‘What About Love?’: the 1985 song that saw Grace Slick collaborate with Heart
Time is an unstoppable constant of existence, and even a cultural revolution of the magnitude of 1960s hippiedom couldn’t slow its effects. Grace Slick, for instance, might have been a youthful, acid-fuelled revolutionary in the 1960s, but by the 1980s her outlook and output had changed almost beyond all recognition.
Slick not only boasted one of the most distinctive, earth-shattering voices of the counterculture age, but she also penned some of the greatest songs of that time. During her days with Jefferson Airplane, albums like Surrealistic Pillow, and songs like ‘White Rabbit’ or ‘Somebody To Love’ perfectly encapsulated the revolutionary spirit of that San Francisco psychedelic scene, and Slick seemed to embody that same spirit in her everyday life; this is the person, after all, who once tried to dose Richard Nixon with LSD.
In the end, though, nothing lasts forever. An increasingly erratic existence, punctuated by problems with drugs and alcohol, meant Slick’s career soon took a much more muddied path. The Airplane turned into Jefferson Starship, continuing on in the same basic spirit as their hippie heyday, before Slick found herself at the forefront of Starship, the 1980s offshoot that did more to damage the vocalist’s legacy than anybody could have imagined.
Even if you aren’t immediately familiar with Starship by name, you have almost certainly heard 1985’s ‘We Built This City’, which, in addition to being the biggest hit of Slick’s career, was also an absolute abomination of a song. However, not all of Slick’s mid-1980s output was quite as criminal as that godawful pop-rock single.
In the very same year that Starship released that track, in fact, Grace Slick featured as a backing vocalist on ‘What About Love’, the top-ten single by hard rock heroes Heart, which typified the sound of mid-1980s mainstream rock.
Much like ‘We Built This City’, in fact, that song borders on being unavoidable, in spite of best efforts, but it does at least boast more in the way of substance than the Starship track.
Exactly how Slick came to collaborate with Ann Wilson and Heart is up for debate, but it must have been something of a full-circle moment for Wilson. After all, her emergence in the hard rock realm of the 1970s, alongside Heart, likely wouldn’t have happened were it not for the inspiration provided by Grace Slick during her countercultural heyday.
Admittedly, ‘What About Love’ hardly captures that counterculture spirit, and most people wouldn’t even begin to theorise that the person providing backing vocals on that track once stood on the stage at Woodstock Festival, tripping the light fantastic. Then again, such a thought would be even further from rationality when encountering Slick’s own work around that same time.
‘What About Love’ was perhaps not a highlight of Grace Slick’s illustrious career, but it did at least give the vocalist a chance to witness the effect that she had on the musical landscape, encountering people like Ann Wilson, whom she had played a key role in inspiring down the path of rock and roll greatness.
