The Jefferson Airplane is a shambles. Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady shaved their heads and went off roller skating in Europe. Paul Kantner’s too pompous to carry anything by himself, and I don’t think they even have a regular drummer anymore. That leaves Grace Slick, the psychedelic Streisand of San Francisco humpty dumpty rock. Grace Slick, immortalised by Eye magazine clear back" in 1968 as the “Ice Maiden” to Janis’ fire gamin. Grace Slick, who sang “White Rabbit” the same year she sang a white Levis commercial and unknowingly slipped the dreaded you-know-what into the martinis of a whole generation of button-downers. Grace Slick, that storied hippie harridan who sings like Biiffy St.-Marie on Toluene and reputedly has such a laser tongue that she makes journalists quiver and even sent (ex Airplane drummer and all around swell fellow) Spencer Dryden home in tears from Winterland one night just because she’d met his howdydo with a typical “Shove it up your ass!”

And here she is, sitting upstairs in the Airplane mansion across from Harry Callahan Park in Frisco, sucking demurely on a bottle of champagne. Her hairstyle is perfect curl way this side of frizz, her eyes are deep blue and she’s much given to trying to pin the visitor with one of her famous Piercing Stares which, like a sizeable percentage of her repartee, don’t mean anything at all. But that’s half the fun. Great skin, good legs, good tits she maligns obsessively, which is only part of the overall impression of disarming frankness to the point of self-effacement. Her rap rambles as idiosyncratically as her singing, but it’s all good because Grace is one of those rare personalities who’s managed to transcend the implicit foolishness of hip-countercultural superstardom by reveling in her own unique’foolishness/ eccentricity/ alcohol tangents.