The night Grace Slick was in an armed stand-off with the police: “Firing a shotgun in the house”
Grace Wing was born in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Illinois, but she would make her mark on the other side of America’s great expanse as one of the greatest singers rock ‘n’ roll has ever produced: Grace Slick. However, she also defined the dark flipside of the scene that spawned her, encapsulating the literal highs and lows of a movement that stepped one toke over the line.
On August 26th, 1961, at the age of 21, Grace Wing became Slick when she married an aspiring filmmaker named Jerry. Things were going steady in the pleasant marriage of Grace and Jerry. They were enjoying the slowly swelling boon of pop culture and plotting out their way in the world, mindful not to succumb to the pitfalls of their forebearers but not quite developing a full-on punk attitude just yet.
Two years into their marriage, the patent for LSD expired. Thereafter, there was a three-year period when acid was legal. This turned out to be quite a big deal for Grace Slick. From that moment on, her life and indeed the whole counterculture movement was accelerated, launching at Roadrunner pace towards some unknown future, perhaps a cliff would befall them, but at least they were getting away from the stilted past.
Her adventures with acid may well have resulted in masterpieces like ‘White Rabbit’ and ‘Somebody to Love’, but the brilliance sadly waned towards a darker end to Jefferson Airplane. This unfurled in myriad condemnable ways, even though she once said, “Personally, I never freaked out on acid. I didn’t think it could affect you unless you had psychological problems, to begin with, and I didn’t.”
That duality is what makes Slick such a fascinating figure when looking back on the era. On one hand, she was the voice of a generation reaching for something higher, articulating the psychedelic experience in a way that felt poetic and transcendent rather than self-indulgent.
On the other, the same forces that fuelled that creativity were never far from tipping into something far more destructive. The line between enlightenment and excess was always razor-thin in the late 1960s, and Slick seemed to walk it with a kind of reckless confidence that mirrored the wider counterculture around her.
It’s that tension that ultimately defines her legacy. The songs remain as pristine snapshots of possibility and imagination, but the stories that followed serve as a reminder that for many artists of that time, the comedown was never too far behind the high.
While she might opine that, appearing on the cover of Teenset in blackface along with the caption, “Grace Slick and Jimi Hendrix on being black,” would imply otherwise. But if that was a major faux pas, then there are other incidents that could’ve been downright fatal. It is a sign of how manic the times were that even in a recent interview, she mentioned she only has two regrets in life: never riding a horse and never screwing Jimi Hendrix. No mention is made of the incident below.
Even in 1994, mania was par for the course in the life of the rocker. In March of that year, police were called to her house when an “apparently intoxicated man” phoned them to report that “a drunken woman was firing a shotgun in the house,” they encountered a stand-off upon arrival as Slick brandished the weapon at them and screamed at the cops ordering them to get off her property.
The caller, 58-year-old Ira Lee, rushed towards them, yelling, “Kill me”. She was forcibly subdued. Meanwhile, Slick continued brandishing the weapon and refused to relent. Ultimately, as per the police report, “Officer Bob Rossi was able to wrestle the gun away from her when her attention was diverted,” but the incident hints at an unstable encounter that could’ve been far worse.
What later asked about the escapade by the San Francisco Chronicle, she merely passed it off as a drunken mishap. She recalled: “They said, ‘Put the shotgun down, Grace.’ I told them, ‘Not until I know what’s going on.’ So, one of them did a body roll and knocked me down. It was a good move.”
While she might have been flippant about the whole thing, it did prompt her to pursue sobriety. “I can’t drink anymore because I’m so bad at it,” she admitted. “If I had continued, I’d be dead by now. There isn’t any other drug that can turn you into an ass in just three hours. I love it. It’s fabulous. But I just can’t do it.”
