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"Oh yes -- it happened," she answers. "Ten years after leaving Finch College in NYC, a finishing school for privileged kids who couldn't get into Vassar, I got an invite from Trisha Nixon to attend a tea party at the White House. So few kids went to Finch, she must have invited like every class. She invited me as Grace Wing, my maiden name, not knowing I was singing for Airplane. I brought 600 micrograms of LSD and invited Abbie Hoffman as my date."
I ask her if she had lost her mind. She could have spent many years in jail.
"I wouldn't have been caught, I planned to talk with the man, gesture with my hands -- and plop, slip it in. But it never happened. A security guard recognized Abbie and escorted us both out." She sighs.
An opportunity lost. A door of perception closed for Dick Nixon. Jail time avoided.
She's my hero for merely considering it.
And what about the child named god?
She never named her child god. Her daughter China was forever dubbed "god" by the media circus following an offhand remark by Grace after her daughter's birth. An overly upbeat nurse had irritated Slick throughout the ordeal. Following China's arrival, the nurse came into the recovery room with the official birth certificate. She explained this certificate was given to all the new mothers in the hospital. She wanted to get the entry right: "What are you going to name the baby?"
Grace had enough of "Nurse Sunnyside." She noticed the nurse was wearing a crucifix.
"god. Her name is god, with a little 'g.' We spell it with a small 'g' to keep her humble. She didn't believe it. I told her again."
The nurse walked out to call the San Francisco Chronicle. Birth of a child. Birth of a myth.
Go ask Alice
A piece of Slick's life is chronicled in her portraits of fellow travelers to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The portraits are all good likenesses, and all tributes to friends or colleagues, some fallen and others still afloat.
"Janis Wood Nymph" is a likeness that looks nothing like the Janice Joplin I adored and pitied from my safe distance at the receiving end of the media megaphone. Slick insists, "The drugged out lunatic portrayed by most of her biographers is not the person I knew. (Janice was) radiant and consuming."
I would say radical and consumed, but Slick's read of Janis is likely to be more accurate than mine; she was friends with the woman. I was merely one more fan spinning a scratchy LP in a dorm room. Her Janice is smiling, warm, sober, and downright resplendent, with feathers sprouting from her lush, luxurious mane like plumes from an exotic bird. This Janis is neither busted flat in Ban-rouge, nor does she appear to be getting it while she can. She looks like she's always had it, and always will.
A second portrait of Janice, titled "Nine 11," more accurately captures the plaintive and perverse spirit in the haunted and wailing woman I remember. Janice is clad in all black, down on hands and knees, belting out her song while riding a magic carpet woven from an American flag. Dressed in black and wrapped in the red, white and blue -- the image is disjunctive, jarring, and comically absurd. Now there's the woman who sang "Oh Lord, won't you buy me a color TV ..."
"Sacrifice to Morpheus" is a large, full frontal portrait of Jim Morrison. Slick has captured his classic good looks, his piercing eyes, and his faint, dark smile. Jim never looked so good. A circular light throbs behind Morrison's head, a light with rings pulsing to the edges of the canvas. It looks like a halo, and confers an aura of dark divinity around the face.
In the late '60s, author Joan Didion scheduled an interview with Jim Morrison at a sound studio in Los Angeles. When the singer appeared two hours late, he sat down on the couch with neither greeting nor apology, and proceeded to attempt to burn his leather pants with matches he lit one by one. He never said a word. Didion said it felt like no one was getting out of the room alive. Slick and Didion knew two different Jims.
Slick's Janice is scrubbed too clean for my tastes, and she paints a tamed Morrison. I like my fiction better.
During our conversations I lit on a few topics I thought might aggravate her because they were either too personal or I reckoned she had heard those damn questions too many times. But, there appears nothing too personal for her to talk about, and she either has never heard those tired questions, she's forgotten she's been asked the tired questions, or age has graced her with patience enough to tolerate another rehash.
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