Remember what the dormouse said - Surrealistic Pillow (1967)

Marty Balin: guitar, vocals

Grace Slick: piano, organ, recorder, vocals

Paul Kantner: rhythm guitar, vocals

Jorma Kaukonen: lead & rhythm guitar, vocals

Jack Casady: bass, rhythm guitar

Spencer Dryden: drums

Produced at R.C.A. Victor, Hollywood by Rick Jarrard

Released: February 1967

Highest chart place: U.S. Billboard 200: 3

January 1966 saw the San Francisco hippie scene's first key event. Unavoidably detained out of town, Jefferson Airplane missed the three-day Trips Festival, which featured instead The Grateful Dead and a pre-Janis Joplin Big Brother & The Holding Company. Promoter Bill Graham was assisted by Augustus Owsley Stanley III, aka the Bear, a colourful sound engineer and acid chemist whose self-styled psychoactives 'factory' would soon be the Bay Area's go-to source for gold-standard product. The festival took place at the Longshoreman's Hall, a little-used union meetinghouse destined, under freaks' collective the Family Dog, to become a proving ground for the mushrooming acid rock scene. Supported by The Great Society, Airplane had played the same venue three months before at a gig that was doubly notable: for catching the ears of the San Francisco Chronicle's influential jazz critic Ralph J Gleason, and for Airplane's first experience of the force of nature fronting The Great Society, Grace Slick.

Gleason quickly became a fan. Thanks partially to his patronage, on 3 September 1966 Airplane became the first rock group to play the Monterey Jazz Festival. This was an outrage too far for Gleason's conservative colleague, Leonard Feather. 'All the delicacy and finesse of a mule team knocking down a picket fence,' Feather thundered, only to see his rage fall on stony ground as an amused Airplane co-opted his words for an album advertisement. On 15 October, Signe Anderson sang with Airplane for the last time. 'I want you all to wear smiles and daisies and box balloons,' Signe gushed to the Fillmore audience, as Marty Balin presented the family-loving vocalist with flowers and effusive thanks for services rendered. 'I love you all. Thank you and goodbye.' On which note, Signe returned to her husband, her three-month-old baby Lilith, and rock'n'roll obscurity.

The next evening, at the same venue, Grace Slick sang with Jefferson Airplane for the first time.

Back in the spring, Skip Spence had exhibited an early capriciousness that would tragically escalate. Cueing inevitable comparisons with Syd Barrett, Skippy's natural talents would be blurred by an inability to cope with an operatic drug consumption. For now, the troubled musician returned from an unannounced Mexican holiday to find his paycheque cancelled and himself out of the band. Following a recommendation from Earl Palmer, Spencer Dryden was drafted in from the strip joints of L.A., bringing an approach to percussion that was subtle and jazz-inflected, with an instinctive sense of timing and of what felt right for Airplane's blossoming adventurism. He and Jack Casady would knit perfectly, maturing into one of the most innovative drum-bass sections in all of rock'n'roll.

Signe had been unhappy for months. Airplane felt the same about her husband, then on the payroll as lighting director. Unlike his wife, Jerry Anderson was a committed stoner, his appetite for booze and hard drugs reinforcing an already overbearing manner. Signe cared still less for Airplane's flamboyant, cape-clad manager, Matthew Katz, a showbizzy schemer who wanted Airplane to back topless dancers and had to be talked out of forming a troupe of uniformed female cheerleaders. Unsurprisingly Signe wasn't about to sign any long-term contract. She didn't mince words: 'He's a crook.' She quit in July 1966, shortly before the release of Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, keen to concentrate on bringing up Lilith rather than exposing the family to life on the road or any more nonsense from Katz. With Airplane about to lose a key part of their sound, Bill Graham, the dynamic promoter who would soon usurp Katz, offered Anderson a payrise sweetener to stay until the autumn. How Marty's old high school chum, roommate and long-term Airplane factotum Bill Thompson felt about Signe's retention, however, is uncertain. Thompson had tired of the singer's neediness; as sex, drugs and rock'n'roll raged through the Haight, Airplane's road manager and all-round Mr Fixit too often found himself seconded by Signe to babysitting and fetching Lilith's nappies.

Signe soldiered on through a season of October shows at Graham's Winterland Ballroom. The band courted Sherry Snow, whom Paul knew from his L.A. folkie days and who sang in a duo with guitarist Jeff Blackburn, but Sherry preferred to stay with her partner. Briefly Janis Joplin was considered; but good as she was, Janis's style was too closely wedded to raw blues, lacking a certain property which, for now, remained indefinable.

That je ne sais quoi wasn't far away. Exactly one year before her introductory Airplane gig, Grace Slick made her first appearance with The Great Society, a new group inspired by Marty's activities (as well, inevitably, as those of The Beatles). At its core were her husband, Jerry Slick, and his brother Darby, alongside friends David Miner, Peter van Gelder and Bard DuPont. With The Great Society frequently playing Balin's Matrix and another Graham venue, the Fillmore Auditorium, Grace soon became well known to Airplane, cutting an exotic, almost untouchable swathe through the Bay Area scene. Already feted in song by Joe McDonald (his 'Grace' would appear on Country Joe & The Fish's first album, Electric Music for the Mind and Body), the former model from Illinois was a hot ticket; Kantner later enthused about Grace's 'early punk attitude', her striking beauty, charisma and stagecraft complementing her extensive, as yet untapped talents as a musician and songwriter. Right under the noses of her brother-in-law and (now estranged) husband, Airplane lost no time in a poaching expedition. For Grace, bored with her role as The Great Society's lone lead voice, was increasingly drawn to Airplane's more sophisticated close-harmony vocal experiments. Through the agency of an admiring Jack Casady (although Jorma remembers it was he who made the advance) the deal unsurprisingly went down badly with Darby and co, Thompson's $750 buyout fee scarce recompense for a band losing its biggest asset just as things were looking up. The Great Society soon split, fated to join Signe Anderson in the rock'n'roll backwaters.

At the end of October 1966, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off on the shelves for only two months and Grace a full member for just a fortnight, Airplane entered R.C.A. Victor's L.A. studios to begin the sophomore album. If the first was these psychedelic politicians' election manifesto, Surrealistic Pillow was the policy enacted, a promise made real. The album would confirm that a new American force had joined The Doors, The Lovin' Spoonful, The Byrds and The Beach Boys in marshalling its creativity to appeal to the underground and the mainstream alike. It would also include some of Airplane's most enduringly beautiful melodies, written mainly by Marty Balin, poignant indications of the founder's true songwriting instincts. Here was forged a point of conflict that would have seismic consequences for Airplane's long-term cohesion: between Marty the eternal romantic, and others in the band, notably Jorma and Jack, whose musical inclinations were more abstruse and exploratory.

Assisted by returning engineer Dave Hassinger, Rick Jarrard came in as producer. Jarrard was another company man, laying down the law in schoolmasterly fashion whenever he spotted the band spliffing up or otherwise misbehaving in the studio. Once again the production team was liberal with the studio reverb (too much so for some band members), while Marty's typically bittersweet odes to love lost, found and regained preserved a clear continuity with Takes Off. Yet while Marty's inclination for a lovelorn lyric was unmistakable, so too was the sharp, vinegary edge now etched, with ever more facility, through Airplane's music. Lifted by growing confidence onstage and off, the band sounded harder and freshly urgent, with more testimony to a desire to break out of the folk-rock mould.

This was a period of great productivity, with six tracks in the can in just four evenings between 31 October and 3 November. For later sessions, a redeemed Skip Spence was drafted in to play guitar alongside The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia. Lyrics evinced a new social awareness and were occasionally obscure in meaning; chemical-herbal inspiration was clearly at work. (In her 1998 autobiography, Grace conceded that Airplane's lyrical approach had been 'drug-fueled' and 'anomalous'). Garcia's reaction on first hearing the tapes was a famously gnomic (and long misquoted) accolade which supplied the record's name: 'That's as surrealistic as a pillow is soft'. The Dead's leader and Airplane's close friend, now widely respected as San Francisco's resident karmic 'Captain Trips', had been hanging around the studio since the second night, mainly to keep the abstemious Jarrard from turning the...