Somebody to Love?

by Grace Slick

  Adding to Paul's misery were songs of the “Baby, why don't you love me?” ilk. He just couldn't handle it, and he also resented the time limits set for the length of songs. There could be no more eleven-minute songs because Top 40 radio wouldn't play them, and the rest of the group wanted hit singles to help sell the albums and pull in the bucks.

  Also driving Paul batty was the overreliance on the same formulaic song structure: verse-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus-out. It simply wasn't Paul's style. His personal integrity was crashing into the desire of the rest of the group to go with the current trends.

  Was he right? Sure. From where he was standing. And we thought we were busy being sensible and modern. As usual, somewhere in the middle was the truth. But Paul knew his own truth. He left the band in disgust, and Jefferson Starship continued as simply Starship.

  The record company, on the other hand, couldn't have cared less who wrote the songs as long as they sold, so the new Starship wound up soliciting Top 40 hits from “pros” and “up-and-comers.” The multitalented Peter Wolf (no, not Faye Dunaway's ex) wrote “Sara” with Ina Wolf, Diane Warren wrote “Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now,” and Bernie Taupin, collaborating with Peter Wolf, Dennis Lambert, and Martin Page, contributed “We Built This City.” All three songs quickly went to No. 1 and ensured the group a consistent string of successful records and tours during the mid-eighties.

  Left to right: David Freiberg, Mickey Thomas, Grace Slick, Paul Kantner, and Pete Sears, smiling, sober, and selling out. (Roger Ressmeyer/© Corbis)

  As fate would have it, my participation in the latter two songs with Starship led to a continuing role. Between Welcome to the Wrecking Ball and Software, two forgettable solo albums I managed to squeeze out, I was bumped up to singing duets with Starship's Mickey Thomas. That was fine with me, but Mickey had envisioned himself as commanding the spotlight (by himself) at the front of the band—until I arrived to ruin his vision. Since two of Star-ship's monster singles were our duets, it became increasingly difficult for him to make a case against pairing up with me. He was never vocal about it, but it was easy to tell that singing with the old broad clearly wasn't his idea of the ultimate rock-bank lineup.

  I thought Mickey would recognize that singing duets wasn't a lifelong sentence, and that if he could put up with me for a few more albums, he'd gain the commercial clout to go out on his own and pull in the stadium crowds. But he didn't see it that way. As it turned out, neither of us mentioned our discomfort to each other, and polite acceptance lingered until 1986.

  Going for the glam. (Roger Ressmeyer/© Corbis)

  Left to right: Grace Slick, Jane Fonda, and Mickey Thomas: two seconds with a hotshot. (© Steve Schapiro)

  Another problem arose: Aynsley Dunbar, our new drummer, was fired, and that's how Donny Baldwin, one of my all-time favorite people, became the drummer for the rest of the Starship records.

  After Paul left, I remained the last shred of the original Airplane lineup, and I was enjoying an easy ride. Skip, having recovered from the worst part of his illness, once again took on the lighting director job. With him, Donny Baldwin, Pete Sears, producer Ron Nevison, and Peter Wolf all part of the mix, I was surrounded by friends and good traveling companions. The congenial atmosphere made our pop MOR (middle of the road) music tolerable, and the three chart-toppers supported our various families of children, dogs, grandmothers, and mortgages.

  A middle-aged person on a rock-n-roll stage. (AP/Wide World Photos)

  Life had become more stable—with the exception of a few unavoidable incidents that were related to celebrity. One night, I was lying awake beside a sleeping Skip, letting my mind wander, when I saw a figure appear in the darkness of our bedroom doorway. For some reason, I thought it was one of the band or crew members screwing around, so I tapped Skip on the shoulder and asked him, “Do you know who that is?”

  Since my eyesight isn't as good as Skip's, I didn't see the gun in the man's hand. Skip did, however, and let out a wordless yell that was so loud and excruciating, the guy ran out of the room, down the stairs, and right through a plate-glass door, his plans thwarted by sheer decibel volume. Good old rock and roll. Caught by the police after we lodged a complaint, the screwball said that an extraterrestrial had sent him to Maria Muldaur's house to make contact. (With a gun?) The poor fool had apparently confused me with Maria Muldaur, another dark-haired singer who also lived in Mill Valley. I never did call her to find out if he'd honored her with his unraveled presence.

  China was an easy child to love and care for, and Skip was, and still is, my “rock” and my “brother.” There were few intrusions into our much needed respite from the more exciting but ultimately ravaging celebrations of full-on drug rock. Sober, smiling, and selling out, I realized I was becoming my mother—not a bad role model, but not me. And yet, playing Virginia Wing was better than playing the deadly games I'd favored previously.

  Unfortunately, Paul, now gone from the group, was beginning to exhibit some of his own peculiarities by compiling a collection of bad Starship reviews and jokes made at the group's expense. When Starship checked into the various hotels where it was booked, our cubbyholes would be full of these bad reviews. They arrived before we did; Paul had individually addressed them, wanting us to have something negative to think about while we were enjoying our commercial grand slam. Although some of the jokes he sent were actually funny, we recognized the gesture for what it was: an indication of how much pain he was feeling.

  For me, the eighties incarnation of Starship that Paul had left felt entirely opposite from the 1969 version of Airplane. It was almost like having two different occupations. The two bands had different focuses, purposes, and conduct; one was a circus, the other a musical shopping mall. Starship was a working band: do the albums, do the videos, do the road trips. No drugs, no alcohol, no wild parties, and no fooling around with anyone but my husband. I drove China to and from school when I was home, did the grocery shopping, and conducted myself with uncharacteristic reserve.

  Any hanging out with hotshots during the eighties happened incidentally in uneventful moments during awards ceremonies or talk shows. For instance, I met Meg Ryan in the ladies' room before an appearance on Good Morning America, traded snide comments about cocaine with Chevy Chase on The Merv Griffin Show, did a couple of Letterman stints, had my picture taken with Joe Montana at the Bay Area Music Awards, went to drug-abuse counseling with Jerry Garcia, listened to Gene Simmons of Kiss talk about his post-coital Polaroid collection, met Sting, met Phil Collins. I'd love to be able to relate something profound—or even titillating—that I took away from these encounters, but they were all of the five-minute variety without either substance or glaring impropriety.

  During that time, although I felt pretty much okay, I was keenly aware of how strange it was to be a middle-aged person on a rock-and-roll stage.

  I never thought there were corners in time till

  I was told to stand in one.

  —GRACE SLICK, FROMHYPERDRIVE

  I wore the fashion of the moment, whatever it was—no let's-be-freaky outfits. I cut my hair, smiled for the cameras, answered press questions, watched the charts, made the records, and kept my ass out of jail. I didn't even mind the restrictive lifestyle because it was unique for me—a new link in a chain of shifting priorities that served to remind me of who I was, who I could be, and who I wanted to be. But conformity is never more than a temporary diversion for me. Inevitably, I revert back to my true nature.

  In any situation, I ask myself, “Does this particular way of being resonate with my being?” Yes? Then I grab an extra-large helping. No? Then fuck it. I take what I can use and leave the rest.

  44

  Exits

  It was 1984, the year George Orwell made famous, when my mother died of a heart ailment. I was at the Hyatt in Los Angeles, getting ready to do the TV show Solid Gold, when I received the call from my father. In the saddest voice I'd ever heard, he told me that everything possi
ble had been done to help her, but it just hadn't worked.

  I received the information and then I turned into a machine. Automatic pilot. I didn't tell the band that my mother had died until after we'd performed, and I have no idea how the performance went or what songs we played. I just knew I had to keep moving, because if I stopped, I'd have to think about an incomprehensible loss. The days following my mother's death were a gray vacuum. I remember Skip being gentle, not at all melodramatic, just close and concerned for my feelings. He'd have to be that strong again a few years later when my father died while we were on the road.

  For several months before his death, my father had a private nurse attending to his needs. I'd call him from the road or write silly postcards trying to cheer him up, but I don't think there's any substitute for the physical companionship of someone you love when you feel sick and lonely. I've often wondered why I'm never there when people die. I'd like to have held both of my parents and shared some of their thoughts on the process of dying. I'm not sure I could have said no to touring without causing major problems to Starship, but the more I think about it now, I see that I should have been with my father. Even with the nurse there, family might have made him a bit more at ease with what he knew were his final days.

  “Now you're the matriarch,” Paul reminded me of the natural but bewildering reality.

  Some whiny little part of my mourning was anger— “How could you leave me?” No matter how old a person is, it feels like it's too soon for them to go. I talk to my father and mother sometimes, hoping their spirits can hear, about my love, my mistakes, and my gratitude for their peaceful parenting.

  The older I get, the more I see the striking similarities between a parent's and a child's genetic makeup. In my case, I got my mother's personality, or at least the showtime aspects of it, and from my father, I got an almost exact duplicate of his body (minus the critical gender specifications). But there's an added element that distinguishes each of us, one from the other. It's the individual's specific way of perceiving the world that swings the whole game in a different direction.

  The way I see it, that missing number in the DNA soup is the soul, our unique spirit that puts a seemingly new spin on the predetermined template. But sometimes the inherited parts are so similar, it's astounding. Everything about my body structure, hair texture, and the shape of my hands, feet, legs, and nose corresponds with my father's. It goes so far that when the dentist made a mold of both the top and bottom rows of my teeth for braces, and I placed them beside my father's molds, each tooth was in exactly the same place. Not just similar—exact. When I looked at him then, I thought I was seeing myself thirty-five years in the future, doing some conservative banker cross-dressing. But his shy, retiring personality was not part of the genetic hand-me-down.

  That's where my mother stepped in. She and I could make the same remark at the same time about the same person, without any of it having been part of the context of the previous sentence. And she gave me my only paranormal experience. Several months after she died, I was lying in bed reading an unrelated spy novel, and I heard her voice say, “Grace?”

  All right! I thought. I'm going to talk to a spook, and it's my mom. I said, “Yes?”

  But that was it, no comment, no advice, no warnings, no bad jokes, just a query in the form of my name. I kept at her for a while, talking out loud, saying, “It's okay. I'm not afraid, you can chat—say anything. I can hear you. What do you want to talk about?” But she didn't feel it necessary to say anything more. She just made the brief connection—then silence. I still don't know exactly what I was supposed to understand from that, maybe just that she does indeed live without form. Is it something my mind did for the comforting aspect? No, I'm already open to intangible phenomena, so I wasn't looking for proof. It was the shortest gabfest I've ever had.

  I know my parents live in me, with or without aural remarks. They are not missing, but their forms are missed.

  45

  Panda

  In 1985, somewhere on the road, I was watching TV and saw this fat little black-and-white ball of fur sitting on a weighing scale in the middle of a roomful of popping flash bulbs, shuffling cameramen, yelling reporters, squirming children, and white-coated veterinarians. It was a baby panda at the Ueno Zoo in Japan, and they were all closing in on him like he was a sack of diamonds. When I noticed that he was watching the chaos with a certain dignified composure, I was intrigued. I knew he must be feeling some fear, and I could relate to that. After all, I'd been in the rock-and-roll press pit, in the midst of a frightening pack of agitated, overadrenalized Homo sapiens shouting out my name, ignoring whatever civilized behavior had been attributed to their species.

  The panda just sat there. He could have tried to lurch off the table, but he seemed to be enjoying the stupid human tricks, and I learned an important lesson from him: it's all just a passing show. When I got back home from the tour and was sorting through my mail, an envelope with a picture of a panda in the upper left-hand corner caught my eye. I hadn't cared one way or the other about animals before; I'd always thought they were just a part of the scenery. But that little guy in Tokyo had shown me something I'd never noticed in anything but humans—a soul.

  I suddenly realized that all these creatures were running around with fur and feather outfits on, just like our skin suits, and for the first time, I saw that inside all the different forms were individual personalities. These “animals” were, in fact, sentient beings who wanted the same things we wanted—food, shelter, peace, entertainment, health, and all the rest of it. Some of them could fly, swim, run, and sleep better than we could, and some of them could swat your head off in one fast move—like a panda bear. I'd discovered a whole new set of friends to hang out with. For a “city girl” like me to come around to this perspective was akin to landing on another planet. Except I hadn't landed on another planet so much as I'd taken a good hard look at the one I was on.

  I'd love to have a panda, I thought. So I wrote to the outfit with the panda logo and asked them how to go about acquiring one.

  They were nice enough not to say, “Wow, are you dumb!” Instead, they sent me a load of information, which included the fact that pandas couldn't be owned by anyone but the Chinese government, which, if it felt like it, occasionally gave one or two to another country as a diplomatic gesture. But that was it. Pandas were almost extinct; there were one thousand or so left in the entire world. Their land had been taken by man, and bamboo, their main source of food (each panda eats forty pounds of it per day), routinely dies off en masse every sixty years or so. Without land or bamboo, the pandas were in big trouble.

  So, no, apparently I couldn't have a panda. But I could write a song about them:

  He can feel the night, the last sunset is in his eyes

  They will carry him away, take his beauty for their prize

  Ah, but hunger would have come when the bamboo forest died …

  Oh Panda Bear—my gentle friend

  I don't want to say goodbye

  Oh Panda Bear—when will the killing end

  When will we get it right?

  Panda

  Once I'd gained this new awareness of the animal kingdom, I remembered that Skip, on Christmas or Thanksgiving, used to take a large plate of leftovers “out to the backyard for the animals.”

  “What animals?” I'd asked him.

  “Oh, you know, possums, squirrels, foxes, raccoons …”

  Raccoons? They're related to pandas—cousins with the same heavy eye makeup.

  I started putting food out at night (raccoons are nocturnal animals) and looking out the window to see if any masked bandits wanted to dine at our house. Yup. Several bellied up for dinner, and several more of their fellow critters followed: foxes, possums, vultures, squirrels, deer, even the occasional neighborhood cat or dog. In fact, it got to be such a spectacle that some humans with cameras from the local TV stations arrived to film the menagerie.

  My favorite visitors, though,
were the raccoons—they were smart, tough, and surprisingly peaceful. They brought their babies and they'd hang out with each other and play under the solar panel where I burned the words Raccoon Saloon into the supporting horizontal wooden beam. I was hooked. Every night they'd come and eat two large bags of dry cat food, two dozen raw eggs, four bags of Oreo cookies, and assorted grapes, watermelon, leftovers, and anything else lying around in the grass, creating a scene that looked like one of those anthropomorphic paintings of animals doing human activities. They would lie around on the lounge chairs, swim with each other in the pool, eat grapes, and have sex on the lawn—a regular Roman orgy.

  Among the tribe who lived part-time around the south end of our property in Marin were a mother and baby raccoon who arrived every evening for about a month. One particular night, when they reached the top of the hill near the solar panel, I noticed they were moving at a pace that was far slower than usual. Then I saw that the little one had dragged himself up the hill by his front paws with both of his hind legs splayed flat and immobile on the ground.

  I called a wildlife organization to ask how best to trap the young raccoon and bring him in to be treated, but they said it wouldn't be a good idea, that his mother might not take him back after he was returned. I had to just leave it alone and see what happened. Skip dubbed the baby Sore-foot, a sweet sort of Native American–sounding nickname, and night after night, I watched this amazing scene of a patient mother climbing the hill from wherever they called home during the day, guiding her baby to the food at the top of the hill. I called the mother Torn Back, because she had four gashes about an inch and a half apart down the side of her hindquarters. The deep scratches looked to be the result of a fight with some kind of large wildcat or puma, wounds she probably had received while protecting Sorefoot from becoming a meal for the feline predator.