Somebody to Love? Grace Slick's autobiography

Honestly, one of the best books I've ever read. She gives full insight to the '60s, her life, Jefferson Airplane, and so much more!

Who else has read this book? What do you think of it?

 

I honestly haven't but it does sound interesting, I'll look for it the next time I'm @ the library...

 

This was an enlightening book.
I was quite surprised about the revelation that she had sex with Jim Morrison in a hotel room in Europe during the joint JeffersonAirplane/Doors tour of september 1968.I think that was kept a secret until this book came out.She even pinpoints which European city it must have been at the time,it happened.(& without the book in front of me,I cant remember it.).

 

grace slick and jim morrison, what a hot combination!
that must've been some good sex..

 

Doesn't bear (bare) thinking about does it!.

But fact not fiction if Grace Slick is to be believed.I wonder what position they adopted?.(We know that Jim Morrison recorded 'Back Door Man' ).
The lacklustre way in which Grace idly refers to it confirms that it must have happened.

 

This 1200 word essay on autobiography and biography may be too long for some readers and the conventions of much internet posting. My post may provide a useful extension, tangent, to the discussion here. When your eyes start to glaze over, dear reader, just stop reading. That's what I do.-Ron Price, Tasmania
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AUTOBIOGRAPHY: ANALYSIS YET AGAIN

I have provided a succinct narrative account of my life in my autobiography. It is chronological; the factual material is ordered, sequential and goes for 2500 pages and five volumes. But, clearly, sharpness of detail, revealing anecdote, even suspense and analysis of motivation are given with more insight and style, much more effectively from my point of view, in my poetry. I have so much poetry now, some 6500 poems spread over thousands of pages, that this collected and compendious mass of material, if it is ever to provide a basis for biography in the future, must be shaped, interpreted, given perspective, dimension, a point of view.

Such a biographer must provide the creative, the fertile, the suggestive and engendering fact, an imaginative, a referential dimension. Such an analyst must enact a character, a place, a time in history. He will do this through language, through imposing a formal coherency on my material, although inevitably there will be present the incurable illogicalities of life, as Robert Louis Stevenson called the inconsistent, the unresolved paradoxes of life. And we all have them. He will give the reader a portrait of my life not an inventory. This is what any biographer must do. I do this in my autobiographical poetry. But I provide many pictures, many moods, many sides of one man. Details balloon; they repeat; they illuminate. I discover things about my life, but I do not invent them.

There are unique individuals who bestow on mankind a legacy of artistic greatness. Some of these souls also engender an almost insatiable desire to know more about them, the circumstances in which they lived, worked and what motivated them to such levels of achievement. Some were reserved and humble people who avoided fame and fortune, sustained primarily by their magnificent accomplishments. This autobiography, mine, is about a man who avoided the limelight as far as he was able but, being a teacher and lecturer as well as a Bahá'í, who aimed to give the Faith he had espoused a greater public face, it was difficult to avoid some kind of limelight.

This avoidance of being noticed was even more true in his first decade of writing on the internet: 1999 to 2009. The internet, I found spread me out across thousands of sites in nanoseconds and, thus, fame and notoriety was kept to a bare minimum. Writing my biography, if it is ever written, will be a challenging exercise because of the sheer amount of resources I have made available. I have not done this intentionally but, rather, out of sheer coincidence, the accidences of circumstance. Those mysterious dispensations of Providence, perhaps.

As Plutarch and Boswell, two of history's most famous biographers, demonstrated: "anecdote rather than history teaches us more about the subject."1 I see my narrative as the home of history and my poetry as a source of rich anecdote. It was for this reason I turned to poetry as a reservoir of autobiography; it seemed to teach, to convey, much more than narrative. The anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, helps us to understand why several poems about one object, or person, provide more significance or meaning than a narrative when he writes:

To understand a real object in its totality we always tend to work from its parts. The resistance it offers us is overcome by dividing it...Being smaller, the object as a whole seems less formidable....it seems to us qualitatively simplified.2

One can not know everything about anyone, even oneself. The mountain of detail would sink a ship and would not enlighten anyone. The task of achieving comprehensiveness not only is impossible, it is irrelevant. But there are intelligible dimensions of one's life and it is these dimensions that my poetry deals with best. Imagination is critical in writing biography. Some writers see invention more important than knowledge. Inevitably, there is an element of invention, of moving beyond the factual, but my own preference is to use imagination in a framework of factual experience, as far as possible.

To read my poetry should be to immerse oneself in the first several decades of Baha'i experience in what the Baha'is see as 'the tenth stage of history' and, especially, that time when the spiritual and administrative centre on Mt. Carmel received its richest, its definitive, elaboration and definition. There are several unifying nodes of experience for my poetry, in addition to the above. I have drawn them to the reader's attention from time to time in the introductions to some of my poems.

From a Baha'i perspective my poetry will undoubtedly possess a moral appeal associated with overcoming hardship, a quality that characterized most nineteenth century biography. But the moral framework, while retaining a certain simplicity, is expressed in a portrait of complexity, refinement, mystery, a slumbering world, my own idle fancies and vain imaginings and the streaming utterance of a new Revelation.

Freud commented that biographers choose their subjects 'for personal reasons of their own emotional life.' 3 I'm sure this is equally, if not more, true of autobiographers. After criss-crossing Australia as an international pioneer and teaching in the northernmost and southernmost places in Canada-all of this over thirty-six years, I have watched this emerging world religion grow perhaps fifteen times. I have taught in schools for nearly thirty years and feel a certain fatigue. I must write this poetry for the same reason a foetus must gestate for nine months. I feel, with Rilke, a great inner solitude and that my life and history is itself a beginning, for me, for my religion and for the world. I want to suck the sweetness out of everything and tell the story.

I sigh a deep-dark melancholy but keep it in as far as I am able. I am lonely and attentive in this sadness. My poetry gives expression to this process and to my destiny which comes from within. My poetry is the story of what happens to me. For the most part "life happens" and one must respond to the seemingly inevitability of it all, although the question of freedom and determinism is really quite complex. Reality, I record in my poetry, comes to me slowly, infinitely slowly. My poetry records this process. My poetry is an expression of a fruit that has been ripening within me: obscure, deep, mysterious. After years it now comes out in a continuous preoccupation as if I have, at last, found some hidden springs. It is as if I have been playing around the edges, with trivia, with surface. Finally something real, true, is around me. I stick to my work. I have a quiet confidence, a patience, a distance from a work that always occupies me. And so I can record a deep record of my time. I am preparing something both visible and invisible, something fundamental.

Ron Price
25 September 1998
(updated 16/8/’09)

1 Ira Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin's Press, NY, 1984, p.60.
2 idem
3 ibid., p.122.
(1200 words)

 

well maybe grace is a back door lover also? he he he it isnt that unsual for people to enjoy this type of sex