The TOP 100 Greatest Ever ROCK Frontmen: Grace Slick.

A pioneer of the 1960s psychedelic rock movement in San Francisco, and widely considered as one of the most important frontwomen in rock music history, our next entry, in at #n86, is Jefferson Airplane-fronting acid rock queen and composer, Grace Slick.

If the Summer of Love had an anthem, it was Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit." That's how essential Grace Slick was to the explosion of youth culture in America and the embrace of mind-expansion in the 1960s, and she remains just as essential today.

It was, after all, her song: Slick didn't join the Airplane until the group's second album, 1967's Surrealistic Pillow, and when she arrived she had two songs in tow: "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit"—i.e. the two songs that made them all stars and basically introduced the Bay Area hippie movement to the world.

Together with Janis Joplin, Slick upended the perceptions of women in music in the late '60s, becoming Jefferson Airplane's most enduring personality. Seven albums later, the Airplane crashed and Slick set off on a rocky solo career that found a couple more hits in the '80s with Starship. Though she struggled with drugs and alcohol, Slick's voice—unvarnished, sometimes and fragile and vulnerable, other times fierce and slightly unhinged—remained instantly recognisable, no matter the generation.

Now, nearing her 80th birthday, Slick has been sober for 20 years, but still claims that if Quaaludes were legal, she'd buy a "big dark amber glass bottle and keep it in the refrigerator." That's pretty rock 'n' roll, don't ya think?