1998; 364 pages. Full Title: Somebody
to Love? – A Rock-and-Roll Memoir.
New Author(s)? : Yes (and Yes). Genres:
Music History; Rock Music; Autobiography.
Overall Rating : 8½*/10.
Jefferson Airplane. They were one of the top rock bands of the
1967 “Summer of Love”, thanks mostly to their fantastic breakout album Surrealistic Pillow, which had two songs, Somebody To Love and White
Rabbit, that later made it onto Rolling Stone Magazine’s list of “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”.
Most people don’t realize that
Surrealistic Pillow was actually the band’s second release. Their debut album, Jefferson
Airplane Takes Off, had been released a year earlier, and garnered
almost zero excitement.
There were a couple of
personnel changes between the two albums: a new drummer, and a new female
vocalist, with Grace Slick replacing Signe Anderson, who quit to devote time to her
newborn daughter.
Interestingly, Grace Slick is
credited with writing White Rabbit, and her then-brother-in-law is credited
with writing Somebody to Love. The two songs on the "500 Greatest" list. So,
was Jefferson Airplane's adding Grace Slick to the band and their simultaneous meteoric rise to stardom a case of causation or correlation?
Let’s read her autobiography Somebody To Love? and find
out.
What’s To Like...
Somebody
to Love? was published in 1998, when Grace Slick (neé Grace Wing) was 59 years old and retired
from the music scene. The book includes lots
of great photographs of Grace’s life, loves, career, cohorts. It was co-written by a friend of hers,
Andrea Cagan (you can see her name in
the bottom right-hand corner of the cover image), and the Author’s Note at the beginning of
the book gives a nice thank-you to Andrea by Grace as well as detailing how the
whole writing thing worked.
The first hundred pages or so
chronicle Grace’s childhood, schooling (she went
to a snotty “finishing school for girls” for a while), and first
marriage, all of which was surprisingly interesting. You’ll learn why her family nickname when
growing up was “Grouser”, what her
slang word “toodles” refers to, tag
along for her “first time”, and marvel that her first songwriting effort
managed to offend a bunch of “preppy boys” at a college party, causing them to
ask her to leave and never come back.
The next two hundred pages are pretty much an extended discourse about sex and drugs and rock-and-roll, and booze, all
of which Grace embraced with passionate persistence. Musically, these chapters cover her time with
the bands The Great Society, Jefferson Airplane,
Jefferson Starship, Starship, and a short-lived solo career.
Grace Slick does a lot of
name-dropping here, which is a plus, not a minus. Besides her bandmates, some of the notables include:
JFK (before he was president), Jerry Garcia, Neal
Cassady (a Merry Prankster), Wavy
Gravy (who?), David Crosby, Mick
Jagger, Frank Zappa, Abbie Hoffman, Craig Chaquico (who?),
and Mickey Hart. She credits Randy
Newman, Odetta, and Lenny Bruce with each having a significant impact on her
musical career. Oh yeah, there's also a
threesome involving Grace, Jim Morrison of the Doors, and a plate of
strawberries. Chapter 26 is devoted to
that.
The last 70 pages show us the
present-day (in 1998) Grace Slick:
calm, content, and gratefully retired from the excesses of being a rock-and-roll
star. She wishes her parents were still
alive, is proud as any mother can be of her daughter China, has had enough of
cheating husbands, offers some thoughts about geezer-aged rock bands reuniting
for a brief time (one tour, one album), and introduces us to her current flame,
Buckminister Ratcliff Esquire III, whose fat, furry body Grace loves to play with. Get your mind out of the
gutter, he’s a lab rat.
Ratings…
Amazon:
4.4/5
based on 405 ratings and 175 reviews.
Goodreads: 3.74/5 based on 1,345
ratings and 113 reviews.
Excerpts...
Girl-ask-boy dance. Okay.
I went straight to the top by asking the school’s star quarterback to be
my date. He was older and he didn’t know
who the hell I was, but he said yes.
Polite, I guess. I bought a pink,
flower-covered, wedding cake-like monstrosity of a dress and went with Mr.
Hotshot to a pre-dance party thrown by a senior cheerleader. She opened the door in a red, body-hugging
floor-length number with four-inch dangling earrings, which made me look like
an exploding cotton candy machine. (pg. 49)
In 1988, Paul called together all the
original members of Jefferson Airplane and suggested a short (one album, one
tour) reunion. After some brief
discussion about logistics, we all agreed to the adventure.
Fantastic, I thought. This time Airplane will be assisted by one of
those professional management teams in L.A. (as opposed to well-meaning hippies
from San Francisco) who really know how to put a rock-and-roll package
together. Now that we’re all old enough
to prefer seamless negotiations, it’ll be a snap.
Sure, Grace, and polar bears use toilets. (pg. 323)
I was naïve enough
to be sucked in by the “Wanna see my Bugatti?” routine. (pg. 60)
I don’t really have any great quibbles about Somebody to Love? Yes, there was some cussing, but a lot less
than what I expected – just 9 instances in the first 20% of the book. Yes, Grace hopped into bed with all sorts of
guys, especially musicians, including most (but
not quite all) of her fellow members of Jefferson Airplane. But there were no lurid details (not even about those strawberries), and hey, most readers expect a rock star’s bio to include some romantic trysts.
Finally, it would be nice to
have an updated version of this book, since it’s been 23 years since Somebody to Love? was
published, and Grace Slick is still alive and in her early 80s. But if you’re dying to know what she’s been
up to in the last quarter century, you can read Wikipedia’s post on her here.
All in all, I enjoyed Somebody
to Love? The content is a nice balance
between the flower-power lifestyle of the 1960s, the human side of being in a top-tier band, and
the challenge of having a stable personal life all at the same time. The chapters are short (54 of them covering 364 pages) which made this a quick, easy,
and informative read, and since I was a teenager myself in the 1960s, the book brought back some great memories of my salad days.
8½ Stars. Here’s a few other noteworthy highlights of the book: Grace’s introduction to LSD (pg. 94); her first peyote trip (pgs. 90-91, which also brought back old memories), getting busted again and again (ch. 30), playing “butt bongo” on the Howard Stern Show (pg. 332), and her love for the music of The Gipsy Kings (pgs, 351 and 359).
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