Grace Slick on why Monterey was far superior to Woodstock Festival
It takes a lot to change the world and pull culture into the future, and the countercultural generation knows this well. In the 1960s, an array of unwavering pioneers emerged and did their bit to kick back against tradition and create a world in their own image. One of the most vital of these was Grace Slick, the Jefferson Airplane vocalist who had always trodden her own path and continues to do so today.
Not only did she show that women could go toe-to-toe with men in a male-dominated, deeply misogynistic world, but alongside the likes of Janis Joplin and Joan Baez, Slick resoundingly demonstrated that female artists could be so much better than their male counterparts. She did this by potently propping up the sound and mythology of the hippie era with narcotic classics such as ‘White Rabbit’.
Not solely a great songwriter, Slick has always been a defiant personality. She ranks as the first person to utter the ‘F-word’ on American television, which, alongside her other exploits in the 1960s, posits her as one of the very first punk progenitors. Since then, she’s had an armed stand-off with the police, corrected the ardent anti-hippie Joni Mitchell and championed LGBTQ+ charities by publicly making a mockery of Chick-fil-A and capitalism at large.
Slick is also a compelling figure because of the impartiality with which she deems the era in which she emerged. While she might be one of the definitive cast members of the countercultural period, she’s acutely aware of the pitfalls of the time and the rose-tinted glasses through which much of it is now examined. It wasn’t all that great, she maintains, and alongside offering very human accounts of some of her fellow protagonists, such as Jim Morrison, she’s cast doubt on the legend behind the purported last hurrah of the hippie movement, Woodstock 1969.
According to Slick, Woodstock wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. She maintains that the Monterey International Pop Festival of 1967, the year psychedelia and the Summer of Love emerged, was the greatest moment of the period. Featuring performances from The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Who, Ravi Shankar, Otis Redding and the first prominent appearance by Slick’s close friend Joplin, it is best remembered for Hendrix sacrificing his Fender Stratocaster by setting it on fire during his band’s rendition of The Troggs’ ‘Wild Thing’.
During a conversation with CBS in 2009, wherein she discussed her life and her paintings of her famous contemporaries, Slick provided her accounts of Monterey and Woodstock, dubbing the former “the best” of all the hippie bonanzas when discussing her colourful rendering of it on the canvas. She said: “Oh Monterey, yeah ‘cos that that was the best of all those festivals, it was as exciting for us as it was, I think, for the audience.”
However, there would never be a painting of Woodstock in Slick’s collection, and she explained why, stating that just because half a million people attended didn’t mean it was actually good. “It just means it was big,” she asserted. She then briefly recalled her old band’s drug-addled performance that didn’t materialise until the morning after it was scheduled to, with her surprised they managed to keep it together after consuming so many narcotics.
In her particularly forceful manner, Slick then intelligently but comically outlined why the counterculture failed, dryly referencing CSNY’s supposedly era-defining version of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’.
The hippie icon said: “Crosby, Stills and Nash did ‘We are stardust we are golden and we got to get ourselves back to the garden and half a million strong’ and blah blah blah. What overrides all of that is that we have nervous systems that are cro-magnon, there’s always a lion at the door, we better prepare, we better bomb somebody, you know? Massive brains and a nervous system of a rabbit.”
While Woodstock may have had the bigger impact on the public consciousness, it was Monterey that is now remembered as the starting point for many of the counterculture’s future developments, setting the template for future festivals as well.
