The Brandy Twins
In 1974, about a year before I met Skip, I'd announced through my lyrics (the same prescient way Jorma had in “Chelsea”) that I needed to be figuratively unshackled. The words escapar (escape) and libertad (freedom) kept appearing in the Spanish section of the theme song on my solo album, Manhole.
Look up—the roof is gone
And the long hand moves right on by the hour.
Look up—the roof is gone.
La música de España es para mi como la libertad…
Convenir resueña para escapar.
That title, Manhole, was meant to shock the women's libbers, and the lyrics—half-Spanish, half-English—were meant to please me. It was recorded, in part, at Olympic Studios in London with a symphony orchestra and a group of bagpipers in kilts—the real thing. The head bagpiper, a quintessential Scotsman, healthy, robust, and bearded, pulled a small bottle of Scotch out of his high socks, which he sipped a little bit at a time, from sunrise to sunset, without getting soused. It was good fun; the album was a heteromorphic success and a commercial flop.
It was a year later, when I was still thrashing around, wondering where to aim myself, that I allowed Paul to steer me and some other loose-cannon musicians into Jefferson Starship—a veritable gold-record machine, as it turned out. The drug-fueled, anomalous lyrics of Jefferson Airplane smoothly shifted into the more languid boy/girl laments that made up the critical mass of popular songs in the post-hippie decades. Now it was Marty's turn to be the focus of attention, while I turned my passion toward our young lighting director.
For some reason, John Barbata felt it necessary to tell Paul that not only was Skip heterosexual, he was interacting with Yours Truly in more than a “touring bar pal” sort of way. I suppose Paul had been in denial of the obvious, but with John's sobering words, he understandably lost it and fired Skip. While he did his best to replace Skip (it's not that easy to find a lighting director who knows your songs well enough to cue a hundred lights exactly in time with the music), I was on the move. I'd stay in Detroit one night to perform, then fly to Chicago the next day to be where Skip was doing lights for someone else. Then I'd fly immediately back to New York to sing with the band again. After that, I was off to Washington to fit myself into Skip's tour schedule. Basically I was throwing a lot of money at the commercial airlines for about three months.
In one of the hotel rooms along the way, I sat down on the bed to think. How long could I keep the game going, I wondered, without creating the inevitable confrontation?
When Jefferson Starship got back home to San Francisco, Skip was on the road with Stephen Stills's group, and Sally and I decided to go to Alaska where they were playing. Good ole Sally, it turned out, was interested in Stephen and his keyboard player, Jerry Aiello, so we told Paul that we were going to stay for a while at the Boar's Head Inn, a quaint establishment in Carmel owned by Clint Eastwood. Neither one of us knew Clint, so I don't know why we thought that sounded plausible. But it worked. The problem—or fun, depending on how you look at it—was an airline strike. We had to take four different flights on five different airlines (I don't know, you figure it out) to get to Anchorage. Each time we boarded a different airplane, Sally and I cleaned out their liquor supply, so by the time we finally got to the hotel, we were plastered.
When we checked in and called Skip, our crocked condition didn't seem to bother him at all. He arrived at our room and leaned casually on the door frame, wearing a fireman's helmet with a swirling red police car light on top. Even though Sally and I could be formidable jerks when we were liquored-up, Skip was a veteran, having worked with some of the champs at overindulgence.
When he'd first come on board as production manager for The Who, they all got ripped one night and decided to initiate him into the fold by asking him to get the fire extinguisher and move the couch from the hotel room out into the hall—using nothing but the spray from the hose. Skip had taken up the challenge and had actually started the redecorating, but when he broke the glass on the hose box, an alarm went off and Hyatt security was on the scene before the couch could be adequately relocated.
Sally and I were ready to trash the tundra when we arrived in Alaska, but Skip did have to work. While he was at the concert hall doing the setup, Stephen's drummer, Joey Lala, Sally, and I went out in the twenty-below blizzard to check out the Call of the Wild territory. As we were walking along one of the snow-covered streets, a large man came flying out of a bar, landing facedown in the gutter. The even larger bouncer stood at the door looking like he'd just tossed out a small bag of rat turds. I made a remark like, “What if the guy freezes to death?” But Joey reminded me that this was still frontier land as far as the tough guys were concerned. Besides, the alcohol would probably keep him from turning blue until he came to and found another saloon to inhabit.
Skip more than proved his ability to handle almost anything on that tour by taking care of three difficult situations at once. The first was looking after the Brandy Twins (Sally and Grace); the second was taking on the job of road manager after the first guy suddenly freaked out and quit. The third was in Seattle, on the way back down the coast, when Skip saved one of the boys in the band from committing suicide, by tackling him when he tried to drown himself by diving off the hotel balcony into the Puget Sound. All that and lighting director, too—I was getting more impressed by the minute.
Sally and I made it back home on Christmas Eve, just in time for us to flip into mother mode for Jesse (Sally's son by Spencer) and China. Jesse was about the same age as my daughter, and Sally and I were about the same age as Beavis and Butt-head. We loved our kids, but we hadn't quite finished being children yet ourselves.
“No rghuofmr!” (Roger Ressmeyer/© Corbis)
For a while, the sneaking around was exciting, but I finally had to admit that it wasn't fair to anybody. After making a decision to put an end to it, I got out the want ads and found an apartment in Sausalito. I then called Jefferson Starship's trucker, Mike Fisher, and asked him to meet me at the Seacliff house with the truck. Finally, I talked to Paul. I told him I couldn't pretend anymore, and I moved out and into the new apartment—all within a period of about twenty-four hours.
Sadness, yes. Regrets, no.
Although it was an unpleasant time for Paul, I'm sure he felt relief as well; it takes two people to ensure the failure of a relationship. Certain pop psychologists disagree, but I believe that staying together “for the child” creates a hideous atmosphere of daily bullshit in which the kid is surrounded by mixed messages at best and, at worst, chronic battles that make so-called family life a sham. I'm grateful there were never any custody fights over China. Paul and I shared her without written agreements or arguments.
During that time, Sally and I took up residence in the new apartment, which she referred to as “the combination palace.” Skip stayed there off and on when he was between tours, and the three of us—sometimes accompanied by the “real” children—stayed in that Three's Company configuration until Skip was hired back by Jefferson Starship on a full-time basis. It was inevitable—he was the best, and there's just no substitute for adept professionalism. Now, living together as a bona fide “couple,” Skip and I resumed touring with the band and tried to maintain a social environment as free of open hostility as possible. I roomed alone on that tour as I always had, savoring my privacy and indulging whims as various as shouting at the moon and, literally, walking on the edge.
An affinity for near-death experiences doesn't necessarily indicate that a person is miserable and wants to deanimate the body. That devalues what may be really going on. Perhaps the person is just attempting, in a primitive way, to join the cosmos, or bump into his or her original DNA, or flush out his or her adrenaline. Bungee-jumping, race car driving, astronautics, working on an art project until you drop, taking psychedelics, swimming the English Channel—these are all extreme activities pursued by people who're trying to “push the envelope,” trying to test so-called limits. That urge to know why and why not has resulted in incredible discoveries that have changed the face of our culture forever. And sometimes it has just boiled down to an individual yearning to be part of the greater picture.
To wit:
It happened in the Midwest, where the elements regularly put on a spectacular thunder and lightning show, the likes of which I'd never seen. One such storm was in full swing that night and the entire sky was alive in fast-frame time. Undulating colors moved in and out of gray, white, blue, and black exploding clouds, which were sliced down the center of their fat, rolling surface by spears of bristling electric white light. And beneath their high-voltage crackle was the crashing bass of thunder.
I wanted to be a part of it—it was an instantaneous reaction. I opened the window, took off all my clothes, climbed out on the ledge, and cheered like a rabid sports fan for the clashing natural Titans. I could feel the rain and the wind on my naked body and I could sense the sound of the thunder in my chest. My hair was thrown and whipped around my face. My own shouting voice moved in circles up through the percussion of thunder claps. For just a few minutes, I was embraced by the original choreographer.
Fantastic—until I heard the flat voice of caution.
“Grace, this is your drummer, John Barbata, speaking to you. Get back into your room!” He was using that pseudo-authoritarian crowd-control tone that security employs when large groups of people are threatening to become unruly. I don't know if he thought I was going to jump, or if he was just worried about the group's having to come up with a quick replacement for a vocalist, but he was clearly confused about my intentions. That was understandable; I'm not an athlete, so I suppose he was justified in questioning my ability to maintain balance under the circumstances.
The short of it is that I eventually stepped back through the window and lived to tell the tale. I'm not ordinarily a nature girl, but there are some weather opportunities that can't be refused.