“I thought they were silly”: Grace Slick’s critique of The Beatles
With a band as big as The Beatles, people are bound to have opinions. There are people who like to claim that the Fab Four, with their expansive discography and generations of fans, are simply overrated, or those who claim that the Liverpool lads alone invented modern music as we know it. But one of the funniest opinions has to come from Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick and her cuttingly unimpressed remark about the band.
It’s easy to see why maybe the band weren’t her thing. The Beatles did eventually get on board with counterculture later down the line when Bob Dylan introduced them to weed as a gateway drug, and then they were tripping on acid in no time. However, at the start of the 1960s, when the scene was getting underway, the band were pretty twee. They were mods with their prim suits and bowl cuts; an image worlds away from the long-haired, trippy hippie culture that Slick was a part of.
While The Beatles were singing ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ or ‘Help!’ or any of their other early rock and roll tracks, Slick was riding the first wave of psychedelic rock. She grew up between California and San Francisco, two epicentres for the sound. Then, in 1965, she saw an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about a new band called Jefferson Airplane. She’d been making her own music for several years but had never really considered it seriously until she caught this new band live. It inspired her so much that she started her own group, the Great Society. By the end of the year, she’d composed the track that is still deemed her masterpiece, ‘White Rabbit’.
In an act of incredible manifestation on Slick’s behalf, she was later invited to join the band that had inspired her. So by the time The Beatles’ Revolver was coming out and the band were opening up to more psychedelic sounds, Slick was already an established musical force as she joined Jefferson Airplane and brought her hits along with her, including ‘Somebody To Love’.
Slick’s peers were the titans of rock, but a very different type of rock to the Beatles. There was no roll involved beyond the rolling of spliffs. They played festivals like Woodstock and Monterey Pop Festival, deeply embedded within the countercultural scene that The Beatles were influenced by but weren’t in.
So Slick’s unimpressed nature towards the group makes sense, even if her comment about them still comes off as a hilarious shrug off of their immense impact. “Somebody called and said, ‘Hey, you’ve got to come over and see Ed Sullivan. These guys called The Beatles are on.’ So I went over and they sang ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’’, she remembered. “Now these are 20-year-old people singing ‘I want to hold your hand’”, she continued, mocking their lyrics that she saw as juvenile, overly innocent or all-together weak-willed in comparison to the drug-fueled seduction that powered her own scene at the time.
“Until they came out with Rubber Soul, I thought they were silly,” she said, delivering maybe the most controversial Beatles opinion of them all.
