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Wed 11 March 2026 2:00, UK
Before she was heralded as ‘The Acid Queen’ of the 1960s, Grace Slick was a burgeoning artist, finding her voice in the haze of the 1960s.
The “original great rock diva”, as professed in her memoir, Somebody To Love?, had not fully realised making a possible career out of being a musician, spending her early 20s working various odd jobs and indulging her creative side when she composed a song for a short film directed by her then-husband, Jerry Slick.
Her last job before leading a life of rock ‘n’ roll was as a model, working at the I Magnin department store in San Francisco. During this time, in 1965, she would be introduced to her future when she, her husband, Jerry and his brother, Darby, went to the nightclub The Matrix to see the band Jefferson Airplane.
“I went to see them, and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s way better than what I’m doing because I have to stand on my feet all day. And they get to hang around and smoke dope and play songs for a couple hours a night?’,” she remembered in an interview with Plum.
“My mother was a singer; I thought, ‘I can do that.’ And oddly enough, I can do that!”
Grace Slick
As she recalled in Somebody to Love?, she realised that the members of Jefferson Airplane were making more money playing one gig than she was, working a week of modelling at I Magnin. Almost immediately, she and the Slick brothers began conceptualising the formation of a band of their own.
The three formed The Great Society, progenitors of San Francisco’s acid rock scene alongside Jefferson Airplane, and would produce two songs that, ironically, would later define Jefferson Airplane’s legacy: Grace’s ‘White Rabbit’, a psychedelic trip inspired by the mythical literary world of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Darby’s ‘Somebody to Love’, sung by and later taken with Grace once she joined Jefferson Airplane.
When Jefferson Airplane’s singer Signe Toly Anderson left the land in late 1966 to raise her child, Grace took her place, bringing along her songs and her psychedelic sensibility, slowly altering the band’s former folk-rock style of music. With their second album, 1967’s Surrealistic Pillow, Jefferson Airplane surged into international stardom, becoming a definitive band of the counterculture.
The hedonism of the decade would follow the band as they grappled with controversy, various addictions and fluctuating hierarchies within their dynamic. After they dissolved, Grace and Paul Kantner reformed as Jefferson Starship in 1974, but Kantner would leave ten years later, and a legal battle over the “Jefferson” title would follow.
Grace continued with the band as Starship, releasing their debut album Knee Deep in the Hoopla in 1985, which spawned their number one hits, ‘We Built This City’ and ‘Sara.’ She would follow with the album No Protection (1987), before leaving Starship the following year to rejoin Jefferson Airplane.
Looking back, her tenure in Starship was a decision that Grace does not look back on with particular fondness. “I didn’t care for Starship anyway,” she admitted to Anti Music in 2007. “Like the ‘80s version of Starship was just all… songs were written by other people and ah, God, it was just dumb.”
Even with the success of number ones to their credit, Starship was lacking the spirit of her former bands, namely the creativity that compelled Grace to write her own music in the first place. “Yeah, we had a lot of number ones, but I don’t really care about number ones,” she expressed. “I’d rather do music that’s interesting and different and is written by the band, not somebody else. So I’m kind of a stickler on that kind of stuff.”
After joining the Jefferson Airplane reunion in 1989, Grace retired from music, devoting herself to a life as a painter, where she could fully reclaim her creative side once and for all.