The one drug Grace Slick would never risk: “Too lazy”
More than anybody else, Grace Slick epitomised the peace-loving psychedelic haze of the 1960s.
Some might disagree with that, especially when there were also people like Joan Baez and Janis Joplin around. But even then, it’s hard to find anyone who was as much about the drug-infused spiral of the entire scene as Slick. And in so many different ways too, across music and her general attitude.
When most of us think of counterculture, it’s usually with strange images of people sitting cross-legged in a festival field with flower crowns. Or shouting peace at things that couldn’t be fixed overnight or with faux hope. All that isn’t that far off. But that generally leads to strange thoughts about how hypocritical it all was. As people sat around, talking about how bad the world was, the world was still out there in shambles. And only a select few – like Baez – actually wanted to do something about it.
This is also why a song like ‘White Rabbit’ was so on point. Especially when it came to this mismatch with how it looked and how it actually was. Taking the mindfuck of Lewis Carroll’s story, Slick basically criticised how messed up it was to think a certain way, when all it was most of the time was the effect of psychedelic drugs, making people think they had all the answers. The song is actually about stories kids would be told by their parents when they were younger, but the basic idea remains the same.
“They’d read us all these stories where you’d take some kind of chemical and have a great adventure,” Slick told Q. “Alice in Wonderland is blatant; she gets literally high, too big for the room, while the caterpillar sits on a psychedelic mushroom smoking opium. In the Wizard of Oz, they land in a field of opium poppies, wake up and see this Emerald City. Peter Pan? Sprinkle some white dust-cocaine on your head and you can fly.”
Slick wasn’t perfect herself. Actually, her being such a big part of the scene is a big reason why the song is as good as it is. She gave it that insider touch, a lover of acid and mushrooms herself. But that “too big for the room” feeling was always there, giving people a false sense of reality, with most of them not even seeing it for what it was. The funny thing is, Slick never felt any pull towards any other drugs, because she was also stuck in the laziness of the scene, not really bothered about lifting a finger to do anything else. Much like everybody else around her.
Which is the exact reason why she never tried heroin. Once, she told Forbes that taking drugs was like “hardball entertainment”. But then she went into how much there is to think about, practically. Like, with heroin, there was just too much going on, too much she’d have had to get right. Which made her a bit like, who can be bothered? “Heroin is especially tough because the amounts are so small you think you’ll just have a little more. Well, just a little more will kill you,” she said.
“I never took heroin, really, because I’m too lazy,” she continued. Calling it “too much trouble”, she said she left it alone because you need to know what you’re doing to do it right. And even then, it’s not even worth it. She said she tried it once, but it had no effect, so she left it alone. And went back to her perfect bubble of fake, paradoxical reality, just like everybody else.
