Jefferson Airplane - Surrealistic Pillow

Released - April 1967

Genre - Psychedelic Rock

Producer - Rick Jarrard

Selected Personnel - Marty Balin (Vocals/Guitar); Grace Slick (Vocals/Piano/Organ/Recorder); Paul Kantner (Guitar); Jorma Kaukonen (Guitar); Jack Casady (Bass); Spencer Dryden (Drums); Jerry Garcia (Guitar)

Standout Track - White Rabbit

This album was introduced to me late last year by my housemate, who has a full-on love affair with the 60s. At the time, my tolerance for 60s music was ignorantly low, and I generally wrote the majority of it off as a bunch of people getting ready for things to get really good in the 70s. By and large and as a general trend, I still stand by that, but without any of the militant self-righteousness I used to summon up whenever I was called to have some sort of discussion on the matter. This aforementioned housemate was appalled by my lack of appreciation for the music of the 60s and over the last year I took it upon myself to make a concerted effort to get into the music of the time, and to really start to appreciate it - my reviews for Astrud Gilberto and the Beach Boys all came out of this spurt of listening activity as well. More fool me, the 60s were great. Not up to the standard of the 70s by a long way, but still great. I write all this here because the housemate in question cited this album as the quintessential 60s album, the album that sums up everything that made the era great. Having spent the last six months or so listening to it, I'm inclined to agree with her.

Jefferson Airplane were part of the emerging San Francisco music scene which, up until the celebrated "Summer of Love" in 1967 that truly showcased what the city had to offer, had not really had much of an opportunity to have much influence on the music world, save for its involvement with the Beat generation of the 1950s. But as the psychedelic scene began to flourish in '67, the Airplane suddenly found themselves, along with fellow San Franciscans such as the Grateful Dead (whose Jerry Garcia was an important advisory figure for Surrealistic Pillow), one of the most celebrated bands in the world. One key ingredient to this newfound success was the addition of singer Grace Slick, who exchanges lead vocal duties with the band's core member, Marty Balin. Slick's assured and otherworldly vocals complement Balin's more conventional voice perfectly, and also gelled effortlessly with the trippy and psychedelic mood of the music the band were playing. Slick was also the force behind the two hit singles that really cemented Jefferson Airplane in the public consciousness, bringing "Somebody To Love" with her from her former band, the Great Society, and writing the classic psychedelic anthem "White Rabbit" herself. The former is one of the first truly great hard rock songs of the decade, the band powering away beneath Slick's swaggering performance, while the latter is the most concise and haunting drug anthem ever written, with Slick having a great time floating through the melody and the bizarre kaleidoscope of Alice in Wonderland imagery, set against a drum beat which, in its borrowing from the classical bolero form, anticipates the prog rock movement and its pseudo-classical leanings.

Significantly, though, it's not just the vocals that are the centre of attention here. This is one of the earliest rock albums I can think of that really puts focus on the group dynamic of a band playing together and of the separate instrumental contributions of all the members rather than ultimately being a stage for a melody or a vocal harmony to emerge, as is the case with the majority of stuff by the likes of the Beach Boys or the Beatles. Here, the voice is just one part of a richer tapestry, and there's never a sense that any of the musicians are being short-changed here. This is a band album through and through. It's also not just in the more self-assured rock tracks that it excels, as well. "Today" is a lovely meditative number, while Balin's stunning "Comin' Back To Me" is a hauntingly beautiful ballad that stands up well against pretty much every other heart-stirring ballad of the 60s (and was later covered in an unforgettably vulnerable version by Rickie Lee Jones in the early 90s on her Pop Pop album).

It's bizarre to think that this band, here such a hotbed of creativity and artistic freedom, would later morph into Starship in the 80s and deliver such arena-friendly pop hits as "We Built This City" and "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now." Both very fine songs within the context for which they were written, but it's fair to say that this band were at their creative and artistic peak here. Whether or not this is the best album of the 60s could be discussed endlessly, but it certainly is one of the few I could point to as the quintessential 60s album.

Track Listing:

1. She Has Funny Cars (Jorma Kaukonen & Marty Balin)

2. Somebody To Love (Darby Slick)

3. My Best Friend (Skip Spence)

4. Today (Marty Balin & Paul Kantner)

5. Comin' Back To Me (Marty Balin)

6. 3/5 Of A Mile In 10 Seconds (Marty Balin)

7. D.C.B.A.-25 (Paul Kantner)

8. How Do You Feel? (Tom Mastin)

9. Embryonic Journey (Jorma Kaukonen)

10. White Rabbit (Grace Slick)

11. Plastic Fantastic Lover (Marty Balin)