by John Glatt
“I wanted to see New York City,” she said. “But I’m too lazy and I didn’t want to work, so I figured I’d get my parents to pay for me to stay in New York for a year by going to college there.”15
At eighteen, Grace Wing was a striking beauty, turning heads wherever she went. But she had a foul mouth and never fitted in with the refined young debutantes, who studied etiquette, learning the proper way to use a finger bowl.
At weekends she and her best friend, Celeste (Cici) Shane, who would later marry film director John Huston, would catch the train from Penn Station to Princeton. Then they would hang out on the Princeton campus, partying, before returning to Finch College on Sunday night.
Grace now mainly drank beer and popped the Benzedrine pills that students took to stay up all night and study. She found a steady boyfriend and networked her way into the historic Tiger Inn Eating Club, where she was voted Tiger Girl of the Week.
One night at a frat party, Grace and Cici got up onstage to entertain the students. Grace sang a bawdy Oscar Brand song and accompanied herself on guitar while Cici danced provocatively.
“They told us both to leave because we were being dirty,” recalled Grace. “This is not the proctors either. This is the kids. So I didn’t fit in too well at Princeton.” 16
While most young people loved Elvis Presley and the new rock ’n’ roll music, Grace preferred the classics. She adored South Pacific, and her favorite classical composers were Prokofiev and Bartók.
But she and Cici also headed downtown to Greenwich Village, checking out folk music in the coffee shops and clubs. One night she went to see Odetta at a small folk club, sneaking backstage into her empty dressing room.
“I went in,” said Grace. “Her goddamned guitar’s sitting there. All her clothes and everything. So I sat there and played a song.”
Suddenly, Odetta walked in and sat down to listen to the teenager.
“That’s very nice, young lady,” Odetta told her, asking her to play another song.
Then the folk superstar told Grace she was very talented, but she warned how tough the music business could be.
For her sophomore year, Grace took an arts major at the University of Miami, after hearing it had the best party scene in America. She started hanging out with the hip Jewish kids on campus and smoking marijuana in an area known as The Snake Pit.
“We’d sit around in The Snake Pit and smoke dope,” Grace told Oui magazine in 1977. “And none of the Gentiles knew that everybody was sitting around smoking pot. That’s the Fifties! . . . They figured marijuana was something you’d go to another town and lock yourself in a gas station bathroom or something.”17
While she was at the University of Miami, Grace fell in love with the eviscerating comedy of Lenny Bruce, later writing her song “Father Bruce” as a tribute. She also frequented the tough Miami nightclubs, smoking the strong Cuban dope brought over by Fidel Castro’s troops, a year before America cut ties with Cuba.
“[We’d] hang out with Castro’s soldiers and smoke their dope,” boasted Grace. “It was great.”
On the eve of her twentieth birthday, Grace flunked out of the University of Miami and moved back with her parents in Palo Alto. After an unsuccessful attempt to break into the music business by auditioning as a singer for a record label, Grace took a few months off to decide her future.
In the summer of 1960, Cici Shane invited Grace to Beverly Hills to help her work on John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign in the Golden State. Grace accepted and soon found herself in the midst of a political operation, working alongside Cici and her friend Jill St. John to promote the charismatic Massachusetts senator. Although she had little interest in politics, Grace was soon caught up in the social swirl of political receptions and was once introduced to Kennedy.
After the campaign was over, Grace became a couturier model for I. Magnin & Co. in San Francisco. She enjoyed modeling $20,000 couture gowns for old ladies and then going home to laze around in jeans and sandals. During her five years at the luxury goods and high-fashion department store, Grace took part in numerous runway fashion shows, as well as regularly appearing in newspaper ads.
“I hated modeling,” said Grace. “I don’t like being told what to do at all.”18
Now living back with her parents in Palo Alto, Grace decided to settle down and become a housewife. Although the Wings’ friends the Slicks had moved away, they remained in touch. One night Grace met their oldest son, Jerry, who was a film student at San Francisco State University. The reunited neighbors hit it off, and after going on a couple of dates they were engaged within a month.
On August 26, 1961, they were married in a lavish wedding at Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill in San Francisco. Jerry’s younger brother Darby was best man.
“It was like a Middle Eastern arranged marriage,” explained Grace. “Only they didn’t arrange it. We were the old people. We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice for them.’ ”19
After a Hawaiian honeymoon, the newlyweds moved to San Diego, as Jerry Slick was taking a film course at San Diego State University. But Grace disliked the city, and they moved to San Francisco after only one semester. There they rented a house in the posh Potrero Hill district, with its stunning views of San Francisco Bay, and planted marijuana in the backyard.20
The Slicks lived the bohemian life, hanging out in North Beach with the beatnik crowd. They listened to the new folk music being played at the coffee clubs, such as the Fox and Hounds (later renamed Coffee and Confusion) and the Coffee Gallery, where Grace’s future Jefferson Airplane bandmate Jorma Kaukonen played with Janis Joplin, passing the hat for beer money. Most Sunday afternoons they took Darby to the Old Spaghetti Factory to hear live Flamenco music. It was home to a tight group of Bohemians and Flamenco artists, who called themselves Los Flamencos de la Bodega, holding weekly performances in a small room at the restaurant. Grace loved Spanish music and would later use Ravel’s “Bolero” as her musical inspiration for “White Rabbit.”
But after three years of marriage, there was little passion between Grace and Jerry Slick, who both started sleeping around.
“Their marriage was an open one,” said Darby. “They both occasionally made it with other people.”
They also turned nineteen-year-old Darby on to high-quality marijuana, pot that Jerry bought from a San Francisco cop they knew. Soon afterward they all tripped out on peyote, and after vomiting, Grace spent the next eight hours clutching a large squash.
By 1964, Grace, who was still working as a model at I. Magnin, was drinking heavily, and her unpredictable behavior alienated many.
“There was a German guy,” recalled Darby, “that used to come to these parties, and she used to regularly attack him.”
It was around this time that Grace composed and recorded her first piece of music, for her husband’s senior thesis at San Francisco State. The forty-five-minute independent film, called Everybody Hits Their Brother Once, had a Spanish-influenced soundtrack by Grace, who also appeared in it. It later won first prize at the Ann Arbor Film Festival.
While Jerry was away editing his film, Darby hung out with Grace, smoking grass and improvising music. He would play acoustic guitar while she noodled around on her recorder.
One afternoon while they were alone, Grace got very drunk and tried to seduce her brother-in-law.
“Grace offered herself to me,” he later wrote in his autobiography. “I had dreamed of something like this, but had not really thought that it would happen.” 21
Fearing that his brother would catch them, Darby suggested going to his parents’ empty beach house, sixty-one miles away in Santa Cruz. On the way there Grace wanted more alcohol.
“I can’t do this thing without booze,” she told him.
After getting her a bottle, they proceeded along local streets, drinking, and smoking joints. When they got to the house they both showered and made
love in the living room.
The next morning, Grace had a bad hangover and vomited. She couldn’t even remember leaving San Francisco. Soon afterward, Darby left town feeling guilty and not wanting to break up his brother’s marriage. He hitchhiked to New York and stayed in Brooklyn for the next few months.
In the winter of 1964, Jerry and Grace Slick moved into a house in Tiburon in Marin County, a ferry ride across San Francisco Bay. Soon after they moved, Darby Slick returned to San Francisco and began hanging out at their house, keeping his relationship with Grace strictly platonic.
One evening he arrived to find Jerry and Grace improvising music with a friend named Jean Piersol. Darby joined in on electric guitar, and soon they were rehearsing every day. Grace shared lead vocals with Piersol, as well as playing guitar. Jerry played drums and Darby played lead guitar.
Grace, Darby, and Jerry also started writing songs, as well as playing covers like the recent Jaynetts’ hit “Sally Go ’Round the Roses.” One of Grace’s first compositions was “Father Bruce,” a tribute to her favorite comedian, Lenny Bruce, who had recently fallen out of a hotel window in North Beach.
In August 1965, while reading the San Francisco Chronicle, Grace Slick stumbled on an article about a hot new San Francisco rock band called Jefferson Airplane. Accompanying entertainment critic John L. Wasserman’s story was a photograph of singer Marty Balin that caught Grace’s eye.
“He looked like he was Japanese or Filipino or something,” she recalled, “with a Prince Valiant hairdo, which nobody had at the time.”22
That night Grace and Jerry went to the Matrix Club to see Jefferson Airplane perform, and their lives changed forever.
“I thought, ‘Wow, that would be so much better than [modeling],’ ” Grace would say later. “They make more money in one night than I do all week, and they can smoke and drink and hang out and only go to work two nights a week.”
After seeing Jefferson Airplane, Grace galvanized Jerry and Darby to break into the blossoming San Francisco music scene. She named their band The Great Society, a sarcastic reference to President Lyndon Johnson’s domestic program. She also recruited new members, David Miner on second guitar and Bard DuPont on bass and harmonica.
Grace also started going to every Jefferson Airplane gig, studiously observing their performance. She soon caught the attention of Airplane founder and singer Marty Balin.
“Grace used to sit right in front of me all the time and watch me like a hawk,” he said. “I mean I used to see her at [all] our concerts.”23
Balin later told Crawdaddy magazine that Grace would “stare” at him while he was performing, and he claimed she had made sexual advances, which he’d turned down.
The Great Society debuted at the Coffee Gallery on October 15, 1965—Grace’s first professional public performance.
“The audience reaction was mixed,” recalled Darby Slick. “Still Grace’s flute playing, and our obvious jazz influence, seemed to sway them in our direction.”24
The following night The Great Society played at the inaugural Family Dog dance, A Tribute to Doctor Strange, at Longshoreman’s Hall with Jefferson Airplane, their first ever appearance outside of the Matrix Club, owned by their singer Marty Balin. Grace was overjoyed to be opening for the group that had inspired The Great Society, closely watching their pigtailed singer Signe Toly Anderson with more than a little envy.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Right Time at the Right Place
The Family Dog’s first show made a healthy profit, so they immediately announced a second one, A Tribute to Sparkle Plenty. Headlining was The Lovin’ Spoonful, a New York band who was riding high in the charts with “Do You Believe in Magic,” supported by a local San Francisco group called The Charlatans.
After Ralph J. Gleason’s rapturous San Francisco Chronicle review of the first dance concert, the second sold out immediately. Then the Family Dog announced that from now on they would be holding regular weekly dance concerts.
Bill Graham’s big breakthrough came when the Family Dog’s Alton Kelley and Luria Castell offered to stage his Mime Troupe appeal show in return for a mention on the poster. At a sit-down meeting to discuss it, the Mime Troupe’s business manager asked about Family Dog’s future plans.
“We told him that we had found out that the old Fillmore Auditorium . . . could be rented at only $60 a night,” recalled Kelley, “and we were planning to put on dances there. He said he’d get back to us.”1
The next day, Bill Graham slyly tracked down the Fillmore’s leaseholder, Charles Sullivan, an African-American businessman who promoted R&B shows. He then negotiated a four-year option for first rights to the Fillmore, whenever it was available, for just $45 a night.
“He just grabbed it,” said Kelley, “and blew us right out of the water. Bill was very smart and he had seen what was happening with our dances. He stood to get his money back in two or three weekends.”2
Keeping his Fillmore deal to himself, Graham now concentrated on organizing his Mime Troupe Benefit. Among the artists lined up to perform were Jefferson Airplane, The Fugs, The Committee, and poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
To publicize it, Graham covered a rented Cadillac convertible with banners and drove it through downtown San Francisco on Friday at lunchtime, with costumed actors handing out flyers. The traffic-stopping parade made the five o’clock news.
Saturday, November 6, 1965, was a watershed in music history and a life-changing day for Bill Graham. Hours before the scheduled evening start at eight o’clock, there was a line stretching around the block. Earlier that day, Graham had written a tongue-in-cheek tariff on some sheetrock at the top of the stairs: $48 admission for people making over $80,000 ($600,000) a year; 16 cents entry for people living in a walkup apartment higher than the sixth floor; and if broke, people were asked to help clean up afterward.
When Bill Graham and Bonnie arrived on his Lambretta at around six o’clock, they were surprised to find so many people already there.
“There was a huge, enormous crowd,” recalled Bonnie in 2012.3
And by the time Ronnie Davis arrived from a Mime Troupe show in Sausalito, Graham was at the front door grabbing dollar bills from the crowd and stuffing them into a green bag.
Every time the green bag was full, it would be hoisted upstairs on a rope to be emptied before being sent down again for Graham to take more money. That night he would cram more than three thousand people into the tiny loft, which legally held just six hundred.
“It was the greatest night of my life,” he later recalled. “That whole world that came into that building wasn’t actors, wasn’t theater—it was a whole lifestyle. Everybody got bombed. There were nine measures of vodka and a drop of orange juice. This was all new—jazz and poetry or rock ’n’ roll and freeform dancing. I’d never seen it.”4
At midnight, after numerous complaints from the neighbors, several San Francisco police officers arrived to close him down.
“And we had a thousand people upstairs and thousands [more] lining around the building,” said Graham. “And I kept on saying, ‘You can’t. Frank Sinatra’s going to help us out. Rudy Valee’s coming. Harry Belafonte.’ He thought I was crazy.”
Then Graham tried another ploy.
“I finally said, ‘Captain!’ and he was only a sergeant, but the minute I called him ‘Captain’ everything was fine. He said, ‘Yes, son.’ And we came into this whole different relationship.”
Then the sergeant said the show could continue as long as Graham promised to thin out the crowd.
“So we told some people to leave,” said Graham, “and I ran downstairs and said, ‘Ronnie, tell the people in the street we’ll let them in.’ ”
After the police left, Graham sneaked in hundreds more people through the back, taking their dollar bills at the freight elevator.
And that was the night w
hen Jefferson Airplane guitarist and singer Paul Kantner first met Bill Graham.
“He was busy,” recalled Kantner, “simultaneously taking tickets, checking refreshments, mopping the floor and dealing with the SFPD, who had come to complain about the spillover of people from the loft.”5
It was six o’clock Sunday morning when Allen Ginsberg brought the dance concert to a close with a chanting mantra. And after everybody had left, Bill Graham loaded all the $1 bills into his canvas knapsack and threw it on his back. Then he drove Bonnie to Mel’s Drive-In for a celebration breakfast. Back at their apartment they carefully counted the night’s takings, which came to $4,200 ($31,000 today).
“He emptied the bag on the floor,” explained Bonnie, “and we’d just separate the bills in piles. He saw the opportunity. The opportunity light bulb really went on.”
The next day, Bill Graham announced a second Mime Troupe Benefit for Friday, December 10, at his newly acquired Fillmore Auditorium. He booked Jefferson Airplane, The Great Society, The Mystery Trend, and the John Handy Quintet to play, as well as a light show like the one Family Dog used.
“So Bill discovered rock ’n’ roll,” Ralph Gleason told KSAN radio in 1972. “The only music [up to then] he was interested in was Latin music—I mean he was a Mongo Santa Maria freak and Tito Puente.”
Several days before the second benefit, Bob Dylan, who had just released “Like a Rolling Stone,” happened to be holding a press conference at the KQED-TV studios to publicize an upcoming show. Graham and Bonnie arrived early, sneaked in through a side door, and placed a handbill on every seat. Graham then handed a poster to Dylan when the folk star arrived.
Later when a reporter asked about the poster he was carrying, Dylan replied: “Yeah. It’s a poster somebody gave me. It looks pretty good—and I would like to go if I could, but unfortunately I won’t be there.”
He then read out on camera all the acts performing at the Fillmore benefit, giving Graham a publicity home run, which was immortalized in the D. A. Pennebaker documentary Don’t Look Back.
