Somebody To Love

Psych-rock legend Grace Slick is in the middle of telling us a story. It’s Chicago Auditorium, 1973. Jefferson Airplane is tuning up. Slick, better known as their singer, exchanges banter with her home-town crowd. “I’m getting ready to sing. Some guy in the audience shouts: ‘Hey Gracie! Take off your chastity belt!’ I look directly at him and say: ‘Hey, I don’t even wear underpants.’ I pull my skirt up for a beaver shot, and the audience explodes with laughter. I can hear the guys in the band behind me muttering: ‘Oh, Jesus.’”

The story, like most of the tales that surround the legendary pin-up girl for the Summer of Love, isn’t apocryphal. Slick used it to open her autobiography Somebody To Love? A Rock And Roll Memoir, one of the funniest accounts of the whole West Coast psychedelic extravaganza ever written. “I shaved my legs, but I talked like a truck driver,” she said. She was the bohemian who defined a generation in the USA. And she had, as Patti Smith has noted, dark violet eyes like Elizabeth Taylor… read more >