Knobs and Dials and Wires
Signe Anderson was finishing up her last performances with Airplane when I started rehearsing at Jack Casady's and Marty Balin's apartment in Haight Ashbury. Since the group already knew their material, they didn't need the practice.
But I did.
Mostly when we got together, though, it was about conversation and listening to other people's records, so I had to find other ways to get familiar with the music. Airplane was the first San Francisco band to sign with a major label, RCA, and since they'd already recorded Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, I could practice along with the album. But only some of the numbers they performed live were on that album, so to get a feel for their stage routine, I'd go and watch them whenever they were playing.
Signe was still one of the lead singers, but one night at the Fillmore, Bill Graham came backstage all worked up. “Where's Signe?” he yelled. “You guys were supposed to go on five minutes ago!” I knew what was coming next. “Say, Grace, think you can do the show?”
“Uh, can we wait for another five? She might be stuck in traffic,” I said.
Signe never came.
When I stepped out onto the stage at the Fillmore to sing with Jefferson Airplane for the first time, I was scared shitless. Airplane was extremely popular at the time. The group had become an integral part of the current scene while The Great Society was still working its way up the ladder. What terrified me was not the fear that I lacked the talent, or even that I lacked knowledge of the material. I knew the songs because I'd been listening to them for a long time. The audience at the Fillmore knew me, they'd seen me many times with The Great Society, so I wasn't afraid of their acceptance or of fucking up the lyrics.
My problem was that I detested performing without lots of rehearsals, without meticulous preparation. I'm still that way. I like to practice whatever it is I'm about to do until I have the technical side down perfectly. Only then do I feel free to express myself. I'd imagined my first performance with Airplane would be well rehearsed, that when I replaced Signe, it would be a pat changeover. But there I was, ready to start singing, with very little preparation and, hence, no self-assurance.
Even so, I stepped out onstage with plenty of attitude, calculated, looking casual, walking slowly, careful to keep my hands relaxed and by my sides, no fingers twitching. I gave the audience a smile and a silent look that said, “I know I'm new, I know you're used to Signe, but I'm here now.” In a certain way, it felt natural to be there and I tried to look like I belonged, like I had the situation handled. Of course inside I was a nervous wreck.
I didn't realize how much louder Airplane played than Great Society. With the low-tech monitor speakers, I couldn't hear a thing except the amplified guitars—I didn't have any idea what notes I was singing. That's rough for a singer, not to be able to hear yourself. When you play a guitar, you have frets that are always in the same place, so even if you can't hear yourself play, when you hit those frets, you can be sure, by finger placement, that you're playing a specific note. With piano keys, it's the same. But a singer has an invisible instrument, and if you can't hear yourself, you can't be sure what the hell you're singing.
That night, I just hoped that whatever I was doing was somewhere near the music that the band was playing. When the set was over, I knew it had been awful, but Airplane's road manager, Bill Thompson, in particular, and all the guys in the band, in general, were very encouraging. Someone said, “We have a tape of it—you want to listen?”
“No,” I said quickly, not interested in hearing back a performance that I knew had sucked, “but I do want to step up the practices. And let's do them plugged in, instead of those deceptively audible acoustic rehearsals.”
When a band is in sync, and everybody is playing well and feeling good, there's nothing like it. You, both the audience and the performers, become the power of the music. It's a biological as well as a spiritual phenomenon and it still happens to me when I'm riding around in a car or sitting at home listening to 130 decibels of speaker-cracking music. An almost tangible shift in feeling happens as I go from thick to weightless. It's like swimming in scuba gear with a twenty-five percent nitrous feed.
The first time I recorded in the big Studio A at RCA on Sunset Boulevard, I felt like a kid who loves horses getting paid to ride a stallion for a couple of months. Four gigantic Altec speakers were set up so we could literally feel the playback, the technology could squeeze or explode a sound, and the engineers could get whatever sound you wanted if you could just explain it to them. There were countless knobs and dials and wires to mold a song into an aural vision, and I was fascinated by all of it. Along with the stationary equipment, the guys in the band were starting to experiment with all the new gadgets that were coming out on a daily basis for the electric guitar. Rick Jarrard, our producer, was a company man, and between his ear for how the completed song should sound and our desire to make it unique, the finished “product” worked for everybody—the suits and the kids. During the making of Surrealistic Pillow, even when I wasn't recording, I was in the studio, just watching and listening to all the machinery transform the simplest noise into an all-enveloping sound. It was Jefferson Airplane's second album (following Jefferson Airplane Takes Off), but it was my first, and I didn't want to miss a second of the process.
If you're wondering what the title Surrealistic Pillow means, it's one of those names that leaves the interpretation up to the beholder. When Marty Balin asked Jerry Garcia what he thought of the studio tapes, Jerry said, “Sounds like a surrealistic pillow.” Asleep or awake on the pillow? Dreaming? Making love? The adjective “surrealistic” leaves the picture wide open.
What went on outside the studio during that time certainly dipped into the surreal world. We all stayed at the Tropicana, a cheap motel on Santa Monica Boulevard, where we had semi-kitchenette setups and complimentary smog. On one of our first nights in L.A., we were coming back to our rooms, when we heard what we thought was a dog howling. On the balcony, crawling on all fours, was a totally nude Jim Morrison, barking at the moon. Oblivious to the contrast between his “natural” state and the urban slum look of midtown L.A., he kept up the dog act even after Paul Kantner stepped over him to get to his room.
When I asked Paul what he said to Morrison, Paul answered, “What do you say to a guy who's becoming a dog? Nothing.” Jim was so willing to take himself completely to the edge of human experience, I found his “performance” both fascinating and frightening. I tried to imagine what kind of curiosity could take someone to those extremes without the overwhelming fear of “Maybe I'll never get back.” But get back to what? Who's to say which is the preferable reality?
I sometimes see guys dancing down the street, singing and talking to themselves or some imaginary person, and my first thought is, “Too bad, they're nuts.” But what do I know? Maybe they're happier people than I'll ever be. My judgment is based on a set of cultural ideas that clearly reflect a cautious norm. I have to regularly remind myself that without the freaks—without the Wright Brothers, or Mozart, or Jim Carrey, or Gandhi, or Le Petomaine, the famous “fartmeister”—existence might be very gray indeed.
During our stay at the Tropicana, I was not only getting to know the music business, I was also getting to “know” my fellow band members. Although, as far as the state of California was concerned, Jerry Slick and I were still married, I hardly ever saw him anymore. Between his work (film) and mine (music), the chances of our even colliding at an airport were slim.
For better or worse, I've always been driven primarily by my passions—for art, architecture, music, learning. I suppose it's selfish, but it's the way I operate, and the sixties rock-and-roll scene in San Francisco, which was all about passion and freedom of expression, was irresistible to me. My marriage with Jerry, on the other hand, was a throwback to the fifties way of life, which heavily impacted Jerry's and my relationship. There was no passion there at all, there never had been, and when I started performing and making music, I found a lifestyle I was far more attuned to. It was the way I'd pictured my life when I was a child. Though Jerry and I wouldn't divorce until 1971, in 1967 I already felt like a single woman.
The sixties idea of sexual freedom was something I actually related to quite easily, despite my earlier programming. To me, switching to the new lifestyle was like changing costumes—was that so difficult? Who wants to wear the same thing every day? Similarly, even if you love bananas, you probably wouldn't want bananas at every meal. A little diversification is what we look for in every other area, so why not in bed? At least, that was the thinking at the time, and it made sense to me. So it wasn't surprising that musicians, because of their talent, humor, and proximity, made up the majority of my lovers. When you're in a band, you see more of your fellow band members than you do your blood family, so it stands to reason that I'd end up honing in on the guys I sang next to night after night. During my Great Society and Airplane/Starship years, it seemed like I was married to seven people at once.
I always ignored the old dictum “Never ask a boy out, always let them ask you.” Ask them out? How about asking them if they want to FUCK? The Tropicana didn't lend itself to romantic encounters, but if you just ignored the surroundings, things could get downright enjoyable. For example, I knew that Jack Casady was in his room one morning; it was too early to have gone anywhere and too late to be asleep. Using the excuse of having no corkscrew, I called his room for assistance. But wine at 9:00 A.M.? Now Jack is a friendly and helpful sort, so he personally brought the corkscrew over to my room.
Even though Jack and I both considered ourselves sophisticated, the conversation that took place when we knew we were about to make love in five minutes consisted of smiles, jokes, and innuendoes. Basically, we were two embarrassed and horny people, and exactly what we said I don't remember, but the general drift was one of circling anticipation—touch, move back, close in, silence, laugh, get face to face, and come in on the kiss that moves everything to horizontal.
He was an extremely well hung man, and I'm sure Jack's wife, Diana (whom I know and like very much), will forgive that blunt description of the man she didn't even know at the time. But I also was friends with a girl Jack did know at the time, a woman named Miranda. A companionable sort, Miranda had also “known” some of our road crew, Paul Kantner and others. Our group obviously had a lot in common, so we had made a point of getting to “know” each other. After I got back to San Francisco and mentioned to Miranda the incident with Jack and me, she said, “Well, you get him in L.A., and I'll take him in San Francisco.”
Okay.
Did Jack feel like a piece of meat being handed around by two sexist sluts? I don't think so. We weren't saddled with the politically correct social/moral restrictions that would later predominate in the Age of AIDS. We were all friends, and one of the possible activities you could do with a friend was have sex. We also had cures for all the sexually transmitted diseases of the time.
As Paul Kantner said many years later, “Forget about ‘The Summer of Love’; it should have been called ‘The Golden Age of Fucking.’”