Grace Slick

Grace Slick biography

Grace Slick (born Grace Barnett Wing; October 30, 1939) is an American singer, songwriter, and former model, best known as one of the lead singers of the rock groups The Great Society, Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship, and Starship, as well as for her work as a solo artist from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s. Slick was an important figure in the 1960s psychedelic rock movement, known for her witty lyrics and powerful contralto vocals.

Early life (1939-1960s)

Grace Barnett Wing was born in Evanston, Illinois, to Ivan W. Wing (1907-1987) and Virginia (née Barnett; 1910-1984), the latter a direct descendant of passengers of the Mayflower). In 1949, a month before her tenth birthday, her brother Chris Wing was born. Her father was transferred several times when she was a child and, in addition to the Chicago area, she lived in Los Angeles and San Francisco before her family finally settled in Palo Alto, California, south of San Francisco, in the early 1950s. She attended Palo Alto Senior High School before switching to Castilleja High School, a private all-girls school in Palo Alto. Following graduation she attended Finch College in New York from 1957 to 1958 and the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, from 1958-1959.

Musical career

The Great Society

Slick's music career started in 1965 in San Francisco when she and her then husband Jerry Slick formed their own band, influenced by The Beatles as well as by a performance by the freshly-formed Jefferson Airplane at The Matrix and who, Slick realized, maintained an impressive revenue in comparison to her earnings as a model while having fun performing. Slick and her husband, her then brother-in-law, Darby Slick and other friends named themselves The Great Society after the social reform program of the same name, beginning during the autumn of 1965 and by early 1966 becoming a popular psychedelic act in the Bay area. By the summer of 1966 The Great Society was recording, releasing one single in San Francisco, a precursor to the future Jefferson Airplane success "Somebody to Love", which was written by Darby. Grace provided vocals, guitar, piano and recorder and co-wrote a majority of the band's songs with her brother-in-law.

Jefferson Airplane

That autumn Jefferson Airplane's singer Signe Toly Anderson left the band to start a family, and the Airplane asked Slick to join them. Slick stated that she joined the Airplane because it was run in a professional manner, unlike The Great Society. She took two compositions from The Great Society with her; "White Rabbit", which she is purported to have written in an hour, and "Somebody to Love", both of which went on to become hits and to appear on Rolling Stone's top 500 greatest songs of all time. Though both songs were first performed by The Great Society; their versions of the songs were much different: the Great Society's rendering of "White Rabbit" featured an oboe solo by Slick.

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