Surrealistic Pillow

The Summer of Love: 1967. A golden era in music, forever linking drug culture with rock and finally breaking rock fashion from the loosening strictures of late 50s rock n roll. Long tangled hair, garish colours and spaced-out complexions reigned. Drug-induced and inspired albums from the Doors, Grateful Dead, Beatles and Jimi Hendrix are often cited as the main exponents of the era, but Jefferson Airplane’s breakthrough work is perhaps the most evocative example.

Hailing from San Francisco – the same breeding ground as their mates the Grateful Dead – the band regrouped and swapped members to release their second album in February 1967. Their debut, released the previous year, was a typical folk-rock record that never became more than locally popular. Out went drummer Skip Spence and pregnant vocalist Signe Anderson, and in came Spencer Dryden and, most significantly, the stunning raven-haired Grace Slick. Slick’s dark powerful vocals had marked out her previous band, the Great Society, from the rest of the local San Franciscan scene, and her recruitment was a major coup for the band. Not only did she add a extra dimension in sound that neither Anderson nor male vocalist Marty Balin could offer, she also bore two compositions that had become fan favourites with her former band.

‘Somebody To Love’ and ‘White Rabbit’ (originally ‘Someone To Love’ and ‘White Rabbit Blues’) became top ten singles and Jefferson Airplane classics. The former, a slow-fast-slow chorus-led track with the Great Society, became a rocking breathless track of unremitting power. The latter, a track inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland, mixed stripped-down bass and guitar with a powerful vocal crescendo not seen with such authority since Ravel’s Bolero. ‘Go ask Alice – I think she’ll know’ Slick commanded as the band created a haunting anthem packed into two and a half minutes.

Slick’s vocals were not all pervasive, however. Standout opener ‘She Has Funny Cars’ reveals how well Balin and Slick could mix, while Balin (one of the founding members) received top billing in several others – notably in the exquisite ‘Today’ and closer ‘Plastic Fantastic Lover’. Surrealistic Pillow is an album of remarkable variety, including ballads (‘Comin Back To Me’, ‘Today’), mid-tempo folk rock (‘DCBA-25’, ‘3/5 Of A Mile In 10 Seconds’) and even the solitary instrumental (‘Embryonic Journey’). Each fits into a seamless whole, exemplifying the proverbial ‘sum greater than its individual parts’. As Colin Larkin notes, there is nothing remotely weird about this recording, which is why it has lasted so well.

This album really marked the start of the Jefferson Airplane, when they found their voice. True, they had already released Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, with such treasures as It's No Secret, Come Up The Years and Don't Slip Away. These featured the powerful folk rock vocals of Signe Tole Anderson and Marty Balin, but had been recorded back in late 1965 and the band were to find their métier as spokespersons for the psychedelic generation, not as electrified tambourine-bashing folkies, however good, and had been changing direction throughout the tumultuous social upheavals of 1966.

Signe Tole Anderson left the band to have a baby, performing her last gig with the band on 15 October 1966 at the Fillmore in San Francisco CA. The following night at the same venue new member Grace Slick stepped into her shoes, and on 31 October 1966, less than three weeks later, she went into the RCA Studios in Hollywood with the band to begin work on the album that became Surrealistic Pillow. When the sessions were completed on 22 November, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off was only just appearing in the shops but was already obsolete.

Grace Slick had been singer with the Great Society and came with two songs she used to perform with them. Someone To Love (written by her brother-in-law Darby Slick)was rearranged and reworked as Somebody To Love to become the first single taken from the album after its release, and a million-selling US Top Five hit. The other was its follow up, her own Carrollian ode, White Rabbit, another million seller. If Jefferson Airplane had never released anything but White Rabbit, their place in the hall of fame would be beyond doubt.

Both signified the direction their music was to take. However, Surrealistic Pillow is probably the most rounded of all the Airplane albums in terms of group members' contributions as it also features songs by Marty Balin, Paul Kantner, Jorma Kaukonen and ex-drummer Skip Spence. These included the surreal She Has Funny Cars, beautiful ballads like Today and Comin' Back To Me, the Donovan-esque protest song Plastic Fantastic Lover and the more psychedelically experimental DCBA-25 and 3/5ths Of A Mile In 10 Seconds. It also featured the magnificent virtuoso guitar instrumental Embryonic Journey, written by Jorma Kaukonen in 1962.

The bonus tracks are mostly outtakes from the album sessions and are all excellent. Additionally, there is a stray Lightnin' Hopkins cover arranged by Jorma Kaukonen, recorded in March 1967, the month after Surrealistic Pillow was first released; and the reverb-free mono single mixes of Somebody To Love and White Rabbit which some prefer.

This re-issue edition has been produced and mastered by Bob Irwin, who remastered the Byrds albums so successfully, although there has been some doubt as to whether he had access to the original multi-tracks. The sound is certainly superior to the 1987 German pressing I was familiar with, though the timings are consistently shorter by a couple of seconds than on that edition, suggesting some speed correction may have been made?

British purchasers wishing to replace ancient vinyl records should note that the original British album, released 7 months after the US version, dropped a couple of tracks in favour of older recordings from the first album, which RCA had never released here

Exploding into the USA charts in early 1967 with two incredibly powerful singles, “Somebody to Love” & “White Rabbit”, Jefferson Airplane were the most commercially successful of all the “new wave” San Francisco groups for good reason: they could play, they could sing, and they could write unforgettably good songs. And “Surrealistic Pillow”, from which both singles were drawn, shows just how impressive they were before success and group politics took their toll.

Opening with the magnificent “She Has Funny Cars” – with its, for the time, bizarre song structure, driving drums & guitars, and wonderful vocal interactions between Grace Slick & Marty Balin – the album is an almost perfect example of everything that was good about “hippie” music. Moving effortlessly between progressive rock (“Somebody to Love”, “3/5 of a Mile in 10 Seconds” & “Plastic Fantastic Lover”), wistful introspection (“Today”, “Embryonic Journey” & “Coming Back to Me”) and barrier bending innovation (“She Has Funny Cars”, “D.C.B.A. - 25” & “White Rabbit”) it captured a group at the peak of their powers, born out of and immersed in a world where they were encouraged to push their music into totally new areas. And underpinning it all is the “atmosphere” of San Francisco in its fleeting period when hippie ideals really were musically relevant… nothing from the Airplane, or indeed any of their San Francisco contemporaries, caught the feel of the time & place as well as “Surrealistic Pillow” and, like all classic albums, it remains as interesting and listenable today as it did all those years ago.