A local attorney has his own show on TV here and interviews the occasional celebrity who has nothing better to do and is in Las Vegas.
One day I caught the show and couldn’t believe my eyes and ears - it was Grace Slick being interviewed.
OK, so I am no spring chicken either - and Summer Of Love was, like, a million years ago.
Let’s just say Grace Slick today could play Ray’s mother in Everybody Loves Raymond and nobody would know the difference - seriously, she looks like Doris Roberts!
(I think the following “now” picture is a few years old…)
I’m not into Folk or Progressive, so I don’t listen to them often, but Sandy Denny and Annie Haslam had/have incredible voices. Incredible. The sort of voices that leads one to compose enthusiastically over-the-top metaphors and similes. I should just cue up a few hours of their music and force myself to listen to it several times. I think a lot of musical taste is based on what you’ve listened to repeatedly, so maybe that would solve my lack of interest in those genres and allow me to appreciated those gifted vocalists and musicians. I am far too much a creature of habit.
Aceplace57, I wonder how many ppl first heard Sandy Denny through her Zep guest vocal. I know I did.
I am a huge fan of Grace Slick: for her singing, her composing, for representing the feisty female - and, of course, for her looks.
Some of her best work was in the interregnum period between the end of the Airplane and the beginning of the Starship. Blows Against the Empire, Sunfighter, Dragonfly, and her ‘solo’ album, Manhole are all superb albums, sadly ignored. Dreams wasn’t bad, either.
It’s very difficult comparing singers; it’s not really like-for-like. I love Judy Collins’s voice, for example, but her style is so different to Grace’s that I feel it would be unfair to rate one above the other.
White Rabbit to me is like a madeleine to Proust, it has the power to take me instantly back to the 60s (so far away now that they sometimes seem like a dream).
Grace Slick is the archetypal rock & roll woman. While singers like Sandy Denny, or even Slick’s own predecessor Signe Anderson had purer voices with a finer range, Slick had a more raw power and fire in her voice. Speaking as Sandy Denny fan myself, she has a more traditionally feminine, ‘girly’ singing voice. Grace was always more ‘rock’ - bold, steely, aggressive. She’s not exactly ‘butch’, but you don’t imagine her sewing or spending much time in the kitchen.
She is also her biggest critic, and is very quick to dismiss the idea that she is truly great singer. She does have a forceful personality that comes across in the concert recordings and videos from Woodstock - she grabbed attention on stage.
Slick has often stated that two of her biggest influences were Mick Jagger & Lenny Bruce. She stated that she never really liked rock music before she heard the Rolling Stones and was captivated by Jagger’s ‘snide attitude.’ And she loved Bruce’s sarcastic, iconoclastic sense of humor. Those influences are readily apparent in her music.
I’ve posted this in another thread, but WTH - some Grace Slick trivia. Before Slick officially started a singing career, around '65 or so, she was married to aspiring film-maker Jerry Slick, whose film school project was a series of animated shorts called “jazzy spies.” Seeing that his wife had some musical leanings, he asked her to compose the music & perform some scat singing for it. Anyway, Grace & Jerry split up, Grace becomes a famous rock star, and Jerry licenses the “Jazzy Spies” shorts to a new PBS educational series in '70. The shorts, complete with Slick’s garage-band style music & singing, became hugely popular and were re-run on the show for years to come.
So, yes it’s true: Grace Slick, the legendary counter-cultural rock star who exhorted the late 60s era youth to “Feed your Head!” is (or was) doubly famous as the singer on Sesame Street’s OneTwoThreeFourFiveSixSevenEightNIIINETennnnnn! shorts.
The voice singing in that link is clearly Grace Slick’s. And is one single voice, not a trio.
Google to the rescue.
Completely different series.
To clear up another confusion that’s plagued people for years. Grace’s husband was Jerry Slick. His brother was Darby Slick. Grace co-wrote “Somebody to Love” with Darby, not her husband.
My bad. I thought the pinball count was what you were linking to. I can’t watch YouTube videos here at work. I assumed…thus making an ass out of…well, me and me (wait, that doesn’t work!).
Yes, I think I remember hearing her say that she had a range of about five notes, but in that range, she was absolutely devastating… so they made sure she stayed in it as much as possible.
I loved the story of how she had went to the same college as tricia nixon, and was accidentally invited to a reunion and tried to go and dose the punch.
Yeah, yeah. I love Maddy too. And I love Jacqui. And Grace. And Janis. And Julie Fowlis. And Joan Baez. I’d love Karen Carpenter if I could stand her material. And da-da, da-da, da-da. I don’t really see the point of making it a horse race, or a Rolling Stone list, or whatever.
Just wanted to pop in and say that I’ve always liked Grace Slick. I would love to meet her, even though I “hate celebrities”. I was just reading a coffee table book I have on the psychedelic era, published by the RnRHOF, and she says something like, “We pushed the boundaries of what had been done before. Sometimes we weren’t very good at it, but we tried.” Anyone who has had her measure of success, and can still look back and say that, goes in my awesome column.
Marty Balin (who also had a great voice, better than Slick IMHO, and way better than Kantner) founded Jefferson Airplane, invited first Signe Anderson and later (when Signe left to have a baby, I believe) Grace Slick into the band to share vocals with him, and encouraged Paul Kantner, originally just a (rather crappy) rhythm guitarist, to contribute vocals too. (I read somewhere that Marty invited Paul to join because he liked his hair.)
What Marty didn’t like was not sharing the vocals (which he initiated) but the way Kantner took over control of the band, which he was able to do largely because he was screwing Slick, who had got them their first two big hits (with the songs - Somebody to Love and White Rabbit - that she and her brother had originally written for their band, the Great Society).
When Airplane fell apart (probably because the others got sick of Kantner too), Kantner and Slick formed Jefferson Starship, but they did not have much more than cult following until Marty rejoined and actually wrote and sang lead on some hits for them.
In my opinion, Marty Balin’s contribution to Jefferson Whatever is hugely underrated, and Paul Kantner’s hugely overrated. Grace was a real talent, though, and deserves the credit that she generally gets.
I loathe GS and have loathed her from the beginning. (her voice is distinctive, she encapsulates a certain time period and style, etc. - not arguing her talent). But that picture of her “now”? I think she looks f’ing FABULOUS for her age.
