“Some of the best rock songs”: Grace Slick’s ambivalent admiration of Stevie Nicks
Musicians are strange people; that is a fact that has been proven on repeated occasions across the timeline of rock and roll.
Back in the heady countercultural days of the 1960s, acid queen Grace Slick got the chance to rub shoulders with a lot of those musical weirdos, and she has rarely pulled any punches when discussing her opinion on those fellow tripped-out rock stars.
Thankfully, Slick comes from a period in rock that predated media training and rejected any ideas of marketability. Whereas, in the modern day, even the most contentious of rockstars tend to shy away from disparaging their fellow musicians, the Jefferson Airplane vocalist has never been bound by such restrictions.
This is, after all, the person who tried to dose Richard Nixon with LSD, and spent the majority of her younger years on a perpetual trip with the likes of Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and a plethora of similarly inclined advocates for sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
As such, you don’t have to use much in the way of interpretation to deduce Grace Slick’s view on many of her contemporaries, including Stevie Nicks. While it wasn’t until the mid-1970s, by which time Jefferson Airplane had morphed into Jefferson Starship, that Nicks made her mark alongside Fleetwood Mac, she was once in the psychedelic outfit Fritz, who during the hippie age, supported Hendrix and Joplin. So, perhaps she isn’t so far removed from the far-out world of Grace Slick.
What’s more, you can draw a litany of parallels between the pair, both for their respective vocal brilliance and their extensive battles with addiction throughout their respective careers. Inevitably, then, Slick was once asked, in a 2003 interview, what her opinion of the Fleetwood Mac vocalist was. However, the Starship singer’s response was a little more off-the-wall than the interviewer might have suspected.
“Stevie Nicks has written some of the best rock songs,” Slick started, ordinarily enough. From there, though, her view of Stevie Nicks seemed to descend into some fabled world of fantasy and mythical beings.
“I don’t know her that well,” she continued, “But I like that strange little person; that she’s decided to be a somebody from some fairy story, the witch woman, or whatever it was.”
“I thought that was great,” Slick added, snapping back to reality. “She also writes some good songs, very good songs.” Predominantly, though, it appears to be Nicks’ witchy, mystical persona that really captured the singer’s attention.
“She must have read something, or seen something, that really blew her away when she was a kid or very young,” she theorised as to the origins of that particular interest. Slick wasn’t the first to accuse Nicks of witchcraft, either. Reportedly, during her early stint in Fleetwood Mac, the singer received multiple letters accusing her of being a witch, prompting her to reflect in a 2013 interview with the Los Angeles Times, “No, I’m not. I just wear black because it makes me look thinner, you idiots.”
Whether or not Stevie Nicks really does have ties to the mythical world of the occult (she doesn’t), that idea, along with her fairytale stage persona, certainly did enough to capture the attention of Grace Slick, seemingly even more so than her songwriting credentials.
