The Woodstock Music & Art Fair in August of 1969 was a lot of things to a lot of different people, depending on who you ask—for Jefferson Airplane frontwoman Grace Slick, it was more of a headache than a heavenly retreat to the “garden” that Joni Mitchell sings about in her song named for the landmark event in upstate New York. It was muddy. It was chaotic. For a bunch of musicians in their late 20s and early 30s, it was tiresome.
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Unfortunately, the little “trick” the band used to get through the logistical nightmare of waiting for their set didn’t make the festival any more fun.
Jefferson Airplane And Their Pre-Set Accident At Woodstock
Over the course of three days, the Woodstock Music & Art Fair boasted a star-studded lineup of musical giants of the late 1960s, including Janis Joplin, The Who, Santana, Joan Baez, and Jefferson Airplane. The festival’s massive size, inclement weather conditions, and a fair amount of recreational drug use made for a somewhat loose festival structure, stretching and delaying set times until people were performing as the sun was coming up. Jefferson Airplane took the stage bright and early at 8 am.
“I had to stay up all night on a stage with no bathroom that I can remember, waiting to go on because something got screwed up,” frontwoman Grace Slick told CBC Radio in 2019. “We’re supposed to go on at 9, and we had to be on the stage until six o’clock in the morning. Now, rock ‘n’ roll’s weird at six o’clock in the morning. But we did it because we said we would. It was kind of funny being backstage, and they kept saying, ‘Well, no, you can’t go on yet.’ ‘Oh, hell, give me some c******.”
The problem with festivals is that things get messy. Things are loud, busy, hectic, and it’s easy to make simple mistakes…like choosing the wrong baggy of drugs from a segmented box. “We took what we thought was c******. But we took it out of the wrong box, and we took LSD. So, about 15 minutes into the set, we looked at each other and went, ‘Oh, boy. Oops.’ I was supposed to be playing the piano at one point, and I just stopped playing the piano because I wanted to listen to Jack [Casady] playing the bass. I really liked his bass playing, so I just stopped playing. That’s the problem with a***.”
Looking Back On Her Iconic Performance Is Difficult
1960s psychedelic icon or not, sometimes, looking back on an old performance is difficult. Such is the case for Jefferson Airplane vocalist Grace Slick, who performed with her band at Woodstock in the early morning hours of August 17, 1969. The band had unknowingly ingested LSD before getting up to play psych rock in front of half a million people when most Americans were getting ready to start their work day. Despite their accidental doses, Jefferson Airplane’s Woodstock set is highly regarded today as an iconic moment in late 1960s rock history. For Slick, it’s not that great.
The vocalist said certain songs from the set, like “White Rabbit,” give her chills, but not necessarily in a good way. “When you have been up all night—and I’m a smoker, still am, which is real stupid—but I’m a smoker, so if you’ve been up all night smoking, your voice is not spectacular. I mean, I didn’t get up with a big bunch of sleep the night before. So, your attention span, a bunch of things, are not working as well as they should.”
“So, when I hear the performances that we did on various things, whether it’s tape or whatever it is, I just think, ‘Oh God, oh God, that note’s about a half a pitch higher, oh Jesus.” Indeed, performers are often their own worst critics, and Slick is no different. Nevertheless, Jefferson Airplane helped establish the musical sound that came to define the Summer of Love and its sunset seminal event all those years ago.
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