Well, now here we are. I’ve posted artists 100 through 3, so now it comes down to the ULTIMATE JessieLou queens of music – Lita Ford, who has been a MAJOR favorite of mine since 2007, and Grace Slick, who I was a casual fan of for many years until last year when her music impacted me during a very rough time in my life (although Lita also helped me through a rough time as well). Before I announce the top two, let me just say that this was NOT an easy decision for me to make. I watched interviews and concert footage of both of them, listened to both of them back to back, remembered all the memories I have involving both of their music, and even made a “pros and cons” list involving both of them.
As absolutely cheesy as this may sound, at the end of the day, I did what my heart told me to do. Wow, that really does sound silly lol but you know what I mean.
Anyway, without further ado…
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#2. MEGHAN TRAINOR
Lolz jk
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It all started in October 2006.
FreakyFlyBry sent me an AT40 show from June 1988 that Premiere aired earlier that year and I fell asleep in the middle of the show due to me not getting enough sleep the night before (although I figured it would be more fun to blame the song I fell asleep to, "Two Occasions" by The Deele). I thought it would be fun to broadcast the show on Fusion radio, so I listened with
FreakyFlyBry and
Jawshii. One of the songs on the chart was Lita's first top 40 hit, "Kiss Me Deadly". At the time, I thought the song was just okay, which is hilarious in retrospect given how I feel about Lita today.
I always really liked Joan Jett, and one day in June 2007 I was looking at her Wikipedia page, and read that she started out in a 70's all-female rock band called The Runaways. Another member of that band? Lita Ford. I went on Limewire (which, back in the day, I liked to call Limeslow because of how f*cking slow it was), and downloaded any songs from her that came up. Among those songs was "Dressed To Kill", "Shot Of Poison", and her cover of Alice Cooper's "Only Women Bleed". I really enjoyed all of them, but one month later, I discovered the song from her that changed EVERYTHING.
I went to go work out one day in July 2007, and put on the Arena Rock station on Music Choice (which is now called Rock Hits). I caught about the last minute or two of a Lita song called "Gotta Let Go". I LOVED it and had it stuck in my head throughout the entire 30-minute workout.
The SECOND I got off that treadmill, I rushed to my computer to download that song! Unfortunately, I can't prove this to you guys as I idiotically deleted my first Last.fm account in December 2007, but I'm sure you all will believe me
- that night, I listened to "Gotta Let Go"
46 TIMES. That's more than the amount of times Helen Not-Reddy says "leave me alone" in "Leave Me Alone (Ruby Red Dress)". After that, EVERYTHING was about Lita Ford.
Here in Florida, we have this really shitty standardized test called the FCAT. I always struggled with it because it's very pressuring and they basically set you up to fail. Because of that, for one year only in 10th grade, I was transferred to a different school with teachers who help prepare you for the stupid FCAT. My parents were specifically told that the students at this school didn't have any behavioral problems. During my time there, I learned that was bullshit. I got straight A's and the teachers loved me, and as a result, I was bullied on a regular basis (mostly by guys). They always went after me for my appearance and would always tell me to shut up for saying ANYTHING. Between that, my bad relationship with my Mom at that time, and my Dad’s co-worker and her stupid bitch of a daughter (as well as her uninvited friends) always coming to our house and intimidating me, I became really depressed. If it wasn’t for Lita’s music, I would have NEVER been able to deal with all that crap as much as I did. How I never flipped out and told all those boys to go f*ck themselves, I’ll never know (although I should’ve tbh
). She really helped me cope during a time where I felt a lot of anger and sadness. However, as much of a help as she was, there is one other artist who helped me even more than she did, which I will get to in a moment. But first, as much as I love “Gotta Let Go”, that’s my second favorite song from her, behind this one:
I’d also like to mention that Lita Ford is responsible for the greatest concert I’ve ever been to. In October 2012, she gave a free concert in Daytona and it was the best night of my life. She did all the songs I loved, she sounded great, and at one point she POINTED AT ME!!!
Words cannot explain how happy I was to finally see her!!
Now, in 2007, after getting into the music of Pat Benatar, Heart, and Lita Ford within a few months of each other, several board members, including @wife,
Courage, and
MIKEB made a prediction that the next female rocker I would get into would be this woman, and here were some of the things I said in response to that at the time:
“For some reason, some people on here think that Grace Slick is going to be my next Pat/Heart/Lita. Why I don’t know.” – August 2007.
“*waits for everyone to say Grace Slick will be the new Pat/Heart/Lita
*” – September 2007.
“I love Starship and everything, but WHAT IS IT ABOUT THEM THAT'S SO JESSIELOU-TASTIC? GOD.
” – June 2007.
Well, folks, it’s not every day when I say this, but this is one of those rare occasions where JessieLou actually got it wrong, as my #1 favorite artist of all-time is…
What a way to wrap up Grace Slick’s birthday – by finally confirming that she has done the impossible and out-awesomed Lita Ford. I honestly never would’ve guessed in a million years that anyone OTHER than Lita would be #1 on this list.
I was first introduced to Grace as a member of Starship when I was about 5-6 years old. WALK-FM used to play "We Built This City" and "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" (and I think they played "Sara" too) all the time and I loved them, although I had no idea who sang them until around 2006 when I was 13, because that was when I began listening to AT40 shows from the 80’s. Like Pat Benatar, I was a casual fan of Grace’s for many years – and, as seen above, I laughed off predictions that Grace would become a core JessieLou artist back in 2007. If only Seb, John, and Mike B. waited six years to make that prediction.
I don’t want to go into too much detail about these things because in several of my commentaries I said, “Enough of the negativity though, let’s remember when ___ was awesome!”, and if I went into a lot of detail about this I’d be a hypocrite.
But if any of you have any questions about this, feel free to ask as none of these things bother me anymore. What I went through around the time I got into Lita was really shitty, but it was nowhere near as bad as the depression I had to deal with from March 2011 to April 2013. Basically, in a nutshell, my self-image/self-esteem issues were worse than ever, a “friend” of mine that I met through Eddie Trunk’s now-defunct online chatroom turned her back on me when I met her in New York, and called me a “desperate whore”, among other things, I was still struggling to make real friends because people in Port Orange continued to be assholes, my Mom attempted suicide twice, my brother got a job that was located 1 ½ hours away from Port Orange, and my Dad’s co-worker’s stupid bitch of a daughter continued to be an intimidating, fake, narcissistic piece of shit.
One day in April 2013, the week that my Mom was in the hospital after her second suicide attempt, I was playing the Facebook game SongPop, and I saw that they added a “Female Rockers” playlist which of course I had to get.
I was challenging pretty much everyone to that category, and almost every single time, Jefferson Airplane’s song “White Rabbit” would come on, and I remembered how much I loved that song and I haven’t heard it in awhile, so I listened to it, and then one thing led to another. I became curious to check out Airplane and Starship’s albums that week, and it was slowly starting to make me feel better. I kept checking out more and more of Grace’s music through Spotify and it helped me cope with all the drama going on with my Mom. I absolutely LOVE Grace’s voice and there is just something about it that makes me so happy. Ironically though, the song that caused my Grace Slick artist obsession to REALLY escalate was a song where she wasn’t even the lead vocalist! That Saturday, I was in my room trying to find a new album of hers to check out – I decided to go for the 1975 Jefferson Starship album
Red Octopus, because I heard about what a huge hit their song, “Miracles”, was, and I was curious to hear it. I ABSOLUTELY LOVED IT. I couldn’t finish listening to the rest of the album because I kept coming back to that song. What’s weird is before last year, 70’s soft rock/easy listening was never really my cup of tea, but ever since I heard that song I have really grown to appreciate a lot of that stuff (I still have my limits though, which is why I hate on Craptain & Tennille, Helen Not-Reddy, and Kris Kardashian). After that, I started buying all her CD’s (and, later on, records), talking about her non-stop on AND offline, having her as my avatar and wallpaper EVERYWHERE, etc. Mike and I call it “Slickmania”.
Even today, I consider myself a happy person, and I don’t have any of the bad feelings or depression that I used to have (especially since I’m out of Port Orange
), but whenever I am just feeling content, if I just watch a Grace live performance on YouTube or listen to one of her records, it just brightens me up. Unfortunately, I will never see her live, as she retired from music after Jefferson Airplane’s 1989 reunion tour. However, in May of this year, Mike and I went to San Francisco, and the day I went to Haight Ashbury was quite possibly the greatest day of my life. We hiked TEN MILES to see 2400 Fulton Street, which was the mansion that Jefferson Airplane lived in back in the late 60’s and early 70’s, and on the sidewalk it said “Jefferson Airplane still loves you” (they have a box set called
Jefferson Airplane Loves You). Even Mike has said that he has never seen me as happy as he did in that moment. And of course there were the trips to the record stores Rasputin and Amoeba (the former is where I found her 1981 album,
Wrecking To The Wrecking Ball!!
).
Grace Slick’s voice and music saved my life. Just for that alone, she is not only the queen of music, but my favorite artist of all-time.