The music and culture of the sixties focusing on the Jefferson Airplane
Memories of the Jefferson Airplane bring back the best and worst of the sixties
I first saw them at a county fair in Allentown, PA. It was a beautiful evening with a small appreciative crowd standing around a makeshift bandstand. Everyone was clean and bright and just slightly stoned, peacefully listening to the band. Someone threw a pill onto the stage. Without missing a beat, Gracie Slick gracefully swooped it up. When the music ended, she held it up, said, I don’t know who threw this red pill up here, but unless it’s an m&m, it’s too strong for my head” and ground it under her shoe.
Thinking of that concert reminds me of peaceful nights watching fish in an aquarium while listening to music with friends. It’s peace and love and belonging to a subculture filled with political and social awareness, of striving for peace and equality.
But due to the drugs, everything was a mixed bag, as we used to say. The Airplane epitomized that. As time went on there were a lot of rumors about the band. Some were good -they gave a lot of free concerts, including a midnight one on the rooftop of a New York hotel. Some were fun - the band members walked into a Mercedes dealership and shocked the salesforce by each paying cash for a new car. Who knows what legends were true and what were rumor. It really didn’t matter if it added to the image of the group.
Unfortunately, there was also a dark side. Gracie became addicted to quaaludes, alcohol and cocaine. Unaware of this I was shocked when I saw the band four years later. Unable to remember the song lyrics, she strode back and forth across the stage swinging the microphone wire in an arc, the mic itself dipping dangerously close to the floor.
She had become a victim of the times, and that concert reminds me of the tragedy of lost friends. There was one who took too many acid trips and became unable to make eye contact with anyone. And another who became addicted to downers, started mugging people in the park for petty cash, and finally blew out his brains. And way too many others memorialized in the lines of the Neil Young song, “I’ve seen the needle and the damage done.”
It’s easy to condemn my fallen comrades or look down on them. But along with everyone else, I experimented with the cornucopia of drugs that were so prevalent. Most of us, myself included were lucky – we didn’t have the addictive gene or the necessary cash to fall into the trap, so emerged relatively unscathed.
Gracie was not so lucky – she lost a lot, including her band. Decades later, she became clean and sober, and has since been living on a beach, creating art. I’m glad she found her way out of the darkness and regained the power that fueled her songs. Hopefully, to paraphrase one of her songs- “Nothing’s Going to Stop Her Or Others Like Her Now.”
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