Somebody to Love?: A Rock-and-Roll Memoir

Grace Slick looks back on a lifetime of sex, drugs and rock & roll in Somebody to Love?, a wisecracking memoir featuring cameos by some mighty famous faces. As the lead singer of Jefferson Airplane (later Jefferson Starship and, still later, Starship), Slick had a ringside seat for some of the decade's most notorious high jinks--Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock, the sexual revolution, and of course, '60s drug culture. Put it this way: if the dormouse said feed your head, Slick did--again and again and again. Which leads to this memoir's principal shortcoming: it's hard to document the most important decade of your life if you can't remember it. Still, even if she's a little fuzzy on some of the details, the anecdotes alone are worth the price of admission, from the time Slick and Abbie Hoffman plotted to dose Richard Nixon to her surreal sexual encounter with a nearly autistic-seeming Jim Morrison: "Although I knew there was some pattern of events going on in his head that connected what I'd just said to what he was thinking, it never made sense." Now sober and nearing her 60s, Slick frets over her aging body, campaigns against biomedical research, and feeds the raccoons in her back yard. But she hasn't lost any of her famous feistiness. This is the same woman who flashed her breasts at photographers, pulled her skirt over her head at concerts, and even once, "having ingested the entire contents of the minibar in my hotel room," stuck her fingers up an audience member's nose. Grace Slick may have mellowed, but bless her heart, she's still running off her mouth. --Mary Park

She was the original "great rock diva", the lead singer of Jefferson Airplane who stood at the forefront of the sixties and seventies counterculture and belted out classics like "White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love". Now, in her own inimitable voice, Grace Slick offers a revealing self-portrait of the complex woman behind the rock-outlaw image, and delivers a behind-the-scenes, no-holds-barred view of rock's grandest stages. Wildly funny, candid, and evocative, SOMEBODY TO LOVE? tells what it was really like during, and after, the Summer of Love -- and how one remarkable woman survived it all.