Rant of the Week

Oh So Grace Slick

In the mid-1960's, television realized that it had to acknowledge that there was something going on out there in reality-land that did not conform to the standard paradigm of the way big people do things in America-- because there was money in it (which was exactly the way big people did things anyway) and so they deigned to acknowledge rock'n'roll and decided to occasionally allow a rock'n'roll band onto the Ed Sullivan Show or Hootenany or Hullabaloo. 

But what do you do with them?  How do you pose them?  What do you put in the background?  How much do we have to pay them?

They discovered that if you played the recording while the band faked a performance of the song, you didn't have to pay very much for the performance.  It was technically promotion, not a performance.  Union rules didn't apply.  So Dick Clark, who I really believe is the king pimp of all television pimps, week after week, on American Bandstand, featured musicians standing in front of real teens from America lip-synching to their own tunes.  Did they think we were fooled?  I don't know.  I'm not too sure. 

On Ed Sullivan, the bands really played.  You can see cords going from their guitars to their amps-- a dead give-away in that era.  If there are no cords-- it's lip-synching.  Thank you Ed.  And it is now time for you to stop introducing Jimmy Morrison and the Doors, Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane, and Mick Jagger and the Stones, as "something for the youngsters of America".   Weird, wasn't it?   Dean Martin would come out and put all the adults to sleep with songs about pillows that you dream on, and then Mick Jagger would come out for the "youngsters" and tell them he couldn't get no satisfaction.

The other way you could tell if it was really live was if you heard a mistake.  And that's what gives Grace Slick away in this performance of "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane.  It's real.  It's live.  Grace misses the beat on "pill" and has to speed up to catch the beat on "one pill makes you small".  That is her smiling, I'm pretty sure, because she just made a mistake in front of 25 million people.  She's cute, isn't she?  It's endearing.   One minute, she is a poised artist, delivering the amazing goods, the number one hit single in America.  Then, just for a second, she's an embarrassed little girl again who turned the wrong way on the dance floor.

There are a lot of great songs from the sixties, and a lot of great performances.  There are only a few performances of great songs.  And there are even fewer performances that are so monumental that they seem to leap from their era and genre into a kind of stratosphere of transcendental moments in life.  There was Hendrix performing "All Along the Watchtower", and Dylan doing "Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" in London, and the Beatles doing "Hey Jude".   There was Jimmy Morrison doing "Light My Fire".

And there was Grace Slick performing "White Rabbit".   You have to hear Grace Slick's voice to believe it.  It is incredibly big and powerful and you might believe it could be heard above the electric guitars and drums even without amplification.  The only other female singers I can think of with a voice of comparable size are Mama Cass Elliot and Janis Joplin.  Grace was sexier than those two and the next top twenty female singers combined. 

Grace Slick's voice probably couldn't have been small if she'd wanted it too.  The first lines of "White Rabbit" are delivered with as much restraint as you could possibly muster for a Sherman tank of a voice.  Then she builds, with an insinuating vibrato, like a whip being drawn back.  She builds and builds until, by the last lines-- "remember what the dormouse said..."-- her voice is in full bore, a wall of sound coming at you like a freight train, tidal and relentless, slashing guitars just barely able to provide seething rhythmic foundation to this thing of power and explosive fury.

While Grace Slick was singing like this, the Grammies for best female vocal performance went to Barbara Streisand, Eydie Gorme, Bobbie Gentry, Peggy Lee, and Dionne Warwick.  That's why I haven't paid any attention to the Grammies for about 40 years. 

Grace Slick had beautiful blue eyes and long black hair.  She was uncompromising--- she quit Jefferson Starship when they went commercial.  She drank too much.  She got married and divorced, married and divorced.  She had one daughter, China, who would be about 30 by now. 

 

All contents copyright © 2004 Bill Van Dyk