“Rock’n’roll people are spoiled brats,” she says at one point with a throaty cackle. “We don’t know anything about anything except having fun, how much money we can spend and who we can screw.”
Interview by Tim Jonce per The Guardian, you can read the full article here
Today, Slick is speaking from her home in Malibu, Los Angeles. When the California wildfires broke out in January, she was all packed up and ready to leave for a hotel that had been booked, but it didn’t come to that. Still, Slick is no stranger to fires. In 2018, the Woolsey fire reached the outskirts of her property. At her previous home, a fire started by welders working on a gate nearby in 1993 was not so merciful – it destroyed her property and all Slick’s possessions, including her music memorabilia. The only thing left after the blaze, she says, was a ceramic white rabbit. They seem to have followed her around. Fans still send them. She paints them, too, these days. She remembers one riotous gig in the 1970s when a fan put a live rabbit on stage.
“We were worried because what do you do?” she says. “We actually took it home. I remember it had one ear that wasn’t working, it didn’t stick up like rabbit’s ears do. And, oddly enough, he liked marijuana seeds. So not only were we loaded, but the rabbit was loaded too!”
What happened to the rabbit?
“We might have given him to one of the members of the band who had a child … I don’t know. We didn’t kill him or anything.”
Slick’s stories are often quite like the lyrics in White Rabbit – populated by all kinds of weird and wonderful characters and events. In her 1998 autobiography she recalls an encounter with the Doors’ Jim Morrison in which he was on all fours howling like a dog.
Grace Slick performing in 1970
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‘Don’t offend anybody, dress a certain way, get married, have children, stay at home and cook pies. Don’t think so!’ Slick performing in 1970. Photograph: Robert Altman/Getty Images
“No, it was more like a wolf,” she corrects me, as if that makes it perfectly understandable. “He was howling at the moon. But that was not unusual for Jim.”
It must have made an impression on Slick because, sometime later while on tour with the Doors, she found herself building up the courage to knock on Morrison’s hotel door. What followed was a session of smearing strawberries all over the room and a sexual encounter Slick describes as “like making love to a floating art form with eyes”. That might sound almost spiritual if not for her added acknowledgment: “He was a well-built boy … his cock was slightly larger than average.”
