Somebody to Love? (21 page)

We were annoyed when a radio DJ who'd lost all sense of proportion jumped Paul's and my fence in Bolinas on a semiregular basis. Sometimes we'd find him standing in the backyard; sometimes he'd be in the house. Eventually, Paul got tired of it. On “DJ's” final visit, Paul asked him to leave by pointing a gun at him. Not to be deterred by a lethal weapon, the man just kept walking toward us. When Paul shot about five bullets around him in a circular pattern, his response was, “We must have a misunderstanding.”

Uh huh. Fearless stupidity.

Two other fellows, unknown to each other or anyone else for that matter, decided (independently) they were China's father. The first climbed up the outside of a New York hotel to the nineteenth floor, crawled in the window, then turned on the tube and spread himself out on
my
bed, waiting for me to return from a concert. Airplane had booked the whole floor for that particular date, but the hotel guard who was stationed near the entrance hadn't seen anyone. When Paul and Bill Laudner walked me to my room that night (I still maintained my own room), there was this guy just lying there.

“Hi, Grace, I want to see my daughter,” he said, right in front of Paul. The guys were amused; it was so goofy, nobody was taking him seriously—except
me.
I wanted him the hell out of my room. He was “escorted” out of the building and spent an evening hanging out with NYPD Blue.

The second stalker, who'd maneuvered himself to a dangerous precipice overlooking the bay in San Francisco, also wanted me to admit he was China's father or he'd jump off the cliff next to our house by the Golden Gate Bridge. Some part of me wondered why we didn't just let him jump, but reason took over. We asked the fire department to bring the suicide nets, and it took them quite some time to get hold of the man without triggering a dive.

Rather than committed lifetime stalkers, these two were more into one-night stands. Lucky for me. Maybe I should have been nervous about that kind of insanity, but with so many people around at all times, I tended to find it entertaining—
pathetically
entertaining.

Of course, it did occur to me that perhaps I should be offended. Most celebrities have stalkers who're more interested in
them
than in their immediate family members. Did the obsession with China imply that I wasn't interesting enough on my own to stalk? Or might these guys have created the “father-of-China” thing as some kind of proof they'd boinked a rock star? I used to get lots of fan mail from prisoners and people in nuthouses. It was a bit easier to understand someone wanting to correspond with a person who
seemed
to have a larger area of freedom and mobility, than to make sense of guys who were willing to kill themselves over an impossible (they apparently weren't afraid of DNA testing) claim.

On the other end of my fanatical-fan spectrum were two benevolent fans who were almost twins but who had no knowledge of each other's existence. The first, Vincent Marchilello, gave me a reproduction antique doll during one of his visits backstage—with the result that I developed an interest in dolls that eventually became so extensive, my house looked like a toy store. Vince was a good-looking Italian man who was always polite, and although he was a persistent fan, he never showed any tendencies toward the stalker-type MO.

The second benevolent fan was named Vincent, too—Vincent Marino (or Vinnie, as I liked to call him). He was also sweet, good-looking, generous (he sent me every panda article, picture, magazine, and trinket available to Western man), Italian, and East Coast, and eventually he became one of my best friends.

The moral of the story: Some fans are frightening, some are family.

Back at the beginning of “Now I'm famous” in the sixties, I'd never heard of stalkers or tabloid journalism. If the lowbrow newspapers or gossip columns focused on anybody in particular, it was probably people in the movie business who were trying to maintain a certain amount of decorum. Rock-and-roll musicians could have cared less if they were caught with their pants down, so to speak—so we were less interesting to the press. But now it's a different story entirely. Constant invasion of privacy is driving people nuts, not only entertainers but notable people from all walks of life. I think paparazzi should have to get a signed release for any picture they take.

I understand about First Amendment rights, but the First Amendment was written by people who never had a clue that cameras, if used improperly, could
cripple
freedom. The new photo machinery and zoom lenses that are available to any goofball make it harder and harder to endorse limitless freedom of expression. From the somewhat harmless “organized” chaos I saw in the sixties and seventies, to the nineties death of Princess Diana, the stalking and rummaging around in people's garbage for cheesy information has escalated to insane proportions.

Supply and demand? That's a big part of it. As long as we read the rags, they'll continue to flourish.

My personal reaction to one of those in-your-face photographers was to be
more
disgusting than he was. At a concert back in the sixties, I was in a coed bathroom taking a pee, when I heard a guy ask, “Can I take some pictures out in the hall when you're through in there?” I
was
through, so I opened the stall door and pulled up my shirt, exposing one of my boobs, and said, “Here you go. The left one's a better shape than the right one, so take the shot now!” He did, and it appeared in the rock magazine
Creem.

Sure, being famous can be fun, but when you have to resort to bodyguards, killer dogs, armored cars, and Fort Knox security systems, it makes you wonder. Today, my own home is situated so that there's no way to get to it except through an electric gate that closes behind anyone who enters. And if they look scary, I press a button and the gate becomes electrified, meaning that if you touch it, you're toast. Nice and friendly, but I was robbed three times in my relatively well protected Mill Valley house. This time around, I've made a vow: no robbers, intruders, paparazzi, or nuts (except me) get in or out without searing results.

Welcome to the modern world.

34

Silver Cup

T
hink of Jefferson Airplane as a silver cup. By the early seventies the marks of neglect were showing on the cup. But its owners were at once unwilling to give it up and no longer interested in polishing its exterior. Nor did they put it to much use. It waited on a shelf, quietly collecting a streaky tarnish, for someone to restore it to its position at the table of feasts, while each servant in the house thought it was the other's job to tend to the chalice.

Nineteen seventy-two was a good year for cracks in the wall and shredded documents. It was a year that sent Tricky Dick to a second term in office, and G. Gordon Liddy to prison for his stoic G-man tactics on behalf of Tricky Dick. Those of us in the rock-and-roll community had continued to write and sing our political views to a public that just didn't want to believe that a president could stoop to wiretapping. From our point of view,
anybody
the Democrats came up with to run against Darth Vader would be just fine. One of the hopefuls was George McGovern.

Old George, wanting to bridge the generation gap, contacted us, wondering if we'd meet with him in the lounge of the hotel where we were playing, somewhere in the middle of the country. Most us agreed to hear him out, but Jorma was lukewarm about this political get-together. On the pretext of encouraging his participation in the barstool hustle the following night, I went to his room to practice my cajole. In reality, I wanted to go to bed with him, but killing two birds with one stone didn't seem like a bad idea. I began to talk about McGovern while we loosened up with one drug or the other, but I quickly proceeded to forget about
anyone's
candidacy … at least for that night. As I recall, though, everyone
did
eventually come down to the bar to listen to the man-who-would-not-be-king speaking in sincere tones about his hopes for our divided nation.

I slept with Jorma only that one time, but after a long recording session one night, he and I decided to interact in a different way, by racing cars on Doyle Drive. A number of people like me have thought that this straight wide road would be a good place not only to go faster than the speed limit, but to defy its history of brutal accidents. Unfortunately, I found out—the hard way—that it's called Deadly Doyle Drive for a reason.

Race until you land in a hospital, which is precisely what I did.

The combination of the rain and the oil on the street caused my car to slide sideways at 80 mph into a cement wall. The impact threw me over to the passenger's seat, so I was one of the rare exceptions to the seat belt rule: if I'd been wearing one, I'd be dead today, because the driver's side was crushed. It must have scared the shit out of Jorma, having to go up to the crushed car, wondering what kind of a mangled mess he'd find.

At the hospital emergency room with a head concussion and a split lip, I remember asking the nurses for “cocaine, for the pain, of course.” They just shook their heads (some addicts never give up), and knocked me out with something so strong I can't remember the entire next week that I was in their care. They wanted me to be
very
quiet so they could do tests and allow my head to heal.

Head injuries aside, I enjoyed spending time with Jorma because I loved him. In fact, I loved
all
the men in Airplane, and I
made
love to all of them. That is, the ones who were in the original lineup. Except Marty. Exactly why we didn't make that final connection, I don't know. There were times when I thought it would have brought a beautiful truth to the duets we performed onstage, but that sort of fantasy wasn't strong enough to cut through whatever aversion Marty might have had to consummating an artistic partnership. He might have just thought I was a jerk. At any rate, we both maintained enough of a distance that singing together sometimes felt like a competitive sport.

I still enjoyed Marty's presence, though,
and
his music. I think “Today” and “Comin' Back to Me” are two of the best love songs ever written.

I saw you—comin' back to me,

Through an open window where no curtain hung,

I saw you—comin' back to me

In a way, Marty's capacity for love reached me through his songs. And
that
was the main attraction—the music. Each member of our band—and probably most bands for that matter—had the exquisite ability to appreciate and produce sound that
communicated
. Whether an individual likes the sitar or bagpipes, Old English lyrics or “punk shriek,” everybody listens to someone calling on their humanity through music. For some, it's the purest form of expression, for others a brief passing delight, but it exists like no other art form in every culture, in all languages, giving voice to anyone who wants to sing. And when we sing together, everyone becomes perfect for a while.

But only for a while.

The unrest in the group was emerging in a visible way. We were starting to pair off—Jack and Jorma, Grace and Paul—or retreat as individuals: Marty into his own world, and Spencer into relationships with the women in his life.

We were in a new decade where the style of the old cup was being outmoded and replaced by a more physical and material disco sound. Airplane's promise was becoming exhausted. Or perhaps it was just like every other human contract—there's a time when the initial passion and novelty fades and attention turns to that which has not yet been experienced. We want a new game, a new job, a new government, a new husband, a new mistress, a new art form.

Although at this point we didn't discuss it out loud, we were all thinking similar thoughts. Without the constraints of Airplane, the possibilities seemed bright.

For Jack and Jorma, as Hot Tuna, they could …

For Grace and Paul, doing albums together, we could …

For Marty, working solo, he could …

And on and on.

The big chariot was getting cumbersome, and everyone saw some kind of freedom in the solo wild horse.

Marty, Yours Truly, and Paul at a free concert in Golden Gate Park. (
People Weekly
© 1975 Michael Alexander)

We made our next two albums,
Bark
and
Long John Silver,
in this irritated state. Back in 1967, when we were making
After Bathing at Baxter's,
Jorma had driven a motorcycle right into the studio (while Jack was recording), waving at several people sitting on the floor getting high with a nitrous oxide tank. But now, in the early seventies, even the fun of frivolous mutual excess was missing from the recording sessions. We just couldn't get a good bacchanal going for lack of interest in what we'd become. The desire to give the best performance had been reduced to barely compliant execution. The music was splintered. Each member worked on his or her own material, then put as little time as possible into everybody else's work.

Our new drummer, Joey Covington, was a fresh-faced Oshkosh B'Gosh blond farmboy whose enthusiasm at being in this famous group didn't rub off on the old regulars. We thought he was young, strong, and hopelessly naive. Jorma let not only the band, but the record-buying public as well, know of his dissatisfaction with Airplane, with his song, “Third Week in the Chelsea.”