Hi Psychsters
I saw this on "Groove Tunnel" and it made interesting reading so I thought I'd share.

"In 1965, Grace Slick watched a band called Jefferson Airplane perform in a San Francisco club.

She was 25 years old. She had been a model, a wife, a woman with a college education and no clear sense of direction. The music changed everything. Within months, she had formed her own band, The Great Society, and written a song on a fifty-dollar piano with missing keys.

The song was called White Rabbit.

It built like Ravel’s Boléro—slowly, relentlessly, hypnotically—and used the imagery of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland to deliver something radio had never heard before: a two-and-a-half-minute meditation on perception, conformity, and the hypocrisy of parents who read children stories about magic potions and then wondered why those children experimented with drugs.

“Feed your head,” she sang at the climax. The line was both a command and an accusation.

In October 1966, Jefferson Airplane’s lead singer left to raise her child. The band needed a replacement. They chose Grace Slick.

She brought “White Rabbit” with her. She also brought Somebody to Love, written by her brother-in-law. Both became top-ten hits. By 1967, Jefferson Airplane was one of the most important bands in America, and Grace Slick—the only woman in the group—had become the voice of San Francisco’s counterculture.

She did not soften herself to fit the role.

In 1968, she appeared on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in blackface and ended with a raised Black Panther fist. The following year, on The Dick Cavett Show, she became the first person to say “motherfucker” on American television. The censors couldn’t stop her. The word was already out.

Then came the White House.

In April 1970, Grace Slick received an invitation in the mail. Tricia Nixon, the president’s daughter, was hosting a tea party for alumnae of Finch College. Grace had attended Finch—briefly—before dropping out. The invitation was addressed to her maiden name: Grace Wing.

The Nixon administration had no idea they were inviting one of the most notorious rock stars in America into their home.

Slick decided to bring a guest: Abbie Hoffman, the anarchist activist recently tried for inciting unrest at the Democratic National Convention. She also brought LSD powder hidden under her fingernail. Her plan was simple: during conversation, she would gesture over the president’s teacup and slip the drug into his drink.

The plan failed. Hoffman was recognized immediately. White House security turned them both away at the door. Slick later recalled the exchange: “We checked—and you’re a security risk.”

She never got inside. But the message was delivered. A woman rock star had walked straight up to power and dared it to respond.

Jefferson Airplane kept rising. They headlined Monterey Pop in 1967. They headlined Woodstock in August 1969, taking the stage at 8 a.m. after a rain-soaked night of chaos. Slick introduced the band with words that became famous: “It’s the new dawn.”

She sang “White Rabbit” to a crowd of half a million.

But the cost was coming.

Grace Slick had always been open about her drinking. “I’ve never had two drinks in my life,” she told Rolling Stone in 1978. “It’s either I drink and I’m totally drunk, or I don’t drink at all.”

In June 1978, Jefferson Starship—the band that evolved from Jefferson Airplane—went on tour in Germany. At a festival, Slick refused to perform. The crowd rioted. They burned the stage and stole the band’s equipment.

Two nights later, she did perform—drunk, wearing a Nazi uniform, goose-stepping across the stage and taunting the audience: “Who won the war?”

The band’s publicist watched the life drain out of the group.

After the show, guitarist Paul Kantner—Slick’s partner and the father of her daughter, China—demanded her resignation. She gave it.

“I wanted the band to see an uncontrollable mutant,” she later said. “And I wanted to be so out of line that when I fired myself the next day, nobody would object.”

Slick was gone. But not for good.

She returned three years later. By 1985, the band had become Starship and released We Built This City, which went to number one. Slick hated it. She called it “awful.” She called the band “a sell-out.”

But she stayed. The royalty checks were hard to ignore.

In 1988, she left again. In 1989, she reunited with the original Jefferson Airplane lineup for an album and tour. Then, in 1990, she retired.

No comeback. No nostalgia circuit. No gentle farewell record.

She was 50 years old and had a rule: “All rock-and-rollers over 50 look stupid and should retire.”

She meant it.

Slick turned to painting. She had studied art in college before music took over. Now she returned to it. She painted portraits of Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison—the friends and peers she had outlived. She painted white rabbits again and again, in every style. “I can draw a white rabbit blindfolded by now,” she said.

She faced serious health crises. In 2007, diverticulitis nearly killed her. She spent two months in a medically induced coma and had to relearn how to walk.

She survived.

Today, Grace Slick is 86. She lives in Malibu. She paints. She doesn’t perform. She doesn’t tour. She doesn’t pretend to be who she once was.

“When you get older,” she has said, “it’s not about what you did that you regret. It’s what you didn’t do.”

Grace Slick did everything.

And when the microphone stopped serving her, she set it down herself."

Whatever happened to the female mavericks of rock 'n' roll? Instead we get the likes of Taylor Swift... Ho Hum!!

PPP