Grace Slick’s two biggest regrets in life
Grace Slick has lived a wild and crazy life. She has hit the lofty heights of some of the greatest vocal performances ever put to tape in the world of rock ‘n’ roll. She’s blacked-up and spoken about what it’s like to be a person of colour in the same breath as Jimi Hendrix. She has penned masterpieces that came close to defining the meaning of life, and she has also been part of ‘We Built This City’, a track which was voted the worst of all time. She was a trailblazing force in the Summer of Love. She’s been involved in armed stand-offs with the police…
…And she only has two regrets in life: never riding a horse and never screwing Jimi Hendrix. Those are two things you wouldn’t want to get the wrong way around. But pithiness aside, this might seem like further absurdity in the colourful life of an icon, but it is, once again, proof of how Slick remains a paragon of an era, forever encapsulating its duality. She’s more liberated from regret than Edith Piaf at a bottomless brunch, but she also has had a few brushes with controversy that probably deserve to replace a spot of dressage and getting dirtier than a coal miner’s hanky with a deceased guitar god.
I suppose when you ask the woman who has done everything what she regrets then you are indeed likely to get something she didn’t do. “The things I wish I did do that I did not do,” she answered, “were screw Jimi Hendrix and ride a horse.” She continued to rattle off a ream of other trifling things she regretted to Phyllis Pollack, including never getting to hang out with the alcoholic lunatics “Richard Harris, Oliver Reed, Richard Burton, and Peter O’Toole,” she adds, “they were all a bunch of raconteurs.”
Alongside that, she wishes she went to France more, and that she made better use of her agent while setting up social occasions. This is why she tells her children: “Go for it. Do everything. Try not to kill yourself, but do as much as you possibly can.” However, she is also willing to accept, “If I wasn’t Grace Slick, I’d be dead.” Thankfully, she’s still going strong while there are boxes on her list that she wishes she ticked, her pen certainly got through a lot of ink. And there are still regrets she can hopefully tick off like going to Russia and watching more of The History Channel.
But it’s never riding a damn horse that sticks in her craw the most—never getting the simple pleasure of plodding along on man’s humble, trusted steed. They’re there all along, grazing and gazing doe-eyed, but all too often we simply hand them an apple and get on our merry way, never fully appreciating that our horseriding days are numbered until it’s too late, and you sit there a 70-year-old (now 83) rock star looking back at a life of artistic zeniths and troublesome faux pas and wonder, “Horseback riding seems really neat to me,” sighing, “never did that.”
Nevertheless, while she was avoiding the call of equestrianism, her life afforded her plenty of opportunities and she took most of them. “There aren’t too many regrets,” she recalls, “because I did pretty much what I wanted to do. So now, as an old person, I don’t have these huge regrets. Mine are fairly minor.” Nevertheless, while she did everything she wanted, her regrets still pertain to not doing it quite enough. “They have to do with drinking and screwing,” she says, “so that’s not all that important.”
