Saving the World
Segue back in time. Last year of graduate school. Sprawled on the apartment sofa of the man who is to become my first husband 14 months later. He plays his latest LP. Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds fills the dark room as he offers me a hallucinogenic mushroom. I'm entranced with the music but turn down the mushroom. Not since Bill Halley came out with Rock Around the Clock in my childhood, causing instant sermons on the sins of Rock & Roll, had I heard a piece of music that I knew would change the face of music in a major way once again.
Lucy...floating through the Sky. We all thought it was the Beatles tripping, but they claimed the song came from a drawing by one of their six year olds. I don't believe them, but we'd have to play Revolver backwards to find out the truth on that one, I suppose.
Enter Grace Slick. Wilder than the Beatles could ever be. A sensual Janis Joplin in white boots, springing up on radios all over the country. Jefferson Airplane. What could be more glamorous than the combination of San Francisco, the Filmore West, Haight Ashbury, and Ken Kesey blowing the scene , all at the same time. Grace was every wild woman's alter ego. She was music. She was sex. She was drugs. She knew no boundaries. I heard White Rabbit...here comes Alice..and she's ten feet tall...and no-one could say GRACE was singing about her six year old's drawing. Grace Slick and the Airplane became the music of the times. She made your heart thump, your feet long for adventure.
I finally saw her perform in the seventies. The band had changed names. Grace was older, tired-looking on a platform stage in a gymnasium somewhere in Massachusetts. The fire wasn't there like before, but the man in my life at that time and I sat on the gym floor in the dark, listening to that famous voice and were swept back to times when our generation believed flowers, protest marches, bell bottoms and free love would save the world.9/18/2003
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Music: White Rabbit