Grace Slick’s regrettable wild night with Jim Morrison: “Apparently, I’m a terrible lay”
If you wanted to pick one rock star to represent the highs and lows of the 1960s, you couldn’t go far wrong with Grace Slick.
In her time, the ‘Acid Queen’ has written masterpieces that approach encapsulating the meaning of life with ‘Somebody to Love’, blacked up and spoken about her experiences as a person of colour, spearheaded a summer of love, and found herself in armed stand-offs with the police. Nevertheless, along this wild ride, she has only amassed two regrets in life: “The things I wish I did do that I did not do, were screw Jimi Hendrix and ride a horse.”
Fortunately, the premier vocalist of her generation didn’t have the same experience with Jim Morrison. Effectively killing two birds with one stone by successfully managing to screw the apparently horse-hung frontman in one comical ride. Tragically, it still proved to be an encounter touched with at least a tinge of regret for the Jefferson Airplane singer. At the height of the counterculture trip, Slick and The Doors’ frontman happened to be the king and queen of the West Coast and all the LSD and mind expansion under their acidic dominion.
However, it was ironically in Europe during respective tours in 1968 when their paths finally crossed in a notable way. It was the first time that both bands had hit the UK despite enjoying great success on foreign soil, so excitement was running high, especially given that the famed Isle of Wight Festival had coaxed them over the pond. “Here they come,” the headline read in the press with a picture of Slick and Morrison imposed upon each other–the headline writers couldn’t have known how close to the truth they had been.
They duetted together during one of Airplane’s sets when they found themselves at the same venue, embraced on stage after the impromptu singalong, and then did a little more than embrace in a hotel thereafter. Slick can’t be sure where. Sadly, the bastard frontman never called her back thereafter.
“Jim was a well-built boy,” Slick candidly recalled in a Louder Sound interview. “Larger than average. When I left, I said, ‘Call me if you want.’ And he never did. So apparently, I’m a terrible lay”.
Nevertheless, she was able to comfort herself with the knowledge that Morrison was such a flaky character that he would’ve forgotten the safe code to unlock world peace, let alone her phone number, had anyone ever told him. As she said of some of her other encounters with the hashish-laden Lothario: “I remember coming back from an Airplane gig in 1967 and going to the Tropicana Motel with [Paul] Kantner, and Morrison was in the hallway, goofy on acid, stark naked and barking like a dog. Paul just stepped over him and went into his room.”
That whacked-out state far from diminishing the lure of messianic rocker; after all, this was the 1960s, and Morrison was far from alone in finding himself nude in funny places. “I liked Jim,” Slick said. “Most women did. He was gorgeous, but he was so screwy – half the time you couldn’t talk to him. He used himself as a human guinea pig, see how far you can push the human brain.”
This is something that Slick, despite everything, claims she never did. “Personally, I never freaked out on acid,” she alleges. “I didn’t think it could affect you unless you had psychological problems, to begin with, and I didn’t.”
It is unclear whether the policeman she once wrestled with on her front lawn would agree with this. All the same, she stopped dropping acid when her first child, apparently initially named God Kantner, was born. She had sobered up along with the ’60s revolution.
Sadly, Morrison never got the chance to. He died mysteriously in a Paris hotel room at the age of 27. In this regard, Morrison and Slick seem like the ultimate ‘what could have been’ couple of the counterculture movement. Perhaps they were simply a duo too wild for this stilted world to allow. Their symbiotic influence lives on all the same, conjuring up the words of Hunter S Thompson: “Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”
