The legend that convinced Grace Slick that Jefferson Airplane was terrible
Acid and anti-war politics is an unexpected blend, but one which produced a plethora of revolutionary artists during the cultural shift of the 1960s, with the likes of Jefferson Airplane helping to tear down the musical establishment, much to the chagrin of musicians who had spent years learning and perfecting their craft through the traditional channels.
By and large, the ‘peace and love’ era of countercultural hippiedom came without any formal training. You only need to watch through the highlights of Woodstock to realise that Country Joe McDonald probably wouldn’t have fit in at Berklee or Juilliard, and Jimi Hendrix’s cavalier attitude towards fire safety would have gotten him booted out of most music colleges.
After all, it was the guerilla nature of counterculture rock which gave it its impact; bands like Jefferson Airplane weren’t all that different from the average young people of the time, allowing audiences to relate to their inherent message.
In the case of the Airplane, that message was invariably structured around LSD-fueled self-discovery and defiant political rebellion, with Grace Slick-penned anthems like ‘White Rabbit’ and ‘Somebody To Love’ leading the charge. It is easy to write those tracks off as the mad ramblings of a group saturated with LSD and a free and easy lifestyle, but on a deeper level they tend to encapsulate the complete cultural revolution of the 1960s, attacking the political status quo, hinting at a bold new age just beyond the horizon line and rapidly coming into view.
Still, the unsuspectingly profound nature of ‘White Rabbit’ did little to quell criticism of Jefferson Airplane from more traditionally-trained musicians struggling to gain any traction. “I mean we were pretty loose in those days,” admitted Grace Slick during a 2024 interview with the Library of Congress. “I know Billy Joel once said we were not very good.”
“You know, all the East Coast bands were trained in the Brill Building in a tiny room with a single piano, and you worked over and over until you got it right,” Slick explained, shedding light on the ‘Piano Man’ songwriter’s apparent disliking of the hippie icons. “They were used to doing commercial jingles and, doing that, they can’t screw around. But we weren’t trained musicians – some knew music better than others – but Billy was right. We were a very loose group.”
That looseness, contrary to what Mr. Joel would have you believe, was pivotal to the sound and success of Jefferson Airplane. Nobody with classical training could have come up with ‘White Rabbit’, but that certainly doesn’t mean the song was devoid of any musical quality – quite the opposite, in fact. Its grassroots cultural revolution was utterly profound, and it helped to change the landscape of rock and psychedelia forevermore.
As Grace Slick herself put it, the group was “Fun and different.” Explaining, “We switched over to what we haven’t done before: writing about politics, because of the wars, because of people like Nixon and him making large mistakes. We started writing about what was going on and not just songs about who you would like to screw.” In that sense, the “loose” and untrained nature of Jefferson Airplane elevated them far above their classically-trained counterparts, at least in terms of innovation and revolutionary potential.
