Paul, I'm sure he felt relief as well; it takes two people to ensure the failure of a relationship. Certain pop psychologists disagree, but I believe that staying together “for the child” creates a hideous atmosphere of daily bullshit in which the kid is surrounded by mixed messages at best and, at worst, chronic battles that make so-called family life a sham. I'm grateful there were never any custody fights over China. Paul and I shared her without written agreements or arguments.
During that time, Sally and I took up residence in the new apartment, which she referred to as “the combination palace.” Skip stayed there off and on when he was between tours, and the three of us—sometimes accompanied by the “real” children—stayed in that Three's Company configuration until Skip was hired back by Jefferson Starship on a full-time basis. It was inevitable—he was the best, and there's just no substitute for adept professionalism. Now, living together as a bona fide “couple,” Skip and I resumed touring with the band and tried to maintain a social environment as free of open hostility as possible. I roomed alone on that tour as I always had, savoring my privacy and indulging whims as various as shouting at the moon and, literally, walking on the edge.
An affinity for near-death experiences doesn't necessarily indicate that a person is miserable and wants to deanimate the body. That devalues what may be really going on. Perhaps the person is just attempting, in a primitive way, to join the cosmos, or bump into his or her original DNA, or flush out his or her adrenaline. Bungee-jumping, race car driving, astronautics, working on an art project until you drop, taking psychedelics, swimming the English Channel—these are all extreme activities pursued by people who're trying to “push the envelope,” trying to test so-called limits. That urge to know why and why not has resulted in incredible discoveries that have changed the face of our culture forever. And sometimes it has just boiled down to an indivi
dual yearning to be part of the greater picture.
To wit:
It happened in the Midwest, where the elements regularly put on a spectacular thunder and lightning show, the likes of which I'd never seen. One such storm was in full swing that night and the entire sky was alive in fast-frame time. Undulating colors moved in and out of gray, white, blue, and black exploding clouds, which were sliced down the center of their fat, rolling surface by spears of bristling electric white light. And beneath their high-voltage crackle was the crashing bass of thunder.
I wanted to be a part of it—it was an instantaneous reaction. I opened the window, took off all my clothes, climbed out on the ledge, and cheered like a rabid sports fan for the clashing natural Titans. I could feel the rain and the wind on my naked body and I could sense the sound of the thunder in my chest. My hair was thrown and whipped around my face. My own shouting voice moved in circles up through the percussion of thunder claps. For just a few minutes, I was embraced by the original choreographer.
Fantastic—until I heard the flat voice of caution.
“Grace, this is your drummer, John Barbata, speaking to you. Get back into your room!” He was using that pseudo-authoritarian crowd-control tone that security employs when large groups of people are threatening to become unruly. I don't know if he thought I was going to jump, or if he was just worried about the group's having to come up with a quick replacement for a vocalist, but he was clearly confused about my intentions. That was understandable; I'm not an athlete, so I suppose he was justified in questioning my ability to maintain balance under the circumstances.