Jefferson Airplane appeared on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” to sing the title song from their then-new album “Crown of Creation.” For this appearance, the band’s almost totally uninhibited singer/provocateur Grace Slick sang in blackface and mimicking the recent Olympic scandal, ended the performance with a black power salute, made infamous when a black athlete at that year’s Olympics had raised his fist instead of putting his hand over his heart during the US National Anthem.Slick maintained that the gesture was one of solidarity with either the Black Power Movement generally or Angela Davis specifically (online sources differ). She later appeared on the January 1969 cover of Teenset magazine in blackface. Other articles in the same issue include “Jimi Hendrix, Black Power, and Money,” and an editorial by Pat Paulsen about censorship on “The Smothers Brothers’ Comedy Hour.” In the article titled “Grace Slick is an Attention-Getting Device,” Slick claimed to have had “about forty different reasons” for the stunt, but specified six of them.
1. “If you listen to the words of ‘Crown of Creation,’ think about a spade singing it. It makes a lot of sense.”
2. “Women wear makeup all the time, so why not black? Next time maybe I’ll wear green. Makeup is pretty silly anyway…”
3. “I did it because it was a trip; it’s weird to have blue eyes and a black face.”
4. “The whole thing started when I was watching TV and someone said that blacks look better on television in closeups, so I wandered around the house wearing blackface and flashing on myself in the mirror. Perhaps a bored socialite can do the same thing and go shopping in blackface and maybe pick up some bargains.”
5. “There weren’t any blacks on the show and the quota needed a little readjustment.”
6. “I knew nearly everybody would object to it.”
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