Slick and Jefferson Airplane achieved significant success and popularity with their 1967 studio album Surrealistic Pillow, which included the top-ten US Billboard hits "White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love".

[7] Her father worked in the investment banking sector for Weeden and Company, and the family relocated several times when she was a child.

She lived in the Chicago metropolitan area, Los Angeles and San Francisco before her family settled in Palo Alto, California in the early 1950s.

Following graduation, she attended Finch College in New York City from 1957 to 1958, and the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, from 1958 to 1959.

[8] The song, which she is purported to have written in an hour,[11] is a reflection on the hallucinogenic effects of psychedelic drugs; when performed live, it featured a speedier tempo and was an instant favorite among the band's followers.

One single emerged from the demos, the Darby Slick-penned "Somebody to Love", the "B" side to "Free Advice", on the locally based Autumn Records subsidiary label "North Beach".

[13][14] During the autumn of 1966, Jefferson Airplane's singer Signe Toly Anderson decided to leave the band to raise her child, and Jack Casady asked Slick to join them.

With Slick on board, Jefferson Airplane began recording new music, and they turned in a more psychedelic direction than their former folk-rock style.

Jefferson Airplane became one of the most popular bands in the country, and through it Slick rose to a position of prominence among female rock musicians of her time.

Sears and Slick penned several early Jefferson Starship songs together, including "Hyperdrive" and "Play On Love".

Dreams, which was produced by Ron Frangipane and incorporated many of the ideas Slick encountered attending twelve-step program meetings, is the most personal of her solo albums, and was nominated for a Grammy Award.

Their nicknames appear as the title of an album she made in 1973 with bandmates Kantner and David Freiberg: Baron von Tollbooth & the Chrome Nun.

During the 1980s, while Slick was the only member remaining from Jefferson Airplane in Starship, the band went on to score three chart-topping successes with "We Built This City", "Sara", and "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now".

In a 2007 interview, she repeated her belief that, "You can do jazz, classical, blues, opera, country until you're 150, but rap and rock and roll are really a way for young people to get that anger out", and, "It's silly to perform a song that has no relevance to the present or expresses feelings you no longer have."

Despite her retirement, Slick has appeared twice with Kantner's revamped version of Jefferson Starship; the first came in 1995 when the band played at Los Angeles's House of Blues, as documented on the live album Deep Space/Virgin Sky.

She has generally refrained from engaging in the music business, although she did perform on "Knock Me Out", a track from In Flight, the 1996 solo debut from former 4 Non Blondes singer, and friend of daughter China, Linda Perry.

[22][23] In 2010, Slick co-wrote "Edge of Madness" with singer Michelle Mangione to raise money for remediation efforts following the BP oil spill.

She accepted Jefferson Airplane's Grammy Lifetime Achievement awards in 2016, and made an appearance for the unveiling of the band's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2022.

She has discussed this and her rehabilitation experiences in her autobiography, various interviews, and several published celebrity addiction and recovery books.

She invited anarchist Abbie Hoffman to be her escort and planned to spike President Nixon's tea with 600 micrograms of LSD, but the party had been billed as an "all ladies" event.

He claimed to be Slick's "bodyguard and escort", which failed to convince the security personnel, who told him that the event was "strictly for females".

[38] One incident occurred when a police officer encountered her sitting against a tree trunk in the backwoods of Marin County, California, drinking wine, eating bread, and reading poetry.

[40] After retiring, and after a house fire, divorce, and breakup, Slick began drawing and painting animals, mainly to amuse herself and because doing so made her happy during a difficult period in her life.

[48] She views her visual artistry as just another extension of the artistic temperament that landed her in the music business in the first place, as it allows her to continue to produce art in a way that does not require the physical demands of appearing on a stage nightly or traveling with a large group of people.

Her distinctive vocal style and striking stage presence exerted influence on other female performers, including Stevie Nicks,[49] Patti Smith,[50] and Terri Nunn.

Previously, the distinction of the oldest female vocalist with a chart-topping single was Tina Turner, who at age 44 had 1984's number-one smash, "What's Love Got To Do With It".

[54] In 2017, Grace Slick licensed the Starship song "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" to Chick-fil-A to use in a TV commercial, but because she disagrees with Chick-fil-A's corporate views on same-sex marriage she gave all of the proceeds of that deal to Lambda Legal, an organization that works to advance the civil rights of LGBTQ people and everyone living with HIV.