The only song Grace Slick regrets making: “A mistake”
Grace Slick had a voice that could haunt an empty house. She could probably start a party in an empty house, too.
The famed Acid Queen defined an era in a whirl of recklessness and magic that now barely seems real. She wrote songs that seemed to sniff at the meaning of life, and even had an armed standoff, too. But along the way, her life may have been manic, but her regrets only amounted to two.
“The things I wish I did do that I did not do,” she answered, “were screw Jimi Hendrix and ride a horse.”
Given that she could still technically ride a horse, she could reduce those regrets by half in an instant. However, her abiding musical mistake is a much harder one to erase, especially considering that it ironically sold over a million copies.
Tragically, the biggest hit Slick ever had turned out to be one she described as “the worst song ever”. So, how did we arrive at the unfortunate juncture of ‘We Built This City’? Well, a few years prior, Slick was sick of her position in the band, so during a show in Germany, she got drunk and decided to ensure that she’d get sacked.
“I went back upstairs,“ she said after a disastrous soundcheck, “put on a Nazi uniform, got drunk and did a ‘get back at you for the Second World War routine’ for the show”.
She was swiftly fired without objection, but by the time that the 1980s arrived, she was sober and looking to make amends. In a strange twist of fate, she would regret this perhaps more than the moment that got her fired in the first place. She had such a good ear for music that as soon as she heard ‘We Built This City’, she knew it was trash, but as she explains, “I kind of had to [record it] because I was trying to make it up to the band.“
Grace Slick’s biggest hit
She added, “I’d been this wild, crazy-ass drunk. So to make up for it. I was sober all through the ’80s … which was a mistake!” Sobriety is not something most rock stars have ever lived to regret, but Slick is not most rock stars. She could see clearly, but all she was staring at was a sorry reflection of what the great Jefferson Airplane had become. And Elton John was to blame.
Elton’s new powerpop brand of rock had a cocaine kookiness that the group figured might work for them. So, they contacted his lyricist Bernie Taupin, and they got to work attempting to revive their career. Slick identified a problem from the off. “I thought [the lyrics] were ridiculous. There isn’t a city built on rock’n’roll! Los Angeles was built on oil and oranges and the movie business.”
Taupin a) came from further afield so had a differing perspective on the States than the band he was writing for, and b) didn’t give a damn anyway. He knew he had written something catchy. “Stupid song,“ Slick recalls objecting, “But our producer said, ‘Yeah, but it’s a hit.’ And he was right.” Indeed, he was, and Taupin’s take was deemed even more credible given that the UK sales figures outstripped those in the US.
From the small side of the pond, the track represented something of the glitz and glam of showbiz in a joyously ironic fashion. In the US, its cheesiness came without the aura of a capitalist fairytale that gave it some credit in the rest of the world, and it was quickly derided by critics. Slick found herself in agreement with them. In a life devoid of more regrets than perhaps would be sensible, this soupy ’80s sensation still sticks in Slick’s craw. But boy was Taupin right about its catchiness.
