Somebody to Love? (12 page)

Spencer's and my common ability to dismiss reality and jump capriciously into the moment was our immediate and sustaining attraction. Our first night “together” began on a bus in the rain, heading to a hotel in Manhattan. The band and crew were laughing and fooling around in back of us, while Spencer and I were sitting side by side and face-to-face at the same time, hunched down in the seats, giggling in the conspiratorial way little kids have of letting you know it's none of your business. It seemed like the bus seats got bigger and bigger and we got smaller and smaller, allowing us to hide from grown-ups' eyes and speak our own language.

I went to his room right after we checked into the hotel. The rest of the night was darkness, illuminated only by the soft glow of the city lights coming in through the curtain. He wanted it that way—wanted to create a place where nothing could intrude. Gentle and imaginative, he made love the way he thought, the way he played. I wrote the song “Lather” about Spencer, and about all of us looking at the impending age of thirty through the eyes of a bunch of perpetual children.

Lather was thirty years old today,

And Lather came foam from his tongue.

He looked at me eyes wide and plainly said,

“Is it true that I'm no longer young?”

And the children call him famous

What the old men call insane,

And sometimes he's so nameless

That he hardly knows what game to play

Spencer and I moved into an apartment below Jorma Kaukonen, Airplane's lead guitar player, and his wife, Margaretta. I have an interesting eight-by-ten publicity shot of the band standing in front of that building on Washington Street in San Francisco. At first glance, it appears to be a standard group photo. But although I'd prepared to pose for the shot standing beside Spencer, at the last moment Paul was seized by what turned out to be a prophetic impulse and hoisted me up on his shoulder.

That photograph was taken by Jim Marshall, one of the San Francisco photographers who shot virtually all of the Bay Area bands. Granted, he was good at his job, but he got some of the best animated “posed” shots because we all tried to make the boring business of standing around for photo sessions less tedious by fucking with him. He usually didn't think we were funny, and that made it even better, because when we messed with Jim's head for two hours, we'd be cracking up, and he'd get
real
smiles and laughter out of us.

During the time I was seeing Spencer, Jim set up a photo session with Janis Joplin and me. When Janis arrived at my apartment in advance of Jim, we concocted a plan to be serious—no matter what Jim said or did. What ensued was hours of Jim saying, “Come on, you guys, smile.” He tried to tell jokes and just be his kind-of-silly self, but Janis and I continued to do the serious routine, thinking Jim would eventually lose it and quit. He didn't, we didn't, and the Grace and Janis side-by-side, grim-looking photograph has shown up on calendars, books, and posters all over the world. No matter what Jim Marshall said or did or what we said or did in return, he always managed to get shots that worked.

Despite the calculation that led up to that picture of Janis and me, if you look closely at it, you can see the dissimilarity between our two personalities. Younger than I was, Janis appeared far more world-weary—as if her dreams had already been altered by disillusionment. Even though it was hot that day, she was wearing a dress, a beaded cape, four pounds of jewelry, and a fur hat—the full hot-mama mask. I, as yet untouched by the same sadness (I'd experience
that
much later in life), was in a Girl Scout uniform, making fun of the suburban club I'd never joined. My face looked like a soft version of “Try me, sucker.” I was self-contained, and I thought I knew how to manipulate the props into the scene I wanted to play.

Janis knew more than I did about “how it was,” but she lacked enough armor for the inevitable hassles. She was open and spontaneous enough to get her heart trampled with a regularity that took me thirty years to experience or understand. On the various occasions when we were together, she seemed to be holding in something she thought I might not want to hear, like older people do when they hear the kids they love saying with absolute youthful confidence, “Oh, that'll never happen to me.” Sometimes you know you can't
tell
them how it is, they have to find out for themselves. Janis felt like an old soul, a wise-cracking grandmother whom everybody loved to visit. When I was with her, I often felt like a part of her distant family, a young upstart relative who was still too full of her own sophistry to hear wisdom. Did we compliment each other? Yes. But not often enough.

Contrasting with Spencer, the thin man in black, was David Crosby, with his Southern California Sun Boy ebullience. Everything about and around him had the natural exuberance of juicy ripe fruit. David's home in Laurel Canyon, with its rubbed wood, hand-carved figures of boats and whales, and beautiful acoustic guitars lying around everywhere, was the quintessential retreat for a man who liked to hide out in the open.

Open doors, open windows, and open refrigerator. Open mind, manners, and morals.

When Paul and I went to visit him during a week off from recording
Pillow,
David had two or three golden nymphs with trays of food and Michuocan moving quietly around the house, while he played his latest songs on a guitar that was almost as beautiful as the women who lived there. He loved them. They loved him. For David, at that time, two women together were what love was all about. I was later to sing a song by David called “Triad,” which his own band rejected because of its reference to living as a threesome.

“What can we do now that we both love you,”

I love you too—I don't really see

Why can't we go on as three

You are afraid—embarrassed too

No one has ever said such a thing to you.

I didn't understand his band's objection. If everyone's happy about it, who cares? It was just a song, anyway, and what's the value of songwriting if not to bring up fringe topics, ideas that everybody thinks about but lacks the guts to express openly?

Some of the fringe topics that we all wrote about then and over the following years, included the following:

Possible space travel:
Blows against the Empire
—P
AUL
K
ANTNER

A sexual threesome:
“Triad”—D
AVID
C
ROSBY

Television addiction:
“Plastic Fantastic Lover”—M
ARTY
B
ALIN

Stand-up comedian as clergy:
“Father Bruce”—G
RACE
S
LICK

Clashes with the police:
“For What It's Worth”—S
TEPHEN
S
TILLS

Drugs:
“Heroin”—T
he
V
ELVET
U
NDERGROUND

Change:
“Break on Through”—T
HE
D
OORS

Gay issues:
“Lola”—T
HE
K
INKS

Poverty:
“We Gotta Get out of This Place”—E
RIC
B
URDON

20

Jailbirds

W
e were now full throttle into the twenty-four-hour lifestyle that built or destroyed rock musicians. For a while Bill Graham was our manager, but after he'd booked us into three different cities in one day, we decided that his power-house management and our interest in having some time to rest or goof off were at terminal odds. Bill Thompson, who'd been our road manager, moved into the position of full-time manager, nurse, confidant, psychotherapist, and fellow freak.

Graham accepted our shift, and this preservation move probably saved our lives, because
all
the members of Jefferson Airplane are still alive, a rarity among the rock-and-roll groups of the sixties. Whether or not we could have made mounds of money with one of the L.A. or New York pros is now a moot point. Bill Thompson was, and is, a friend, who stayed with us through every strange development that occurred in the band over a period of thirty years. In fact, he still negotiates contracts and conducts legal business for the Airplane/Starship entities, with varying degrees of appreciation from the band members.

There were no big audiences or predictable venues then, as is the current situation with rock tours, so some of our early jobs were truly strange. We played in places where the people didn't even know who or
what
we were. On any given evening in the Midwest, you could find us warming up in a country club where we were viewed as base entertainment right up there next to a bearded lady. The audience of rich hog farmers would just stand there with their mouths open, wondering if we might explode or turn inside out—or engage in some other hideous act that would
really
get them off. You've got to remember, the gap between “straight” and “freak” was so wide then, we weren't even considered human in some southern states.

One bust occurred in New Orleans, which, compared to the rest of the South, was actually quite loose. There was flagrant drunkenness, entertaining misuse of political power (is that redundant?), and the ever-expanding population of musicians and freaks in the Crescent City. We checked into our hotel, and within a few minutes everybody, except me, gathered in Chick Casady's room. (Chick, Jack's brother, worked with the band taking care of the equipment.) I wanted to wash off the traveling first, before the fun started.

But the so-called fun took an unexpected turn. Refreshed from my shower, I strolled down the hallway and knocked on Chick's door, expecting to find my comrades hanging out, getting high, making snide remarks at the TV, talking about amplifiers, and getting ready to check out the local clubs—as usual. But no one answered. Someone in the crew came by and told me the guys were all in jail. Apparently, they'd wedged towels beneath the door—their usual modus operandi—but the scent of pot had somehow penetrated and wafted into a security guard's nostrils. Everybody in the room had been arrested for drug possession and taken to the local precinct.

My concern for hygiene had saved me; I was the only one who missed the Jazz City slammer. The next night, after Thompson managed to get everybody out, fifteen hundred high school students dressed in classic prom gear came to hear the “jailbirds” from San Francisco do “acid rock.”

Did they know what it was?

No.

Did they know it was okay to stand up and dance?

No.

They sat there instead, in polite clumps of corsages and stiff tuxedos, clapping for songs that encouraged the complete annihilation of every aspect of their constricted little lives up to and including that peculiar point in time. They could hardly help it; what did they know?

But dumb adults were another matter. Wealthy contributors to the established art museums would receive invitations to concerts that were put on by the “Friends of Culture,” or some other cloying title, where they could see radical new
mishigas
without having to leave their upper-class neighborhoods. The Whitney Museum, my case in point, was filled with lots of furs and diamonds one afternoon, while the patrons patiently waited to see the drug-addled psychedelic trend from the West Coast: Jefferson Airplane. Having been to Finch College, I knew this well-heeled crowd before I even saw them.

One of the newest electronic innovations was a cordless microphone, and the night of our Whitney Museum appearance was the first time I got to use and abuse this liberating device. Someone put it in my hand and informed me that it would likely carry from the top floor all the way down to the room where we'd be playing. I was fascinated and inspired, so in the elevator, on the way to the ground floor, I let the straights have a warm-up talk. Before the music began, before they could even see who was ragging on their ass, I spoke into the mike, “Hello, you fools. You got Rembrandts on the mantel and a Rolls in the garage, but your old man still wouldn't know a clitoris from a junk bond if you had the guts to show him your twat in the first place.”

I added other congenial remarks that made people just want to love me no matter what I did, following such a friendly introduction. I might add that none of the other band members were as prone to warming up audiences the way I was. They were
musicians,
while I was a perverse clown.

Was any of my outrageous behavior fueled by drugs? You betcha. Chemicals destroy inhibitions
and
basic body functions, if administered in the right proportions. Since I'm damned near sixty years old, I can now say with relative impunity the same kind of flippant shit I dished at the Whitney, but would I encourage that sort of “self-destructive” behavior in the nation's youth? Of course! We're overpopulated.

Back when LSD was circulating, I had to constantly look out for the invisible dosers. Since acid was tasteless, colorless, and effective in very small quantities, it was easy to slip someone a hit without their knowledge. Surreptitious dosing was not an activity in which I engaged, but if one of the guys set down his 7-Up bottle in the dressing room, the doser, usually a member of another band, might put a little acid on the bottle's lip. The next thing the thirst quencher knew, the walls were dripping green slime, he thought he was Napoleon, and it was time to go onstage. Since I've never liked soft drinks (easily accessible open containers), the dosers never got me, but an honest dose was had by all of us in Fargo, North Dakota.

We were backstage, in semidarkness, waiting to go on, and our road manager, Bill Laudner, brought out the usual clear plastic drug tray with dividers in it to separate one powder from another. One section held vitamins, while the others held, respectively, a nasal decongestant, crystal Methedrine, cocaine, LSD, and some popular headache remedy. We thought we were each taking a couple of snorts of cocaine, but due to the lack of lighting, the entire band made the mistake of honking up enough acid to make the whole night a complete joke.