“Wasn’t that wonderful?”: Grace Slick’s Woodstock acid trip
“Woodstock was fun. If you’re 18 and you don’t care about sitting in the mud, it’s fun.” That was Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick’s summary of Woodstock. For most music fans, the 1969 festival is reflected upon as a kind of mythical happening, a magical moment where the best of the generation gather for a perfect and exciting weekend of fun and memories. But in reality, it was much like any other festival, and Slick was at the centre of it, tripping on acid.
Perhaps part of the mythologising of Woodstock comes down to the fact that it is an absolute miracle that it happened and that it ran, at least somewhat, smoothly. When organisers Michael Lang, Artie Kornfeld, Joel Rosenman, and John P Roberts decided to hold a festival, they definitely didn’t expect 400,000 people to turn up. They didn’t expect the roads for miles surrounding to be clogged with cars desperately trying to get to the festival. They certainly didn’t expect to have to call upon the National Guard to deliver them water, and they probably never dreamed that they’d managed to secure the lineup they did.
So much of its legacy comes down to happy accidents. The festival is remembered as a free concert, but it was never supposed to be. They simply couldn’t install the ticket booths in time. Even iconic performances, like Jimi Hendrix playing ‘Star Spangled Banner’ as the sun rose, weren’t supposed to happen that way, as various delays kept the show running well into the early morning.
Or, in the case of Slick and her band, their performance ended up being much looser than they intended as they accidentally dropped some acid. “We usually did not take acid on purpose because it can really mess with your perception of things,” she explained to CBC. While part of a trippy generation, Jefferson Airplane took the music seriously, so they tended to keep their drug use recreational and away from their professional performances.
As she explained, “If it gets too messy, then you screw the song up.”
But at Woodstock, in the ultimate messy surroundings of one of history’s biggest and busiest festivals, they were forced to embrace that energy. “Our road manager had a box with about 16 little segments in it, and he had different drugs in each of the little segments. And we took what we thought was cocaine — snorting it, not shooting it — snorting it backstage just before we went on,” Slick recalled, but some disorganised substances were about to send them on a ride. “We took it out of the wrong box, and we took LSD. So, about 15 minutes into the set, we looked at each other and went, ‘Oh boy. Oops.’”
So, while performing at what would later be considered one of the most important shows in music history, Slick and her band definitely didn’t think they gave it their best. “I was supposed to be playing the piano at one point, and I just stopped playing the piano because I wanted to listen to Jack playing the bass. I really liked his bass playing, so I just stopped playing,” she recalled, adding, “That’s the problem with acid is that it’s a little tricky for delivering the song in the style it’s supposed to be delivered.”
But that’s also the problem with nostalgia, it can wipe out slip ups like this. It would have been easy for Slick to simply go “woah yeah, we did Woodstock on acid and it was amazing.” It would be easy to simply lean into the mystique of the day and turn any story from the event into a perfect highlight reel of a memory. But Slick was never going to do that.
“We didn’t just get together and go, ‘Oh man, wasn’t that wonderful?’ Nobody did that,” she said, pointing out the fact that at the time, this was simply another festival. “For us, it wasn’t quite as marvellous as it might be for somebody who’s 18 years old,” she continued, wondering if maybe she was just too old to lean into the atmosphere of the weekend, “I was 29, so my idea of fun is not having to watch out for a white dress and no bathrooms and playing at six o’clock in the morning.”
Perhaps the only person brave enough to suggest that maybe the myth of Woodstock is somewhat made up, Slick said, “So Woodstock, personally, was not fun. But the idea of it, and the idea that we attracted that many people, was kind of amazing. But that’s all in your head. That’s not what actually happened.”
