1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 81. Jefferson Airplane – Surrealistic Pillow (1967)

 

A mix of folk and psychedelia, this album epitomises what we could call the Haight-Ashbury sound, all very Californian hippie kind of stuff, sometimes with gentle guitar, sometimes fuzzing it up. The best songs are the ones where Grace Slick takes the lead vocals, and these are the ones that will be most familiar – the stomping Somebody To Love, and the steady build-up of White Rabbit, a Ravel’s Bolero style constant build to a climactic finale that highlights quite how trippy Lewis Carroll’s ideas actually were (the reference to pills and mushrooms sounding like comments on drug use in the hands of Slick, but are all things from the Alice books).

Other tracks are either like a lesser version of Somebody To Love (e.g. She Has Funny Cars and 3/5 Mile in 10 Seconds, both of which feature Slick on backing vocals), or are gentle folky tunes (e.g. Today or Coming Back To Me), which are generally the ones written by and sung solely by Marty Balin.

This is one of a batch of albums where I made sketchy notes and had to revisit in order to remember what it was like, which says much about how the stand-out tracks stand out and the others blend into an ongoing mix of folk/psychedelia at this time. Listening a second time helps, but I’m going with my original assessment that the Grace Slick ones are best. Balin’s funky Plastic Fantastic Lover is quote good, albeit short. Go To Her is better, because ... Grace Slick.

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