Grace Slick looks back, and ahead

Grace Slick has a recurring dream that's been haunting her for decades. It usually starts out backstage. The crowd is growing restless. The lights go down.

"I'm just about ready to go onstage and something is off," she says. "In other words, we can't find the amplifiers. Or I didn't bring the thing I was supposed to wear. Or Marty (Balin) is sick. Or I'm sick."

At 70, with what "little memory" she has left, Slick often looks back on the '60s and '70s as one big, blurry dream. But ask anyone who survived and they'll remember Slick's mesmerizing vocals rising above the smoke for generation-defining lines like, "Go ask Alice when she's ten feet tall" or "You better find somebody to love."

Joining Jefferson Airplane when she was 26, Slick "fell down down the rabbit hole just like Alice" and launched from the San Francisco psychedelic scene to tour the world as one of the most successful bands of the era. Several decades later, after a few run-ins with the law, including gun charges, DUIs and a near riot when she invoked the Nazis at a concert in Germany, she says her only regrets are the things she didn't do.

Clean and sober, she's been living in Malibu for the past 15 years. Officially retiring from rock and roll in 1989, Slick carved out a new career as a visual artist, painting portraits of old friends Jerry Garcia and Jimi Hendrix and reviving scenes from Woodstock. Her infatuation with "Alice in Wonderland" continues as white rabbits bound through dozens of her paintings, sharing company with mad hatters, smoking caterpillars and her lifelong doppelganger, Alice.

Her new collection of paintings, "The Road to Wonderland," opens Saturday at psychedelic rock artist Stanley Mouse's new Healdsburg gallery, Rockin Roses. Due to health reasons, Slick will not be able to attend. She suffers from erythromelalgia - a neurovascular disease that makes her extremities, mostly her feet, burn. As a result, she's often surrounded by "four air conditioners that are aimed at me to keep my feet cold." She can't stand for more than 10 minutes at a time.

Before she appears via Skype at her Saturday night opening, Slick took time out to chat about memory loss, aging and Lady Gaga:

Q: Do you miss Marin County and the Bay Area at all?

A: No. I don't really miss much of anything because for one thing I can't remember anything. I wouldn't remember my name if it wasn't in my phone book. It's god-awful. But it's always been that way. I can't blame it on drugs or anything. I've always had file cards and I write down everything I have to do today or tomorrow or yesterday. I've got a good 24-hour memory.

Q: What's your daily ritual like?

A: I wake up at about 4. It's just natural for me. I feel wide awake. I get up and paint, draw, read, watch television, clean up the house. I take a nap in the middle of the day around noon. So I get two days for the price of one.

Q: Do you paint every day?

A: I try to, or sometimes I'm drawing a set-up or wrapping a painting to send to my agent.

Q: What do you find in art that you never found in music?

A: Well, art is solitary. You don't have to give in to anybody else. In other words, during the '80s I had to give in to everybody. I had to say OK. I was trying to be a good girl. "OK, I'm not drinking. OK, you wanna do that song? OK." With art, you don't have to give in to anybody. You do what you want to do. Well, partially what sells. My agent said, why don't you do a cartoon series on the lyrics of "White Rabbit" and I thought, "Oh Christ." But he's right. The stuff does sell. You want to pay your bills, you don't draw goofy stuff all the time.

Q: Why do you think the "Alice in Wonderland" myth had such a profound effect on you?

A: The rabbit thing has followed me around my whole life. I was born in the year of the rabbit. One of the things that came through a fire I had at my house in Northern California was a rabbit. Growing up, I lived next door to a guy who had about 40 white rabbits.

The story of Alice in Wonderland is very similar to mine in that she came out of a very straight era, which was Victorian England. I came out of a straight era, which was '50s United States. And then you fall down this hole. For me, it was a rock-and-roll band. Going from the '50s to the '60s was very much like going through a tunnel into a whole different land.

Q: Looking back, do you have any regrets?

I've never been to the Middle East. I've never been to Africa. It's the stuff you didn't do that you regret. The stuff you did do - OK, if you're Catholic, you can go and say a rosary for bad things. I'm not anything, so I don't really care. You make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes.