Jerry Slick (80) – The Great Society/Jefferson Airplane – was born Aug. 8, 1939 to patent attorney Bob Slick and Betty Slick in Berkeley. He grew up in Palo Alto and attended the private Menlo School before graduating from Palo Alto High School. He was the oldest of three brothers, one of which was the younger Darby Slick who co-founded The Great Society with him in the mid-’60s in San Francisco. Upon his release from the Army, he married Grace Wing, his former next door neighbor, in San Francisco on Aug. 26, 1961. After their honeymoon, Jerry Slick enrolled in film courses and began making student films while Grace worked in a department store. Before long the couple fell into San Francisco’s intellectual beatnik scene, listening to folk music and, later, jazz, and growing marijuana in their backyard.
By 1964, Jerry had become more involved with filmmaking. For a short film titled Everybody Hits Their Brother Once, he called upon Grace to provide the music and she entered a recording studio for the first time, playing Spanish guitar to accompany scenes in the film. The film won first prize at the 1964 Ann Arbor Film Festival in Michigan, but although Jerry Slick graduated from San Francisco State College with a degree in cinematography, their future lay not in the medium of film but rather in that of rock and roll.
Neither Jerry nor Grace had much interest in rock—Elvis Presley and the early Beatles had not impressed her. But when Grace heard the Rolling Stones it hit home with her—she admired their scruffy looks and rough-edged, R&B-laced music. While leafing through the San Francisco Chronicle in the summer of 1965, she saw an advertisement for a concert by a new rock band called Jefferson Airplane at a club called the Matrix, and convinced Jerry to go see them. Instantly Grace and Jerry knew what direction to go. They recruited Jerry’s younger brother, Darby Slick, then 21, to play guitar. Jerry played the drums and Grace sang and played guitar. A few others came and went until they settled on a name—the Great Society!! (taken from a domestic program championed by then-President Lyndon B. Johnson)—and, before long, a lineup that also included David Miner on vocals and guitar, Bard DuPont on bass, and (later, replacing DuPont) Peter van Gelder on flute, bass, and saxophone.
Jerry did not have much musical experience, but got in on the action by playing drums. Inexperienced drummers, and inexperienced musicians in general, weren’t that rare in the days when the bohemian music of choice was switching from folk to rock, and people found themselves playing instruments they had never or rarely touched. Skip Spence of the early Jefferson Airplane, for instance, was a guitarist, switching to drums immediately when he was recruited for the drum kit by Marty Balin. Still, Slick’s drumming on the Great Society tracks available on several albums’ worth of live and studio material that was unreleased in the ’60s (as well as on their sole single) is raw, though adequate for the fledgling psychedelic band’s needs.
With original songs written by Grace and Darby Slick, the Great Society (the exclamation points were generally ignored) became a favored attraction at the city’s budding rock ballrooms, including the Fillmore Auditorium, booked by proprietor Bill Graham. Along with other new bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Great Society was ubiquitous at local events. For a publicity gimmick, the Great Society manufactured buttons mocking the Airplane’s slogan Jefferson Airplane Loves You—theirs read The Great Society Really Doesn’t Like You Much at All.
The Great Society didn’t record much during their brief lifetime. In October 1965 they entered San Francisco’s Golden State Recorders for the first of several sessions that would take place over the next couple of months. Their producer was a young, ambitious rhythm and blues disc jockey named Sylvester Stewart who would, a couple of years later, do just fine for himself under the name Sly Stone.
Signed to the local Autumn Records, owned by disc jockey Tom Donahue, the Great Society recorded, on Nov. 30, 1965, the only single that would be released while they were in existence, “Someone to Love,” written by Darby. While (with a B-side titled “Free Advice”) it failed to make any impact outside of the Bay Area, the A-side would have a much greater impact when Grace Slick left the Great Society and took the song with her, renaming it “Somebody to Love.” She would also take with her a song she wrote and performed with the Great Society, a bolero called “White Rabbit.” Both would make the top 10 when re-recorded by the Airplane, and they remain classic rock staples to this day.
By the summer of 1966, Grace was starting to think more of her own future. When the Airplane’s female singer, Signe Anderson, then pregnant, decided to quit the band, it was a no-brainer for Grace Slick to move into her place. The Great Society had little chance of survival once Grace made the jump to the more popular band. In recordings released after their demise, their music, ranging from sloppy/amateur to inspired, is emblematic of the city’s psychedelic rock scene, but it was not enough to give them staying power without their focal point.
The Great Society briefly attempted to continue after Grace jumped ship in October of ’66 but when Darby left to travel and study in India, they called it quits. Grace’s marriage to Jerry also disintegrated quickly, and while they stayed legally married until 1971, she had relationships with the Airplane’s drummer Spencer Dryden and then guitarist/singer Paul Kantner before the divorce papers with Jerry were signed.
The surviving music of the Great Society was later collected on various posthumous album releases, first on the Columbia label and then on other collector labels. Surprisingly, considering that he considered himself a filmmaker first, Jerry Slick then joined another San Francisco band the Final Solution. The Final Solution played modal early psychedelia with some similarities to the Great Society, except their material was much darker and not nearly as strong. Slick gave their arrangements a lot of input, however, and the Final Solution even lifted excerpts of Great Society songs to plug into Final Solution ones. While Slick was in the lineup, they made some rehearsal tapes, and one of the songs, “Bleeding Roses,” was issued on a flexidisc that came with the first issue of the San Francisco ’60s rock fanzine Cream Puff War.
The Final Solution broke up in 1967, and Slick again concentrated on his first love of filmmaking. A commercial he made, aimed at recruiting San Francisco police, won a Clio award in 1971. He later narrowly missed a big Hollywood break, when Director George Lucas interviewed him to be director of photography on a film he was working on, but Jerry Slick had to turn the job down as he had ruined his shoulder pursuing his other passion, driving his MGB in races put on by the Sports Car Club of America, and couldn’t use a handheld camera as Lucas requested.
Gary Coates, a motion picture color editor who freelances for Pixar, met Jerry Slick in the 1990s when Coates was a lab technician at Palmer Films on Howard Street. Part of that job was fixing mistakes in cinematography, but Jerry Slick’s film never needed correcting, he said.
“Jerry and I go back to the photochemical era when the cinematographer really had to know the craft, how the lights work and how to pick the right lens, camera and film negative,” said Coates. “Jerry was a pro with all that knowledge.”
Jerry Slick met his second wife, Wendy Blair, in 1979. She was a filmmaker who started the video department at College of Marin. Jerry Slick was overqualified for the entry-level class, but he was looking to make the transition from film to video, to stay up with the times. Right away he was asking the instructor, 10 years younger, out on dates. She turned him down for a variety of professional and personal reasons. But Jerry Slick found a workaround by casting his instructor for his final class project. This got him both an A in the course and a date with Wendy.
They eventually moved in together into a house in Mill Valley. They then formed a husband-and-wife production company called Slick Film. She did the directing, and he was the cinematographer. They shot promotional videos for Carlos Santana and the San Francisco Opera, and promotional films in the early days of Silicon Valley.
“Jerry was the preferred cinematographer for Steve Jobs,” said Wendy Slick. “All those corporate types liked him because he made them look good.”
Slick Film also produced both short and long-form documentary films. A half-hour documentary they shot for ODC/Dance, called “The Long Run,” got picked up by PBS and was shown nationwide. His camera work was also in “Lou Harrison: A World in Music,” a documentary on the composer by Eva Soltis that got a screening at the Castro Theatre.
Always quick with a one-liner or wry commentary, Jerry Slick was a regular feeder of quips and observations to Leah Garchik‘s column in The Chronicle. “He just had an unusual mind,” said Wendy Slick. “He saw things from a different point of view and always delivered more than what was expected.”
The rest of his career life was in film as a cinematographer and director, known for Steel Arena (1973), Congo the Movie: Descent Into Zinj (1995) and Great Performances (1971) etc.
Jerry Slick died March 17, 2020, at his Mill Valley, California home. His death is believed to be caused by cancer.
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