Grace Slick (born Grace Barnett Wing;
October 30, 1939) is an American painter and retired musician whose
musical career spanned four decades. Slick was a prominent figure in San Francisco's psychedelic scene from the
mid-1960s to the early 1970’s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Slick
Few people symbolized the psychedelic era better than Janis Joplin, whose psychedelic painted 1964 Porsche sold for $1.76 million at auction in 2015. Although Joplin’s death was likely caused by her heroin addiction, she was also very fond of Southern Comfort.
https://money.cnn.com/2015/12/10/luxury/janis-joplin-porsche-auction/index.html
Like
many musicians of her era, Grace Slick was no stranger to illicit drugs, which
earned her the nickname of “the acid queen” – but that was not her only vice.
Few
people thought Grace Wing would become one of the premier wild children of the
newly hatched phenomenon we call rock and roll, but she did, a woman Louder
Sound characterized as a "psych rock legend" out of the San Francisco
music scene. She was born in Chicago, says Biography; her mother was a former
actor and singer, and her father an investment banker. It was partly that
upbringing that helped her survive the '60s, at least financially — she credits
her father with teaching her to save her money. "My dad, who was a
merchant banker, always told me: put one third into savings, one third for
bills and screw around with the rest."
She'd
done some modeling before she joined Jefferson Airplane as a replacement for
their pregnant (and quitting) lead singer. Slick was married to drummer Jerry
Slick and brought with her songs of her own, including the enormous hit
"White Rabbit," which she'd written after dropping acid and listening
to a Miles Davis album "for 24 hours straight." There were more drugs
in her future — she was especially fond of Quaaludes — and alcohol. And
cocaine.
https://www.grunge.com/228112/the-tragic-real-life-story-of-grace-slick/
“White
Rabbit”, coincidentally, paid homage to the drug culture.
A hookah
smoking caterpillar?
Yep
The
pills that mother gave you do nothing at all.
Yep
And
you’ve had some type of mushroom, and your mind is moving low.
Yep
Feed
your head?
Yeah,
baby.
David Cosby (who just died at the age of 81) once marveled in
a concert that he was amazed that he was still alive, since his younger years
were a bit on the wild side.
If you read Grace Slick’s bio (see below) it’s a bit of a
miracle that she is now 83 years old, and will be 84 in October.
Due to careful money management and smart investments, Jimmy
Buffett (who just died at the age of 77) had a net worth of $1 billion.
Grace wasn’t quite as prudent with her earnings. Her net worth
of $20 million would be enough to satisfy most of us, but it could easily have
been a lot more if she had led a more moderate lifestyle.
Here’s a few examples of her excesses:
Slick
was arrested at least four times for what she has referred to as
"TUI" ("talking under the influence") and "drunk
mouth". One incident occurred when a police officer encountered her
sitting against a tree trunk in the backwoods of Marin County, California, drinking wine,
eating bread, and reading poetry. The officer asked what she was doing; she
gave a sarcastic response and was arrested and jailed. She was arrested in
1994 for assault with a deadly weapon after pointing an unloaded gun at a
police officer. She alleged that the officer had come onto her property without
explanation.
As Ultimate Classic Rock tells it, the band had transitioned
from Airplane to Starship and were about to play a show in 1978 in Germany.
Grace "tore into an alcohol-fueled tantrum, throwing bottles, refusing to
get ready for the concert and demanding more booze from room service."
Once onstage she taunted and insulted the audience, a night of what she called
"dumb, drunken decisions." One of the decisions the band made that
night was to fire Slick — she was asked to resign, and did.
And she decided to get sober, realizing that "the only
person I can change is me." She attended AA meetings and stopped drugging.
And with those decisions came the decision to quit the stage. Rolling Stone
quoted her this way back in 2012: "All rock-and-rollers over the age of 50
look stupid and should retire." She's emerged a few times — she took part
in a benefit for victims of 9-11 — but mostly she creates art in her home in
Malibu. She paints various subjects. Though lots of white rabbits, of course.
https://www.grunge.com/228112/the-tragic-real-life-story-of-grace-slick/
She eventually became a competent artist, and her work can be viewed
on her website.
Grace Slick came to mind the other day when we had a conversation
with our daughter Kelly, who is a psych nurse in Colorado.
She mentioned that one of her associates at the clinic has
been treating her patients with psilocybin, which are also called “magic mushrooms”.
In 1955, Valentina
Pavlovna Wasson and R. Gordon Wasson became the first known
European Americans to actively participate in an indigenous mushroom ceremony.
The Wassons did much to publicize their experience, even publishing an article
on their experiences in Life on May 13, 1957. In
1956, Roger Heim identified the psychoactive
mushroom the Wassons brought back from Mexico as Psilocybe and
in 1958, Albert Hofmann first
identified psilocybin and psilocin as the active compounds in these
mushrooms.
Inspired by the Wassons' Life article, Timothy Leary traveled to Mexico to
experience psilocybin mushrooms himself. When he returned to Harvard in 1960, he and Richard Alpert started the Harvard
Psilocybin Project, promoting psychological and religious studies of
psilocybin and other psychedelic drugs. Alpert and Leary sought to
conduct research with psilocybin on prisoners in the 1960s, testing its effects
on recidivism. This experiment reviewed the
subjects six months later, and found that the recidivism rate had decreased
beyond their expectation, below 40%. This, and another experiment administering
psilocybin to graduate divinity students, showed controversy. Shortly after
Leary and Alpert were dismissed from their jobs by Harvard in 1963, they turned
their attention toward promoting the psychedelic
experience to the nascent hippie counterculture.
The popularization of entheogens by the Wassons, Leary, Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson,
and many others led to an explosion in the use of psilocybin mushrooms
throughout the world. By the early 1970s, many psilocybin mushroom species were
described from temperate North America, Europe, and Asia and were widely
collected. Books describing methods of cultivating large quantities of Psilocybe cubensis were
also published. The availability of psilocybin mushrooms from wild and
cultivated sources has made them one of the most widely used psychedelic drugs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin_mushroom
Timothy Leary
was also a proponent of LSD.
Timothy Leary
died in 1996, nearly 30 years after the Moody Blues recorded the song “Timothy
Leary’s dead” on their “In search of the lost chord” album.
THE
MOODY BLUES-R.I.P. RAY THOMAS-LEGEND OF A MIND (TIMOTHY LEARY'S DEAD)-1968 -
YouTube
Like “magic mushrooms”, LSD has also gained a degree of respectability
in some circles.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6985449/
A new study found that psychedelic drugs such as
lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) may be effective at reducing symptoms of
stress-related anxiety and in mental health treatment.
The study’s research team was led by Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, a professor in the
Department of Psychiatry at the Research Institute of the McGill University
Health Center (RI-MUHC) in Montreal, Canada.
The study, published in the journal NeuropsychopharmacologyTrusted Source, also
involved eight other neuroscientists and a collaboration between RI-MUHC, Vita-Salute
San Raffaele University, Italy, and the Pharmaceutical and Pharmacological
Sciences center at the University of Padua, Italy.
Dr. Danilo De Gregorio,
an assistant professor of pharmacology at San Raffaele University, was the lead
author of this research paper. Previous studies by Dr. De Gregorio and Dr.
Gobbi to pinpoint the neurobiological mechanisms by which LSD relieves anxiety
had been elusive and unclear.
One study (Trusted Source) on
healthy human subjects showed that treatment with LSD produced feelings of
happiness, trust, empathy, positive social effects, and altruism when used as
an adjunctive to psychotherapy.
More studies are needed to show LSD’s efficacy and mechanisms of action
in treating depression and anxiety in humans. Earlier studies by Dr. Gobbi and her
colleagues explored the adverse side effects of LSD.
Preliminary randomized controlled trials (RCTs)Trusted Source also
demonstrated the effectiveness of LSD as an adjunct to psychotherapy in cases
of individuals with life threatening illnesses. Participants reported sustained
improvements in anxiety and stress for up to 12 months following two
LSD-assisted psychotherapy sessions.
https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2021/07/timothy-learys-dead.html
So, what are the lessons to be learned from Grace Slick?
1) Under controlled circumstances, drugs that were once considered dangerous can actually be beneficial.
2)
Over time, many people who had previously been
considered unstable can become respectable citizens in their old age.
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