Nadine Condon grew up in Louisville, went to Catholic school, and by her senior year of high school was already sneaking into Freedom Hall to see The Doors with Steppenwolf and Janis Joplin with the Full Tilt Boogie Band. “It was a siren call,” she says. “I wanted to be with people like this. The creativity, the energy, the lifestyle—it was irresistible.”
By 1975 she’d ditched Kentucky and Boston for San Francisco, right as the second-generation counterculture was finding its footing. She worked behind the scenes with Quicksilver Messenger Service, Paul Butterfield, Huey Lewis (still earning ten bucks a night to jam), and eventually landed with Jefferson Starship the very day they released “Jane.” “Two months later I was on my first road trip—first class, limos. I’d parked my beat-up VW at the airport and suddenly I was in champagne land.”
She spent the next decade with the band through every incarnation—Airplane, Starship, even the MTV years that produced the eternally divisive “We Built This City.” She insists the band doesn’t get enough credit. “People pick their decade. But they were always perfectly in sync with the times. In the ’70s they were romantic, in the ’80s they were MTV pop. There weren’t many American bands who lasted that long.”
Grace Slick, she says, was never the unhinged wild card people imagine. “When I worked with her she was sober, married, and professional. But people constantly wanted something from her—a look, a touch, her time. She was the Taylor Swift of her day. It was exhausting. I used to keep my hotel room door open just so I could walk her to the elevator if she wanted a soda.”
By the ’90s, Condon pivoted to nurturing the new guard—Counting Crows, Third Eye Blind, Four Non Blondes, Chuck Prophet. She ran showcases for unsigned bands, spotting talent by watching the crowd. “If you can attract the girls, you can attract the guys. It wasn’t complicated. Just have a show, have songs, hit hard in 20 minutes and get off stage.” One night she even booked a Houston R&B group called Girl’s Tyme, six teens managed by their parents. “The problem was there were six sets of parents. Nobody wanted to deal with that.” A few years later, Girl’s Tyme regrouped as Destiny’s Child, led by Beyoncé Knowles.
Her memoir, Confession: Stories to Rock Your Soul, tells both sides of her life: the sex-and-drugs circus of the San Francisco scene and the later spiritual journey that followed. “People tell me it’s two different books, but that’s life. What attracts you in your 20s isn’t what attracts you in your 50s. Everybody has a story like that.”
And she kissed Muhammad Ali once. “I’ll go to my grave with that,” she laughs.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
