The Jefferson Airplane is a shambles. Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady shaved their heads and went off roller skating in Europe. Paul Kantner’s too pompous to carry anything by himself, and I don’t think they even have a regular drummer anymore. That leaves Grace Slick, the psychedelic Streisand of San Francisco humpty dumpty rock. Grace Slick, immortalised by Eye magazine clear back" in 1968 as the “Ice Maiden” to Janis’ fire gamin. Grace Slick, who sang “White Rabbit” the same year she sang a white Levis commercial and unknowingly slipped the dreaded you-know-what into the martinis of a whole generation of button-downers. Grace Slick, that storied hippie harridan who sings like Biiffy St.-Marie on Toluene and reputedly has such a laser tongue that she makes journalists quiver and even sent (ex Airplane drummer and all around swell fellow) Spencer Dryden home in tears from Winterland one night just because she’d met his howdydo with a typical “Shove it up your ass!”

And here she is, sitting upstairs in the Airplane mansion across from Harry Callahan Park in Frisco, sucking demurely on a bottle of champagne. Her hairstyle is perfect curl way this side of frizz, her eyes are deep blue and she’s much given to trying to pin the visitor with one of her famous Piercing Stares which, like a sizeable percentage of her repartee, don’t mean anything at all. But that’s half the fun. Great skin, good legs, good tits she maligns obsessively, which is only part of the overall impression of disarming frankness to the point of self-effacement. Her rap rambles as idiosyncratically as her singing, but it’s all good because Grace is one of those rare personalities who’s managed to transcend the implicit foolishness of hip-countercultural superstardom by reveling in her own unique’foolishness/ eccentricity/ alcohol tangents.

Which is fortunate, because neither the twilight Airplane albums nor the product of various splinters such as Hot Tuna and Jefferson Starship have been the sort of waxworks which are going to

give anybody a new lease on legend, as Grace readily admits: “I talked to the office before you came up here, and they said, ‘Watch out for him, he doesn’t like the Airplane.’ Okay, so he doesn’t like the Airplane, I don’t give a shit. I think Airplane is a little sloppy. I don’t know what you don’t like about it, but it probably differs from what I don’t like about it. But I am part of what I don’t like about it as well as anybody else. In other words, I’ll jerk off... and Airplane at the moment... as far as what we’re talking about, doesn't even matter!” She breaks into a laugh at Once nervous and healthy.

“I liked them as individuals. I put it in the past tense because we’re not performing live. Airplane is a hasbeen, insofar as what we are supposed to be, ‘isn’t this good aren’t we all going to change society.’ Well, we aren’t.

Were you cynical, I wondered,when you wrote all that peacelove let's-gettogether and later revolutionary stuff?

“Each person in the group writes pretty much what they believe at the time, or something like that. Since the beginning of whatever this was, every damn thing I’ve written has not been anything other than moderately sarcastic.—And I have no illusions about changing society at all.”

What about Paul?

“He did. I don’t know if he does now. We’re individuals, and I understand what he’s trying to say, and unless it sounds repulsive I won’t counter it. The only thing I don’t like about Paul’s lyrics is that sometimes I don’t understand what he’s talking about — I think he’s a bit obscure.

“I can talk about what I’m trying to do. I like to just get up and be a jackass, mainly.,And that’s pretty simple. I like to sing sort of spastic sometimes and sort of on tune sometimes and perform stuff that is other than what you see normally. I never worry about blowing my cool, because I know that’s going to happen at least three or four times in every song.”

But at the same time, I counter,yon give people the impression that you take yourself very seriously.

“Seriously? No, I don’t take anything seriously except my karate teacher. Because if I don’t, that’s the end of the fist. As far as the Airplane coming off serious, that’s too bad. I’m sorry about that, it’s not intentional. Not on my part anyway.”

What about the rest of the group?

“Marty’s the best rock ’n’ roll singer I know of outside of Mick Jagger, and I’m not saying that to try and suck him in or anything because he’s gone. I don’t think Paul’s a good singer. He’s a good harmony singer. In order to be a good lead singer you gotta be more silly.”

Do you think you ’re a good singer?

“No.”

Do you think it’s important to be a good singer?

“Yes.”

Then how do you reconcile that?

“I don’t. I can’t.”

Do you think you’re getting away with something?

“No. I think... the teacher I have now, Korean guy named Byang Yiu that I respect, has been beaten in the ring by

"I like to just get up and he a jackass,"

a guy named Joe Louis, who is not the Joe Louis you’re thinking of but this sort of white Nazi type. Do you know anything about martial arts?”

You mean like Kung Fu. You have a Perfect Master of martial arts.

“There are no perfect masters, jst masters. Byang Yiu is one of them. He is good at certain things; he can be beaten at others, because he is not capable in size or in his mind of doing other things. Now, if you say in rock ’n’ roll that the guy is not a good lead guitar player, that’s stupid. For what? What is he trying to do? If depends what you’re trying to do. The guy I take karate from is good at a certain number of things. I am good at certain things, and not at

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others. The girl that Airplane had before me is a better singer, she has better tubes. At being an entertainer, no. I’m not yet good at being an entertainer, but I’m better than she was. I have a sort of false self-confidence, which is usually projected by liquor. If I say — ”

And suddenly she is arching like a cat, waving her hands in the air before me like a brujo, no, it’s obviously her karate moves. She unfolds vertically from the sofa, moving towards me in a slow hypnotic writhe, singing: “Angie... Ayayungie...” Just when I think I’m about to get it in the throat, she pops a tit at me and snaps back into repose, leering demurely.

Well, 1 stammer so what exactly would you say it is that’s wrong with the Airplane?

“In the movies they say, ‘I wanta have it good.’ In television they say, ‘I wanta have it Thursday.’ And that is one of the things I think Airplane should have — we should have it Thursday. Discipline. Sounds corny for a fuckin’ hippie.”

Wait a second, I thought you were always going around saying Paul was a Nazi. Doesn *t he help?

“Everybody calls him a Nazi, because that’s what he is. He writes notes out to everybody in the house, and he signs them ‘The Fuhrer.’ He has decided to be disciplined to the extent that he does not ever fall apart. He has an incredible amount of control. Because I’m still alive.”

What’s that supposed to mean?

“That I’m a jackass. I’m not entirely a bitch. But about once a month there’s an explosion, it’s usually triggered by alcohol. I have a destructive, sarcastic, caustic mouth, and if they had a black belt for that, I’ve got it. He’s a pothead, but I only smoke grass when I’m alone, in my room at night, for writing or listening to music. To talk, I’m relatively nervous anyway, 1 like booze. 1 can drink a certain amount of liquor and 1 think I’m happy and then all of a sudden 1 just lash out at people that... I’m missing the wrong target. In other words I’ll be mad at something that has nothing to do with the people I'm going NYAAAAA! at. I wish I could just get laid back.”

Why doncha just go up to Marin County?

“Oh, fuck Marin County. If I’m around people who’ve smoked a lot of dope, and there are fifteen of ’em in a room, it gets very boring for me. And fuck the counterculture, too. What is the counterculture? Let’s start off this way: What is the culture? You tell me what the culture is, and I’ll tell you what the counterculture is.”

Okay, the culture is tits. Why did you show your tits at that show in Chicago?

“Why not? If there aren’t any there, what difference does it make?”

Why did Jorma and Jack get those Marine haircuts?

“They keep people from grabbing you by the hair and kicking your face in. Wait a second, you didn’t say anything about Dachau. If Paul’s gonna be a Nazi we gotta have some Nazi publicity, like Paul got mad and cut their hair off in the usual Nazi fashion, because he found out that Jack was partly Jewish.”

Gonna start the master race of rock musicians, eh?

“Paul is gonna start China into knocking down Rodney of hamburger fame in about six months.”

I don *t have the slightest idea what you ’re talking about.

“Well, I’ve got this daughter name China who can sing ‘You Are My Sunshine’. ..”

Yeah, I saw you put her on the cover of your album, figured this was next —

“Hang on, harig on, she’s two and a half years old, she can sing ‘You Are My Sunshine’ ^nd accompany herself IN TUNE on what she calls the sympathizer.”

Well, that’s real cute Grace. Can you imagine if you and Paul had the new Sonny & Cher show - hey, Cher’s a good example of somebody with little tits and a great body!

“Yeah, she’s got good tits, good voice, I really like her. And that’s terrible, because if you’re from San Francisco you’re really not supposed to like anybody from Hollywood. And I sorta useta like Lalo Schifrin, but old Lalo cranks out the same shit for every movie, and lie’s also into martial arts, which is depressing for me, because he cranked out the same shit for Enter the Dragon as Mission Impossible.”

Maybe that’s what martial arts does to ya, makes ya think the same stuff all the time just like Mahavishnu and all that other shit. Maybe you’d do better shoo tin’ crank.

‘‘I’ve never had any; ya got any?... Is that goin’ in the interview? Ya gonna cut that out?”

You want me to?

“Would you sound stupid if it was?”

You think I’m gonna sound stupid in my own story? Lissen, before I came down here Gibson & Stromberg started trying to coach me —

“Gibson & Stromberg? Who’s that?”

Your PR agency.

“I thought they made guitars. Have you ever thought about interviewing musicians instead of accountants?”

If Paul's gonna bea Nazi, we gotta have some Nazi publicity You still didn't say anything about Dachau"

Yeah, but I don’t wanna talk to any more musicians. All they wanna talk about is their guitar strings —

“That’s good, because I don’t know how to write music — ”

And the blues —

Yeah, the blues is where it’s at, man. I’m blonde, I weigh 135 pounds, my parents were in the Welsh mine cuckoo, and I talked to Jimi Hendrix once when I was 14 so I think black folks are where it’s at.”

Grace herself has never been caught with her inverse racism down, although she admits that “I have a current admiration for Orientals that is a little bit out of hand. We got the heaviest bunch of Chinese people in this country, in San

Francisco, and I don’t know shit about Chinese people.”

/ ain’t crazy about the Chinks myself.

“Yeah, because they’re scary, aren’t they? There’s a jujube here, if you’re at a loss for turds.”

Naw, you can just ad-lib.

“Okay, just lemme say this: if we consider how many people there are in China, as opposed to how many people there .are in the U.S., then you have a little something to think about for the rest of the evening. Because they start with Tai Chi in the morning, and we start off with coffee because we’re so drunk that we can’t get up, and coffee doesn’t cut it. Now, they’ve cut down on opium, coffee — ”

Aw, a caffeine speed freak could kick ass on an opium addict any day.

“Dig it! Now, we compare your basic Western man of 25 years old with your basic Eastern man of 25 j and basically, as we are basically talking, I think you’ll basically find yourself in a lot of trouble! Haw haw haw haw haw. Philosophically and physically... otherwise it’s not funny at all.”

That’s the advantage of being a writer, though. They can ’t pull you off the stage and kick your ass.

“I don’t know what the difference is. If you collect garbage you oughta get paid the same as somebody who sings.”

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 35

What is this, a socialism rap?

“No, it’s inevitable. Socialism. Whaddya want, human race or no human race?”

Hmm, gimme a while to think about it.

“It’s either one way or the other. It’s either socialism or ya don’t have it. Want dictatorship?”

I like some of the extraneous trappings. Vicarious dictatorship would be nice.

“Well, I’ve already got that, so I don’t give a shit about that or any” — and here she began to free-associate full steam — “outlanders. .. outlandish. .. unterlandi.... umlaut...”

Well, I said, I’ve always said that the best way to get away with a bad joke is just have it not make any sense. Then people will think you ’re a dadaist; works every time. She laughed, agreed, and we had another drink.