The Best of Grace Slick

Artist: Grace Slick Label: Bmg Special Product Category: Music Average customer rating: Media: Audio CD Number Of Discs: 1 UPC: 755174574221 EAN: 0755174574221 ASIN: B00005Y7UX Release Date: 2000-09-26

The Best of Grace Slick

Tracks:

1. Somebody to Love
2. White Rabbit
3. Rejoyce
4. We Built This City
5. Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now
6. Lather
7. Triad
8. Mexico
9. Fast Buck Freddie
10. Wrecking Ball

Customer Reviews:

Go Ask Gracie!.......2004-07-06

This sampler does include one solo effort, the title track from her controversial hard rock album WELCOME TO THE WRECKING BALL (a play on words that Neil Young was later to use in a similar, though more mournful context). Grace growls and slashes her way through a more metallic arrangement than anything a Jefferson incarnation ever provided her. Effective for what it is, it even had one critic (in CREEM Magazine, I think it was) declaiming that Grace could show the likes of Pat Benatar a thing or three. (High praise? I dunno, but it was right around Benatar's peak of fame and--in some quarters--acclaim).

While I'm quoting, one of her bandmates once said that "no one screams like Grace Slick." That was true of the WRECKING BALL era, for sure, but much of this BEST OF... is actually a lot quieter and subdued and reflective of the early Slick's cool power. If "White Rabbit" and the rockier "Somebody to Love" established Grace as a distinctive, husky-voiced singer with enough of a controlled vibrato to keep things interesting (but not too irritating), it's also true that by the time of BAXTER'S and CROWN OF CREATION, she had begun to take it down a notch or two, at least on her own compositions.

BAXTER'S in fact, featured what I consider to be the two best songs Slick ever wrote, the ominous and surreal "rejoyce" and "Two Heads." "White Rabbit" had been kind of self-consciously literary and its point was pretty obvious. By comparison "rejoyce" and "Two Heads" were dazzling in their language and Grace's icy vocals were all controlled fury and icy rage.

Only "rejoyce" makes it to this collection, but its sequencing is at least intriguing. Visionary Grace is followed immediately by the commercial Grace of "We Built this City" and "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now," as the CD jumps nearly twenty years in time and, some would argue, a quantum leap backwards musically.

I prefer a more nuanced view. I know that "City" was recently declared the worst song of the 20th century or something like that by an upstart music mag called, BLENDER. I read the commentary and it was pretty funny. But I never hated the song. It had at least something of the anthemnic feel that Paul Kanter (who had just been given the boot, ironically enough) had always been trying to achieve. But it also had a nice little bounce. It was also nice to hear Grace bring her patented pointed vocal hiss to a track that was otherwise an arena rock show off performance by Mickey Thomas.

I'm sure someone at BMG decided to interrupt the chronological flow of the album out of a need to crowd as many hits towards the beginning of the CD as possible, because after the two Starship entries we're back into the mid-60s with such classic tracks as "Lather" and "Triad" from CROWN and the infamous single "Mexico." I would have welcomed the aforementiond "Two Heads" and "Greasy Heart" which are less ballad-y than the two former tracks (if not less subversive). But slow tempo stuff does serve to give the lie to Grace's own self-criticism about not being able to sing quietly. She sounds like she could have been a supper club chanteuse if she had so chosen--if such cabaret artists sang ditties about menages a trois. (Well, actually, nowadays they probably do...but you know what I mean).

I suspect that because later critics derided both psychedelia AND 80's AOR, Slick's rep has fallen into something like disrepute. That can change, and there are signs that she's about due for some critical re-evaluation. But why wait, with this discount sampler, a new generation can check out Grace's oeuvre and decide for themselves if she wasn't capable of feeding one's proverbial head.

Gracie's the best!.......2003-11-11

Music Album:

1. Saint Low ~ Saint Low , and Mary Lorson
2. Los Lonely Boys ~ Los Lonely Boys
3. This Fire ~ Franz Ferdinand
4. Animal Lover ~ The Residents
5. The Collection: Slow Dancer/Silk Degrees/Down Two ~ Boz Scaggs
6. You Are the Woman & Other Hits ~ Firefall
7. Nothing We Can Control ~ International Airport
8. Freedom 5 Miles
9. Live from the Highway
10. Away from the Sun ~ 3 Doors Down

Music Album

Music Album

Music CD

When Farmer Met Gryce ~ Art Farmer

In the Wee, Small Hours in London and New York ~ Ruby Braff and Strings

1941-1942 ~ Django Reinhardt

My Romance ~ Art Blakey

Easy Does It ~ Jay Thomas with Cedar Walton Trio

Charlie Parker Memorial, Vol. 1

Continua Su Meta de Cancion ~ Eddie RoyBal & the Larks

Kling Klang Comic-Helden ~ Keimzeit

The Zar - Trance music for Women ~ Awlad Abou Al-Gheit

Mejores Anos de Nuestra Vida ~ Sirex, Mustang