“So boring”: Why Grace Slick grew jealous of Frank Zappa’s sobriety
Drunk people panic me when I’m sober. I’ve been in countless shared housing situations where I hear the jangling alarm bell of an intoxicated key trying to turn in the front door, and know that I have roughly 15 seconds to gather everything I need for an evening barricaded in a bedroom, where I am ostensibly asleep. Evidently, Frank Zappa was not of the same disposition.
The rock star was certainly strong-willed. He once calmly talked a man out of assassinating him. He also bravely returned to the stage after a crazed fan nearly pushed him to his death. But the greatest display of his resolute spirit was the fact that he sat through the entirety of the counterculture movement sober.
What’s so impressive about such a feat is not that he abstained from temptation, but the sheer amount of drivel that he must’ve stoically sat through. No wonder he was so cynical. He was even at parties where Charles Manson was present, rattling off his bizarre visions. So, when Bob Dylan came along and called out the duplicitous nature of the movement with the masterful ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, it’s little surprise that Zappa hailed it as an opus.
“When I heard ‘Like a Rolling Stone’,” the Mothers of Invention star told the writer Clinton Heylin, “I wanted to quit the music business.” He continued, “I felt [that] if this wins and it does what it’s supposed to do, I don’t need to do anything else.” He figured that the track perfectly called out the pitfalls of the so-called progressive movement, and if it was heeded, it may well have seen some of those ideals come to fruition.
Alas, it didn’t, so the sober artist went on to release 62 albums of his own, propagating similar messages to Dylan’s with varying degrees of madness. Along the way, he made a shedload of money and was able to leverage his avant-garde art into a marketable position. After all, prior to making the move to music, he had worked in advertising and knew that culture now had to be packaged and sold.
Therefore, he took a keen interest in this side of his work, but plenty of other stars did not. Grace Slick was certainly one of them. The Jefferson Airplane star preferred acid to business, proclaiming, “I enjoyed every trip I had”, and she had plenty of them.
While she certainly didn’t lament partying, later explaining that her only two regrets in life were never riding a horse and never having sex with Jimi Hendrix, she did grow to wish that this didn’t come at the expense of business smarts. Sadly, Jefferson Airplane have frequently been involved in legal battles over the years.
Slick later admitted that the group lacked Zappa’s sober savviness on this front, commenting, “Frank Zappa was pretty good at business. And Frank Zappa didn’t do drugs either. Drugs really get in the way of paying attention to what your accountant’s saying because it’s so boring.”
Fortunately for the latter, he had sat through far more tedious talks than business strategy discussions and that imbued him with enough will to weave his way towards a very lucrative career. Beyond the music, he owned record labels, his own mail-order merchandise company, and publishing businesses, too. All of which proved profitable, proving the perks of sobriety, provided you can stomach drunks enough without either having to join them or escape to your room.
