Category: General Interest

She was Grace Barnett Wing — a name that sounds like it belongs on a society page, not a rock concert stage.

In 1961, it did. She grew up the daughter of an investment banker and a former singer, raised in the comfortable suburbs of Northern California in a household she later described, with characteristic bluntness, as straight out of a television sitcom. She attended Finch College in New York — a finishing school — studied art briefly at the University of Miami, married a filmmaker named Jerry Slick, and settled into the life that had been implied by her upbringing: a model in San Francisco, representing designers wearing beautiful clothes for people who could afford them.

It was not interesting to her.

In August 1965, she read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about a local band called Jefferson Airplane. She went to see them play. Standing in a small club on a weeknight, watching this group of musicians from the same city she lived in, she decided — in the way people only occasionally do — that she could do that.

Not might. Not wanted to. Could.

She formed her own band, The Great Society, with her husband and a small group of musicians. This was 1965 — the year Bob Dylan went electric at Newport, the year the Rolling Stones released Satisfaction, the year American music was being taken apart by people who had decided the old arrangements were not going to hold.

Grace Slick was one of those people. And she had a song.

She wrote “White Rabbit” in approximately one sitting — a psychedelic piece built on a bolero rhythm and the internal logic of Lewis Carroll, in which the events of Alice in Wonderland became a map for a generation that had decided to follow the rabbit wherever it led. The song builds from a whisper to a command. When she sang it, her voice did something that very few voices in rock history have managed — it didn’t just carry the melody, it embodied the menace and the invitation at the same time.

When Jefferson Airplane’s original female vocalist, Signe Anderson, left the band in 1966 to start a family, they invited Grace Slick to join them. She brought two songs with her: “White Rabbit,” which she had written, and “Somebody to Love,” written by her brother-in-law Darby Slick, which she had already been performing.

Both became top-ten hits. Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow put the band at the center of the San Francisco psychedelic scene and made Grace Slick one of the most recognizable voices in American music.

This was the Summer of Love. San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district had become the center of a generational shift that had no single name but enormous momentum — a renegotiation of how young people understood authority, identity, and what a life was supposed to look like. Grace Slick, who had attended finishing school and modeled designer clothes for wealthy shoppers not three years before, was now its voice.

She performed at Woodstock in August 1969 — not at a sensible hour but in the early hours of a Sunday morning, after rain and chaos had pushed the schedule overnight. Jefferson Airplane took the stage as dawn broke over nearly half a million people, and she sang “White Rabbit” to the largest audience any of them had ever seen.

The song had been written in a single hour, in 1965, by a former department store model.

For three decades, Grace Slick remained one of the most distinctive figures in rock — through Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship, and Starship, across bands that changed their names and sounds as the decades turned but always kept her voice at the center. When she finally retired from music in 1990, she was fifty years old.

She picked up a paintbrush.

Her painting career began in the mid-1990s — portraits of the musicians she had shared stages with: Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix. Scenes from Woodstock. White rabbits. The imagery that had defined her music found a new form on canvas. She has said painting and music come from the same part of the brain. Only painting, she noted, is quieter.

In 1996, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Jefferson Airplane.

She turned 87 yesterday.

She started as Grace Barnett Wing — a finishing-school girl with a modelling job she found boring. She became Grace Slick, a voice that helped define one of the most turbulent and creative decades in American cultural history. And then, quietly, she became a painter.

She wrote her most famous song in an hour. She spent the rest of her life proving that the rabbit hole goes far deeper than any single song.