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On 10 November 1968, five days after Richard Nixon's victory in the hotly contested US presidential election, the CBS television network broadcast the latest episode of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a variety show well known for controversial political satire. The episode, which had been taped in late October, featured Jefferson Airplane, one of the best-known bands to arise from San Francisco's much-publicised rock scene. The band performed 'Crown of Creation', the title track from their recently released fourth album. Astute listeners at the time might have been impressed by the song's unusual formal structure, its brief foray into a 5/4 metre, or its obscure, apocalyptic text. No viewer, however, could have missed the most unsettling aspect of the performance - white singer Grace Slick appeared covered in dark brown makeup, and gave the Black Power salute at the song's end.1
Slick's gesture is difficult to interpret. Because her appearance evokes, first and foremost, the ugly spectre of blackface minstrelsy, the first reaction of many observers today, as then, might be offence. Slick's gesture was, on one level, an insensitive attempt to shock square viewers, comparable to her appearance in an Adolf Hitler costume for a 1969 show at New York's Fillmore East (Tamarkin 2003, p. 210). Slick's biographer Barbara Rowes downplays the significance of the incident by implying that Slick was simply drinking too much at this point in her career and thus wasn't thinking clearly (Rowes 1980, p. 123). According to this reading, Slick's performance was not intentionally racist, but was simply another Dadaist provocation typical of the freewheeling 1960s. Historian Peter Doggett similarly minimises the performance's racial implications, arguing that 'though [Slick's] appearance has passed into rock myth as "blackface", it actually resembled a street urchin who had recently rolled through mud' (Doggett 2007, p. 209).2
Slick's own explanations of the blackface performance, however, reflect engagement with minstrelsy's controversial history as well as a desire to distance herself from it. Shortly after the incident, Slick told an interviewer that 'there weren't any Negroes on the show and I thought the quota needed adjustment', but she went on to contradict this racial interpretation, saying that 'women wear makeup all the time, so why...