Grace Slick Recounts One Wild Night With Jim Morrison As Jefferson Airplane Marks 60 Years
There’s a reason they call it the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. You devote your life to making rock music and roll with whatever good time your current mood calls for. Just ask Grace Slick, the raven haired, eyeliner loving, tripping-hippie goddess who fronted the 1960s counterculture band Jefferson Airplane (and, later, Jefferson Starship). “We don’t know anything about anything except having fun, how much money we can spend, and who we can scr*w,” the now 85-year-old Slick recently told The Guardian. For Slick, the latter includes a messy but memorable one-night stand with The Lizard King himself, Jim Morrison.
In her 1998 autobiography, Slick recounts being at West Hollywood’s Tropicana Motel with her bandmate Paul Kantner in 1967 and coming across Morrison in the hall. Buck naked, high as a kite, and down on all fours, Morrison was howling like a wolf. It left an impression.
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A year later, Jefferson Airplane — who celebrate their 60th anniversary this year — were touring with Morrison’s band, The Doors. The sex-loving Slick decided to make him the newest in her heavily notched bedpost. She knocked on his door at London’s Belgravia hotel and Morrison welcomed her in. The duo spent a lusty night that included smearing each other and the walls with strawberries.
Later on in Amsterdam, Morrison would share drugs with his tour mates, then snuggle up to Slick during the Jefferson Airplane set. “Jim started singing with Grace and hugging her,” Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek recalled. “Then he danced off the stage, went back into the dressing room and passed out.” But Morrison never called Slick — or called her to his room — again.
Slick didn’t hold a grudge.
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“I was kind of disappointed he never called back,” she told The Guardian. “Apparently I wasn’t his style.” But Morrison was still one of her kind, even though Slick emerged unscathed from a life of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll while it claimed The Doors frontman at just 27. Slick took up art in the ’90s, featuring her former lover in multiple pieces, including a full-body portrait of a shirtless Morrison posed like a rock ’n’ roll Jesus and a sketch of Morrison’s handsome face that she called Pretty Boy.
“I liked Jim. Most women did,” Slick told the music website Louder in a 2019 interview. “He was gorgeous, but he was so screwy. Half the time you couldn’t talk to him. He used himself as a human guinea pig — see how far you can push the human brain.”
1965
February 2025
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