The one drug Grace Slick misses: “There’s no hangover”
The 1960s witnessed many significant developments, including the widespread belief that taking drugs was beneficial. The range of narcotics available was more extensive than ever before. While people had long used drugs, new synthetic creations like LSD became inextricably linked to the decade’s most important movement: the counterculture. For better or worse, the stories of its heroes—such as Jimi Hendrix, Grace Slick, and Janis Joplin—would have played out much differently without them.
While Hendrix and Joplin’s lives were ultimately claimed by their misadventures and experimentation—Hendrix passing in September 1970 from barbiturate-related asphyxia and Joplin succumbing to a heroin overdose the following month, both contributing to the eerie ’27 Club’ myth—Grace Slick remains one of that heady period’s most prominent and outspoken survivors.
Slick has always been objective about the countercultural era. She’s cast doubt upon the legend surrounding the supposedly era-defining hippie gathering at Woodstock in 1969 and provided first-hand accounts of the movement’s central characters, including her late friend Joplin and the perenially complex Doors frontman, Jim Morrison. As someone whose life has been indelibly affected by drug-taking, she’s also been very frank about its effects.
Famously, Slick’s definitive hit with Jefferson Airplane, ‘White Rabbit’ captured the essence of the hippie era’s symbiotic relationship with LSD. According to legend, she wrote most of the atmospheric track after an acid trip, which heavily draws on the surreal and trippy nature of Lewis Carroll’s opium-laced book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass.
In a reflection of her brilliance as an artist, Slick has constantly maintained that the titular white mammal in her song is a metaphor for curiosity, with her life holding many parallels to that of Alice, who follows the rabbit into Wonderland. Of course, the rabbit also takes on the guise of drugs, with horizons expanded in the 1960s by experimenting with narcotics and other elements such as sex, music, and fashion.
Outside of this career highlight, there have been many notable and notorious instances in Slick’s life that have been dictated by drugs, including her numerous stints in detoxification facilities. There’s also the time in 1969 when President Richard Nixon’s daughter, Tricia, invited her to a tea party at The White House for the alumnae of New York’s Finch College.
However, in true rebellious form, Slick turned up with Yippie co-founder Abbie Hoffman as her escort, and after being met with suspicion by security, the pair promptly left. In the years since, it has been alleged that she had planned to spike the President’s tea with 600 micrograms of LSD but reneged after realising that the party was ladies only. Furthermore, Slick’s story is so closely tied to LSD that she also earned the moniker ‘The Acid Queen’, which speaks to her heavy experimentation with the drug and the intoxicating essence of her music.
In the spirit of the day and its inherent curiosity, it wasn’t just LSD that was on Slick’s menu, and when speaking to Variety in 2017, she revealed the drug that she misses taking the most. Harking back to the experimental character of the day, the tipple she wishes was still around was Quaaludes, the hypnotic sedative that became known to younger audiences thanks to that slobber-soaked scene in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street.
Slick explained: “Quaaludes. They don’t make them anymore, and we’re lucky because we’d be off to the races with that. You can take Quaaludes and have a day of being silly, and you’re done. There’s no hangover, no six months of being a zombie. If Quaaludes came out again, I’d buy a big dark amber glass bottle and keep it in the refrigerator.”
