Somebody to Love? (18 page)
No Oscars for Grace.
No Grammys either. We were playing in Florida once, and the word was out that I was GOING TO GET A GRAMMY. In fact, it was supposed to be a sure thing.
So
sure that cameras were set up onstage the night of the awards. There was a monitor showing the ceremony in L.A., and the idea was that we'd stop the concert when the winner—
me
—was revealed, so I could blush, look humble, and say thanks to my Aunt Frieda, Uncle Trot, etc. But when the announcement finally came, the presenter said, “And the Grammy goes to … Linda Ronstadt!”
The camera guys onstage looked confused, the audience booed, and I was pretty embarrassed. I remember thinking,
What kind of “inside” information made someone sure enough of my win to go to the trouble of interrupting our set, shutting up the audience, and dragging cameras onstage? Hot tip, indeed.
The screwup left me standing there with vinyl on my face. I knew people were looking at me to see how I'd respond, so I immediately flashed that no-problem-isn't-this-an-amusing-fuck-up look so we could finish the rest of the set without everybody feeling sorry for Grace. The truth was that although not getting “the coveted prize” was awkward, I didn't feel sorry for myself. I was saved by the part of me that was disdainful of the straight world's award show circus. Besides, when you compare notes, Ronstadt
does
have better pipes.
My second Grammy nomination was for “Female Solo Album” or “Female Rock Star with the Best Teeth” or “Female Rock Something or Other.” These were the days before there was a major category called “Best Performance by a Female Rock Singer.” In the early eighties, rock was a subcategory, so this particular category, as well as having a name not worth remembering, wasn't even televised. As I remember, the event took place in Radio City Music Hall in New York, and I went to the actual ceremony. But I was beaten once again—this time by Pat Benatar. I never
was
able to pile up those statues, but I'm grateful the Grammy guys considered my efforts, when they easily could have avoided me altogether, what with my lazy and somewhat sloppy attention to cranking out the hits.
As well as never winning a Grammy, I also have never been able to get a grip on the Top 40. When it
did
happen with a song that I recorded, it was either written by someone else (Darby Slick, Diane Warren, Bernie Taupin) or a one-hit fluke like “White Rabbit.” My inability to successfully mainstream
anything
hasn't bothered me much, but
had
I achieved mega–mainstream success it would have been an interesting test of the distorted pride I seem to take in my idiosyncratic behavior.
My “Mainstream Star of the Year Award” acceptance speech would have gone something like this: “Thank you for your amusing lack of taste in popular icons.”
I
did
get four Bammies (Bay Area Music Awards), but that's a ballot-stuffing process. All you need to do is get enough of the same people to write in to the award office seventeen times. I wasn't aware of “the award-winning procedure” until about the third nomination, when Jackie Kaukonen, the group's executive secretary, who was then married to Jorma's brother Peter, was giggling in the office one day about how many nice people were going to great lengths to get grocery clerks, distant cousins, and parolees to send in votes for Yours Truly.
Scour the country for ballot-marking. No sealed Price Waterhouse envelopes. Just good old Bay Area clout.
I
did
legitimately win three wooden bears in a toy store raffle in Tiburon a couple of years ago, however. Not for any particular talent—just luck of the draw.
With so many performances and my style of shouting out the lyrics as loudly as I could, my voice was suffering, a condition for which I place a great deal of the blame on deficient monitor speakers. Or the lack of them altogether. All of it was rough on the pipes. Before monitor speakers became available at all, I had to scream every night to hear what notes I was singing over the amplified guitars. When they were cheap or broken, which was the case far too often, I wanted to destroy them. Which is exactly what Roger Daltrey did when The Who, Airplane, and B.B. King played at the Tanglewood Festival. When I watched Daltrey kick the monitor speakers and toss them in pieces off the stage, I cheered. It may sound like I'm overreacting, but since the speakers are the only means by which singers have to hear themselves, they're extremely important—
if
the singer cares how the performance sounds.
All that screaming created nodes on my throat, and between concerts, rehearsals, touring, and recording, if I had a minute, I would have Dr. Ripstein (perfect name for a surgeon) rip another one out. I had three operations in about three years, and after each surgery, I couldn't talk or smoke for about six weeks. In order to avoid a fourth trip to the hospital, I asked a singing coach if there was anything I could do, short of quitting singing altogether, to keep from destroying my throat. She asked if I smoked
menthol
cigarettes.
“Yes.”
“Well, smoke if you have to, but lose the menthol.”
“Okay.”
I don't know if it was the switch to regular cigarettes or the increasing technology of the monitor speakers, but after 1970, I had no more problems with nodes.
It was sometime after I'd recovered from the second node removal that we played the International Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. We rented a grand Spanish mansion right on the beach and enjoyed tropical flowers, piña coladas, and hot sun cooled by misty showers—the whole brochure.
One afternoon, Jorma and Margaretta and Paul and I went for a long ride around the island in a jeep. This was the first time I'd had a chance to be with Paul outside a work situation or a fully packed party. Instead of being his preoccupied self, on this day he was animated, relaxed, and apparently unconcerned about the girl he had waiting back at the beach house. I was still hanging onto a dead relationship with Spencer (also back at the house, shades down, nursing a hangover), and the last vestiges of loyalty kept me, once again, from going with the moment.
It didn't take me long after that, however, to get uncharacteristically domestic by offering to make Paul some dinner up in his room. He brought the champagne, I brought the meat and potatoes, so to speak, and as Bill Thompson remembers, “When they came down the next morning, she had a sheepish grin on her face, he looked pretty satisfied, and I thought, ‘Oh no, here we go again.’”
Dosing Tricky Dick
W
hile Paul and I swiftly became a unit, the right-wing Republican situation was offering us great pickings for subcultural entertainment. When Airplane performed at the Fillmore East in New York, I wore a Hitler outfit and Rip Torn joined us up onstage dressed as my buddy, Richard Nixon. We enjoyed the brief satire so much that Paul and I went to see Rip Torn and his wife, Geraldine Page, to discuss doing
Richard III
(the idea was that Rip would play Richard Nixon playing the Shakespearean king) in the round with rock band accompaniment. We dropped the idea when we learned more about the logistics involved. It would have taken the support of the Sultan of Brunei to get the production on the road. But dreaming up the idea was almost as much fun as the actual performance would have been.
Another grandiose “Get Nixon” idea we came up with was the “Let's Dose Dickie” trick. That one wasn't carried through to conclusion either, which was probably fortunate since the repercussions might have been more than we bargained for. But the planning stages were pretty exciting.
Tricky Dick Nixon, as he was fondly referred to by people not part of his inane circle, had a daughter, Tricia, who had attended Finch College about ten years after my stay at the “bow and curtsey” academy. Which led to Yours Truly, of all people, getting an invitation to tea at the White House.
One of the other Finchettes, Mrs. David Busby, who'd been a suite mate of mine, was in charge of passing judgment on each alumna's character—or lack thereof. It seems that she was warned by all the proper ladies who'd heard of the notorious Grace Slick
not
to send me an invitation because I'd become a “lefty,” one of the drug-crazed antigovernment hippies from the San Francisco rock tribes. But poor sweet Mrs. Busby stood up for the Grace she remembered. Going against the counsel of the other Finchettes, she sent me the invitation. When she asked me who my “escort” would be, I quickly said, “Mr. Leonard Haufman.”
Mrs. Busby recalls, “The man's name made an impression on me, but it never occurred to me that she was talking about Abbie Hoffman. I just wrote down his name and listed it with the others I was sending to the State Department for clearance.”
The next morning, Mrs. B. got an urgent call from the White House. “What's the problem?” she asked.
“The problem, Mrs. Busby,” the security guard told her, “is Grace Slick.”
I was pretty good friends with Abbie at the time. In fact, he, his wife, Anita, and Paul and I occasionally used to get together to discuss politics and pranks. One time, we all took a trip to Gettysburg, where we listened to tape-recorded information that came crackling out of boxes that looked like parking meters. Push a button and hear some glorious interpretation of the Civil War slaughter that made that particular cemetery such a popular tourist attraction.
Abbie, a political activist, was later wanted by the FBI, CIA, AT&T, BLT, and several other important government agencies, so he had to go “underground” for quite a while. At one point, he hid in Paul's and my house in San Francisco, where he engaged in subversive terrorist activities like entertaining the kids at China's birthday party. He loved the
idea
of this country (theory and practice often being diametrically opposed), but the manner in which the original documents of freedom had been mangled to steer corporate/military interests drove him close to clinically insane. I believe it was grief for a nation that finally killed him. If all of us had been
that
concerned, “political sins of omission” would no longer be a problem.
So when I was deciding on an escort for the White House, I invited Abbie because I couldn't think of anyone who'd be more delighted to visit the seat of Western power. The day of the tea, I tried to flatten Abbie's hair—he had a big afro and we didn't want to look like a couple of screaming hippies. But when I got through with him and he put on a suit and tie, he looked like a hit man for the Mafia. Really, he looked awful, more intimidating straight than when he wore his American flag shirt.
The Finch alumni lined up in front of the White House in their camel-hair coats, the obligatory round gold pin on the lapel with matching gold earrings, medium-heeled beige shoes, panty hose, and long, camel-hair skirts with beige silk blouses. I stood in line beside Abbie in my black fishnet top with three-by-three-inch patch pockets just covering my nipples, a short black miniskirt that went all the way to the beaver, and long black boots that reached up to my thighs. Looking like a pimp and a go-go girl, the two of us couldn't have been more thrilled to have been invited to Nixon's White House, because unlike the beige crowd surrounding us, we had a personal agenda.
In our pockets was more than enough powdered acid to get a lot of people very high, but we weren't interested in a lot of people. Richard Milhous Nixon was our mark. Having been trained in formal tea etiquette at Finch, I knew this would not be a sit-down affair. There'd probably be two very long tables set up with a large tea urn at one end, maybe a coffee urn beside it, and people would stand around, sipping and conversing with each other. The plan was for me to reach my overly long pinky fingernail, grown especially for easy cocaine snorting, into my pocket, fill it with six hundred mics of pure powdered LSD, and with a large entertainer's gesture, drop the acid into Tricky Dick's teacup. If I missed, Abbie was my backup. We knew we wouldn't have the pleasure of seeing Nixon tripping (LSD takes a while to kick in), but the idea that he might be stumbling through the White House a little later, talking to paintings, watching walls melt, and thinking he was turning into a bulldog, was irresistible.
Although it was raining outside the White House, staining multiple pairs of Gucci shoes, the security boys detained everyone, thoroughly checking their identification and giving them an appraising eye.
“Excuse me, miss, but may I see your invitation?” one of the guards said to me. “And your ID.”
He took my invitation with the name Grace Wing on it, and my driver's license, to the security booth and came back. “I'm sorry, Miss Wing,” he said. “You can't go in.”
“But I have an invitation,” I argued.
“Look. We know you're Grace Slick and we consider you a security risk. You're on the FBI list.” I hadn't done anything subversive that I knew of—it must have been some of my lyrics. And God only knows what they'd dug up on Abbie.
The guards finally agreed I could come in, but only by myself. Abbie would have to stay out. I told them I never went anywhere without my
own
security guard, and Abbie added, “I wouldn't let Miss Slick go in there alone, because I understand they lose a president every three years. It's a dangerous place.”
Abbie and I left, and Mrs. Busby went to the tea sans revolutionaries. But to everyone's surprise, the social secretary said, “Go back and find them. Mrs. Nixon and Tricia really want to meet her.” Unfortunately, we were long gone. I read that Tricia later commented, “If she had to come with a bodyguard, I feel sorry for her. She must be really paranoid.”
Not as paranoid as your daddy was when McCord, Liddy, and Dean copped out on his unsuccessful wiretapping trick.
Nixon never got the ride of his life, but Abbie and I had vivid images of reading in the newspaper that he'd suddenly taken ill and was spending a few days at Walter Reed, the army hospital where the CIA would have hidden him away until they figured out what made him crack. Of course, from what we later learned about Nixon, he walked around the White House talking to pictures anyway, so maybe nobody would have noticed much of a change.