Grace Slick is more than just one of the first female singers to infiltrate—and hold her own in—a male-dominated ’60s rock landscape. For many impressionable teens, the Jefferson Airplane frontwoman was their conduit into psychedelic counterculture, one who shrewdly crafted the childlike u003ciu003eAlice in Wonderlandu003c/iu003e imagery of “White Rabbit” as a gateway to a very different kind of trip. But where her band’s penchant for socially conscious statements cast them as San Francisco hippie heroes, the Illinois-born Slick often played the tough foil to her more whimsical singing partner Marty Balin, inverting the traditional male/female dynamic. She invested a raw urgency in hard-charging anthems like “Somebody to Love” that anticipated future punk icons like Patti Smith and Exene Cervenka, while her willingness to contort her voice from a folky lilt to a blaring siren blazed the trail for idiosyncratic singers like Siouxsie Sioux and Karen O. As the Airplane morphed into the more arena-rockin’ Jefferson Starship and then the pop-oriented Starship, her spotlight-seizing turns on ’80s FM mainstays like “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” and “We Built This City” proved her powerhouse pipes could cut through even the era's glossiest production.