Jefferson Airplane icon Grace Slick got her start around the same time as the Grateful Dead. In a new interview with TIME, Slick talks all about her interaction with the band during their early era.
She begins, saying “I came in a bit after the Warlocks… So when I met them they were already the Grateful Dead. At the time, you don’t think, Oh this is gonna be noteworthy, I better remember this, it’ll be important in 50 years . . . You just are kind of hanging out. I was with a group called the Great! Society when I met the Grateful Dead. I was not in Airplane yet. But all the bands, like the Charlatans, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis, all those people—we all played the same venues. So we saw each other on a fairly regular basis in the early days.”
She continues to talk about the rock and roll lifestyle of the late 60s, dropping some great quotes like:
“We all knew each other and we would party together. The Dead had a ranch up in Northern California and they would throw parties there. And there would be writers and musicians and, you know, local freaks like us.”
“But at the time we were all just kind of hanging out and doing what we did, making music, taking drugs, screwing each other, having a good time, because there is nothing quite as wonderful as being in your twenties in the ’60s. There was no AIDS. Anything you got, a sexually transmitted disease, could be cured. I know because I got them. I went in the hospital for four days once, a bunch of IVs and stuff and then you get out and you’re okay.”
“There’d be writers and people [at the Dead ranch], and there’d be like a barbecue going on and people taking acid and wandering around. There was a swimming pool! You could go nude or you could wear a bathing suit if you wanted to, and it didn’t matter. There were children running around. So it was this kinda pleasant free-for-all for what we called ourselves: ‘freaks.’ You know, because we were freaks compared to the straight nation.”
“It was just you show up, you play your music, and then you either go home or you go to another club—a club that’s open. It was just very easy. Rock ’n’ roll is not a difficult medium. It was marvelous. All the people who say, ‘Well Janis was miserable and Garcia was miserable and Jim Morrison’—no, they weren’t.”
You can read the full online version of interview here, though the next issue of LIFE Magazine will feature a long-form version of Slick’s recollections.