Grace Slick – Musician – 1987 – Far Out Magazine c
November 12th, 2026 · 8:30pm GMT
Attempting to dose Richard Nixon with LSD, belting the standout set for Woodstock, and rubbing shoulders with the likes of Janis Joplin, back in her 1960s heyday, Grace Slick was a veritable icon of counterculture hippiedom but, by the time the 1980s rolled around, the ‘Acid Queen’ had become a reluctant stalwart of mainstream soft rock.
Rock and roll has always been a young person’s game and, in many ways, it was Slick’s generation of tripped-out hippie rockers that cemented that reputation, but some rockstars deal with the ageing process better than others.
While there is almost always a decline in quality once rock musicians reach middle age and above, some are content to live out their days wheeling out anniversary tours and greatest hits records while others, like Grace Slick, stick to their principles and throw in the towel completely.
After a brief reunion with her old Jefferson Airplane bandmates, she retired from the musical realm back in 1990, at the age of 50, declaring that rock and roll is tied to youth, and older performers look ludicrous onstage. “As soon as your chin doesn’t go with your face, when you turn it real fast, it’s time to get out of rock ‘n’ roll,” she once said of the comparatively elderly Rolling Stones.
While Slick’s retirement was a matter of principle for the vocalist, it is difficult to forget that she spent much of the 1990s shilling out Starship records that, while incredibly successful in a commercial sense, were as vapid and lifeless as they come. By her own admission, she hated Starship’s defining hit ‘We Built This City’, but that 1985 single certainly wasn’t the band’s own offending effort.
“I don’t like to sing songs where I don’t believe the lyrics,” the vocalist once shared in an interview. That ethos made things rather tricky during her Starship years, though, particularly when she was presented with a song like ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now’.
A ubiquitous mid-1980s power ballad featuring the kind of deliberately diffuse lyrics present in virtually every mainstream love song throughout the century, courtesy of Diane Warren and Albert Hammond. “Diane Warren is an amazing pop songwriter, and she, I’m assuming, believes in that state where you’re in love, you get kind of crazy,” Slick theorised.
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In case you couldn’t pick up on the tone of that quote, the vocalist does not believe in such a state. “I’m older now,” she said. “I am damn near 50, and I’m singing, ‘Nothing’s gonna stop us now.’” Once that realisation dawned upon the vocalist, it was only a matter of time before she escaped the clutches of Starship, and the music industry as a whole.
Inevitably, the song reached number one both in the US and the UK, becoming one of the most ubiquitous tracks of the 1980s in the process. However, it was the beginning of the end for Grace Slick, who left Starship shortly thereafter. The band itself carried on for a number of years, producing the bizarrely named 1989 album Love Among the Cannibals, but Slick stuck to her guns and went her own way, using her retirement from the music industry to focus on the other great love of her life: painting.
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