In her new memoir, “Confessions: Stories to Rock Your Soul,” retired publicist Nadine Condon looks back on her 30 years in the trenches of the music industry, working with the legendary Grace Slick and the high-powered Jefferson Starship, then going on to mentor a new generation of San Francisco musicians and bands, earning the affectionate title as the Bay Area’s “Godmother of Rock.”
What makes her story so remarkable, elevating it above the average rock insider tell-all, is her mid-life rediscovery of religion and spirituality, leading her to nearly two decades as a volunteer and then as an executive and educator for hospice in the Bay Area and Arizona.
Condon, who turns 71 this weekend and lives with her husband in an over-55 community in Santa Rosa, came on the scene as the Jefferson Starship’s director of promotion and publicity in the MTV-dominated 1980s, a cocaine-fueled decade that saw the Starship — with Slick and tenor Mickey Thomas singing lead — blast into the pop culture firmament with hits like “We Built This City,” “Sara,” “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” and “No Way Out.”
“I lived the rock life because we were on top of the food chain then — first-class hotels, limos, touring Europe and Japan,” she says. “It was the dream. I still feel incredibly fortunate to have worked with such talented, wonderful people. It was a blast and I’m nothing but grateful. Those were great years.”
Apt title
“Confessions” is an apt title. In readable conversational-style, Condon writes frankly about coming to terms emotionally with the trauma of being raped at gunpoint as a college student. She talks about her youthful promiscuity and eventual struggles with alcohol and drugs, specifically cocaine. On her first road trip with the band to Chicago, she carried an ounce of coke in her suitcase. To remove herself from the druggy milieu she was in while living in San Francisco, she moved in the mid-1980s into a cabin on Mount Tamalpais on property that previously had been owned by Carlos Santana.
“I could walk the Dipsea steps to downtown,” she recalls. “I got a lot healthier after I moved there.”
Which is not to say that she has any regrets about her life in rock. There was nothing she liked better than going on tour with the Starship, wrangling the press, record company, radio people and family and friends of the band.
On the road, she became “one of the boys” with the men in the group but never developed that kind of intimacy with Slick, who had long since achieved iconic status as a ‘60s rock goddess with the breakthrough psychedelic-era band the Jefferson Airplane, the precursor to the Starship. At that point in her career, Slick was in her late 40s, mostly sober, and preparing to leave music for a second chapter as a visual artist.
“I held her in such esteem, and how I revered her prevented me from being palsy-walsy with her,” Condon says. “She was the most professional person I had ever worked with. Her life was different from the life of the guys. Grace went from the stage to the backstage to the hotel. She didn’t hang when others were drinking beer and doing lines. She had been there and done that. That did not interest her.”
After Slick left the band, Condon soon followed suit, founding her own agency in the 1990s, operating out of a hipster office building in the city. She worked with record labels and hosted showcases for music rights organization BMI before launching Nadine’s Wild Weekend, an annual four-night festival that grew to feature 135 aspiring bands performing for industry people in clubs and venues across San Francisco. Along the way, she’s helped the careers of Counting Crows, 4 Non Blondes, Third Eye Blind, Stroke 9 and Chuck Prophet, to name a few.
Changed viewpoint
For several years, she volunteered for hospice during the day and worked with musicians in the evenings. But as her life of service with the dying deepened, her interest in her music career faded in significance.
“After I started as a hospice volunteer, I wasn’t sure I wanted to still be counseling musicians on how to be rock stars,” she says. “All the things that had drawn me to the music business — sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll — that were once so attractive had lost their allure for me. I was having these Earth-shaking spiritual experiences with these terminally ill patients that were changing my viewpoint of the world and how I could contribute to the world.”
While the music business is fickle, operating under the sad-but-true notion that you’re only as good as your last hit, helping people through their final days had a gravitas for Condon that transcended the trendiness of the pop charts.
“No matter how big your last hit had been, no matter how many people loved you for it, if you didn’t follow it up, people would stop returning your calls,” she says. “I saw that over and over again. But when I got into my initial hospice volunteering, I saw that in hospice everybody counted. It didn’t matter what your life was or what you did, you were going to live all the way until your very last breath and we were going to make that as good as possible for you. I saw hospice as the antidote to the music business.”
Condon celebrates her 71st birthday with a book signing and interview from 1 to 3 p.m. Sunday at the Saloon at 1232 Grant Ave. in San Francisco’s North Beach. At 2 p.m., author and producer Pat Thomas will interview Condon about her journey “from debauchery to the divine.” Go to nadinecondon.com.
Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net
Source: www.mercurynews.com