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The Enduring Mystery of Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Surrealistic Pillow’

The ingredient that makes jefferson airplane's "surrealistic pillow" such a classic is a name many know, but one you wouldn't likely expect..

Long before the word “unplugged” became part of our common vernacular, an evocative instrumental, barely under two minutes long appeared on Jefferson Airplane ’s 1967 opus Surrealistic Pillow . The first piece of music guitarist Jorma Kaukonen ever wrote, “Embryonic Journey” was a six-string meditation that encapsulated the mood of the 1960s as powerfully as any song of that era (with or without lyrics).

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“ ‘Embryonic Journey’ made me sit up and take notice of Jorma’s remarkable acoustic playing,” exclaimed former Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas . “It is one of the most crystalline, beautiful compositions ever, right up there with John Fahey at his best.”

Blending modal sitar-inspired raga riffs with the Piedmont finger-picking style of Reverend Gary Davis, Kaukonen’s tune quickly became a favorite of DJs back in the days of free-form FM radio, who regularly employed it as either a lead-in or chaser to the news of the day, most of it bad, grim reports of inner-city riots or the escalating war in Vietnam. Fifty years later, that piece of music has been lodged in our collective consciousness.

Released on February 1, 1967, the Airplane’s second album (and the first to showcase Grace Slick , who replaced Signe Anderson, a recent mother who left the band to care for her baby) contained two of their greatest hits: “Somebody To Love,” which featured Slick’s gale-force vocals and Kaukonen’s howling guitar as well as the creeping, claustrophobic bolero, “White Rabbit,” complete with a Lewis Carroll-inspired lyric built on the insistent pulse of Jack Casady ’s bass.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YSHQuQILkY?list=PLVPGzOHIIgz_PYsW0wurklbMPdL_HIGYa&w=560&h=315]

“Jack falls somewhere between John Entwistle and [Motown session bassist] James Jamerson,” asserts Victor Krummenacher, bassist with Santa Cruz rock stalwarts Camper Van Beethoven . “He’s more accurate than McCartney, but not as melodic. He’s got a strong groove and is good with a fast fill. He knows how to propel the music in interesting ways. Jack knows his job and doesn’t get in the way, which is admirable.”

Before performing at the idyllic Monterey Pop Festival (June 16-18 ,  1967) where the band played an explosive set to the first mass-gathering of the mushrooming counter-culture, the Airplane appeared on American Bandstand on June 3. The show’s host, “America’s Oldest Teenager,” Dick Clark informed his teenybopper audience that there was “a whole new scene [happening] in San Francisco” before he awkwardly attempted to interview the band, who, donning a variety of sunglasses, stood before the image of a creepy old Victorian mansion that resembled the run-down residence of Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho .

Clad in a black hoodie, Grace Slick looked like a menacing cult den-mother while Casady smirked a Cheshire cat smile as he played, entangled in a spider-web of guitar cables. During “White Rabbit” the camera intermittently cut between upside down shots of the band and a slow-spurting lava lamp.

But it’s Paul Kantner ’s casual reply to Clark’s question of whether parents have any reason to fear the recent trends amongst America’s youth that still stands out today as a telling moment of the Summer of Love. “I think so,” Kanter answered. “Their children are doing things that they don’t understand.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKtJ0XTwgTE&w=560&h=315]

Although the media generally fixated on Slick, listening to the Airplane one had to wonder who actually was the lead singer of the band.

At any moment there could be three—Marty Balin, Grace Slick, Paul Kantner—or four, as Kaukonen would join in from time to time, as well as offering the occasional songwriting gem like “Good Shepherd” (from 1969’s Volunteers ). Their voices would swoop and weave, circling, chasing each other, until ultimately coming together like a ragged Wagnerian choir. Meanwhile, Kaukonen’s snaky lead guitar smoldered with blues and stinging tremolo overtones that threatened to obliterate the song altogether.

Were Kaukonen’s improvisations, like many psychedelic guitarists of the day, inspired by the modal jazz of John Coltrane and the mesmerizing ragas played by the Bengali sitar master Ravi Shankar?

“Oh, absolutely,” Kaukonen said in a recent interview. “We just didn’t know that much about harmony at the time. Back in the ’60s when anyone wanted to play raga they just smoked a bunch of pot and started playing away. But now you’ve got a guy like Derek Trucks. When he wanted to play raga, he went to India and studied for a year.”

“Jorma is one of the finest exemplars of the San Francisco raga style of electric guitar playing in terms of his overall attack and modal scale approach,” Gary Lucas explained. “The nearest contemporary comparison at the time would be Mike Bloomfield on Paul Butterfield’s East-West . Bringing it geographically closer would be John Cippolina [the prodigious guitarist with Quicksilver Messenger Service] with ‘The Fool.’ All were adept at using waves of sustained feedback while brushing neighboring sympathetic open strings adjacent to the primary articulated lead string as drone generators.”

“But the key ingredient that gives them all that raga sound is their signature vibrato in the fingers of the left hand which causes the picked string to sing like the keening wailing human voice of the ghazal or quawalli singers of India and Pakistan. In Jorma’s case, his tone and attack is uniquely singular and always unmistakably his. You would never mistake him for any other guitarist but Jorma.”

Speaking of guitar innovators, the unsolved mystery of Jerry Garcia ’s role in the making of Surrealistic Pillow still looms large to this day. I now hand the reins over to Oliver Trager , author of The American Book of the Dead , an obsessive encyclopedia of the Grateful Dead’s sprawling legacy, to help fill in the cracks of this long-time enigma:

“The first time many of us ever heard the name Jerry Garcia was on the back LP cover of  Surrealistic Pillow  where he was acknowledged as ‘Musical and Spiritual Adviser.’ In listening to the album today, Jerry’s touch can be heard all over it. Songs such as ‘Today’ and ‘How Do You Feel?’ are imbued with an alternately sweet and autumnal hopeful melancholia that the Dead would capture on their Aoxomoxoa – era material (think ‘Mountains of the Moon’ and ‘Rosemary’). Jerry’s sensibility of what a song could sound like and what an album should be was a gentle force on the nascent San Francisco scene and sound, one that endured for a solid three decades.”

Haight Ashbury’s benevolent guru, “Captain Trips,” as Jerry was once known, is said to have named the album when he spontaneously quipped that one of the album’s tracks was “surrealistic as a pillow.”

O.K., it’s time, as they say, to “give the drummer some.”

The first sound you hear on Surrealistic Pillow is the reverb-drenched thunder of Spencer Dryden ’s drums pounding out a respectable Bo Diddley rhythm on Marty Balin’s “She Has Funny Cars.” Barry Melton, a.k.a., “The Fish,” lead guitarist with Country Joe & the Fish, recalls his old friend and occasional jam partner Dryden: “He was an extraordinary musician. Spencer had an extraordinary feel for ‘the groove,’ and when he was on, he would find it instantly. I wanted to tell him to cut back on his drinking, but it was obvious that he could never lose his bearings no matter how much he consumed. The ‘feel’ or ‘the groove’ was the most important thing about music to Spencer; and he could talk about it for hours. He knew where it was and how to get there.”

Beyond the hits, Surrealistic Pillow offered a wide assortment of songs strung together like a bright glittering chunky necklace of love beads. Written by the tragic Skip Spence , the Airplane’s drummer who jumped ship to form the fabled but doomed Moby Grape, “My Best Friend” evoked the Mamas and the Papas’ lilting sound as Slick and Balin’s vocals volleyed playfully back and forth on the song’s coda.

“Today” is a soul-searching ballad that featured Marty Balin, along with sweet harmonies from Slick and Kanter and a dusting of (the phantom guest star) Jerry Garcia’s sparkling lead guitar.

The introspective “Comin’ Back to Me” is a perfect example of ’60s-style mind-melting musical meandering. Following this momentary bout of belly-button gazing, “3/5’s of a Mile in 10 Seconds,” as its title (randomly inspired by a newspaper headline seen by Balin) suggests, smokes like a patch of freshly laid rubber, bursting with the kind of fire and edge that was previously the domain of Brit invasion bands like the Stones, Kinks and the Who.

Another sweet, easy-grooving Mamas and the Papas-style folk-rocker, complete with an echo-drenched recorder tootled by Slick, “How Do You Feel” seemed to pose a gentle reply to Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” when Dylan crowed “How does it feel?” And speaking of Dylan, the influence of his fractured poetry on “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is all over the abstract lyrics in “Plastic Fantastic Lover.”

Play Surrealistic Pillow loud and in its entirety. It unfolds from song to song like a strange flower whose aural perfume continues to intoxicate 50 years on.

• SEE ALSO : The 2017 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Nominees Are a Disgrace to Music

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Jefferson Airplane’s Kaukonen is still on embryonic journey

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Long before he wrote and recorded the Jefferson Airplane classic “Embryonic Journey,” Jorma Kaukonen was on a decades-long journey of discovery of his own.

From shy, sometimes bullied upper-class son of a globe-trotting U.S. diplomat in post-colonial Pakistan, Kaukonen would evolve into a hard-drinking, hell-raising teenager racing his motorcycle through the streets of the Philippines in the mid-1950s.

Then it was on to a Jesuit university to study Aristotelian logic and other lofty subjects when not playing lead guitar for the Jefferson Airplane, a band he co-founded with Marty Balin, Jack Casady and others and that helped bring psychedelic sounds to the forefront of music.

Oh, and in his spare time Kaukonen would co-found another iconic band, Hot Tuna, which is still recording and touring 48 years later.

“It’s really funny, it’s hard to rate one’s own life” the 77-year-old guitarist says, smiling broadly as he reflects on how an embassy brat turned intellectual academic seemed to morph so easily into a rock star in 1967’s Summer of Love San Francisco.

“But all things considered, I have had a pretty interesting life,” adds the friendly self-effacing Kaukonen as he relaxes in a deserted VIP section of Hollywood’s El Rey Theatre hours before taking the stage for that night’s sold-out Hot Tuna show.

He lays out much of that life in the just-published memoir “Been So Long: My Life & Music” (St. Martin’s Press).

A quick, engaging read at 288 pages, his prose is followed by the lyrics to dozens of songs he’s composed over the past 50 years as well as a five-song CD tucked in between the final two pages. The latter includes Hot Tuna chestnuts like “Been So Long,” River of Time” and “In My Dreams,” a selection that seamlessly connects with the prose that precede them.

It’s a book that’s been generally well received, although Kaukonen acknowledges some have complained it doesn’t contain enough Jefferson Airplane photos or anecdotes along the lines of, “What’s Grace Slick really like?”

Slick, one of the band’s principal vocalists, wrote the book’s forward, which somewhat answers that question. But raising it seems to annoy Kaukonen slightly.

“The Airplane is a huge part of my life. I don’t trivialize it on any level. But it was A PART of my life and it has to fit into the scheme of things,” he says emphatically.

Then, regaining the jovial attitude Slick says she remembers him best for, he adds impishly, “If they continue to complain, I go, ‘Write your own book.’”

What “Been So Long” clearly describes is a love affair with the guitar that began when a 14-year-old persuaded his father, Jorma Sr., to buy him a Gibson Sunburst J-45 acoustic and then pretty much never put it down.

Eventually he would start writing songs, and although Kaukonen maintains he’s not a prolific musician his body of work would argue otherwise: Six classic Jefferson Airplane albums in the 1960s and early ‘70s followed by nearly two dozen Hot Tuna albums and more than a dozen solo projects.

“It’s kind of like learning the guitar,” he says when pressed on the dichotomy. “You start out learning how to play and maybe you get a song or two and you get to do an open mike. And then pretty soon you have enough for a set, and if you keep adding you have a show. And if you live long enough you have a body of work.”

His once brown hair has turned mostly gray and receded some over the years, but Kaukonen, dressed in black jeans and T-shirt, looks fit and younger than his years.

Once also a heavy drinker — and coming of age in the ‘60s a recreational drug user — he says he’s given up such indulgences.

“I abused my party privileges,” he explains with a chuckle.

When he got his first guitar early idols were Buddy Holly and Ricky Nelson, but in college he found himself exposed not only to Aristotelian logic but also folk, blues, bluegrass and gospel. And, perhaps most importantly, to the frenetic finger-picking style of the great bluesman the Rev. Gary Davis.

By the time Jefferson Airplane’s breakthrough album, “Surrealistic Pillow,” was released in 1967 Kaukonen had earned his degree in sociology from Santa Clara University and his finger-picking style was now creating electric-guitar sounds pretty much unheard of in rock music.

The album was anchored by soaring vocals from Slick and Balin, Kaukonen’s transcendent guitar passages and Casady’s thundering bass lines on songs like White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love.” And, in the middle, was a brief but achingly beautiful acoustic-guitar instrumental called “Embryonic Journey.”

“I thought he was out of his mind,” Kaukonen says of his reaction when record producer Rick Jarrard heard him playing it during a break and insisted it go on the album. It remains a fan favorite to this day, and Kaukonen adds, “I owe him a big debt of gratitude.”

By 1970 he and Casady, a friend since childhood, had begun to tire of the Airplane’s more rigid musical structure and formed Hot Tuna, an ever-changing ensemble dedicated to a range of music from blues to jazz to Americana. After they complete a tour this fall that’s taking them across the country they plan another album.

And there is Fur Peace Ranch, the guitar camp Kaukonen founded 20 years ago in the foothills of Ohio’s Appalachian Mountains, where he lives with his wife and daughter. Workshops, which fill up months in advance, have brought in instructors like Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Arlo Guthrie and Guy Clarke.

“One of the things people occasionally ask me is if I think about retiring, and my sort of off-the-cuff answer is, ‘Why,” Kaukonen jokes. “So I’ll have more time to play the guitar?”

“The reality of the situation is that I still really love to do it. I love playing for an audience. And for me to keep my playing at a level that pleases me I need to perform.”

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Embryonic Journey by Jefferson Airplane

Songfacts®:

• This song is an acoustic instrumental showcasing guitarist Jorma Kaukonen's formidable fingerpicking style. According to the album's liner notes, Kaukonen composed the tune in 1962 as part of a guitar workshop in Santa Clara and included it on Surrealistic Pillow at the band's behest. >> Suggestion credit : Mark - Hot Springs, CA
• In "Embryonic Journey," Jorma Kaukonen captures optimism in an instrumental. "I wish I could tell you how that came to pass," he told Mojo magazine. "I was obviously in an in-the-moment process that I was able to capture it as it happened. I was fooling around in a drop D tuning in a workshop I was giving. A friend said 'you oughta check that out.' So I made it into a song. It just made sense to me."
• "Embryonic Journey" plays at the end of the credits for the 1980 documentary Berkeley in the Sixties . Other uses of the song in movies include: 1982 dramedy Purple Haze 1999 drama A Walk on the Moon 2002 sports drama The Rookie "Embryonic Journey" also played in the final Friends episode (titled "The Last One"), and in Ken Burns' 2017 TV documentary series The Vietnam War .
• More songs from Jefferson Airplane
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Comments: 4

• Johann from Buenos Aires Fact: this melancholic song sounds on the last scene of the sitcom "Friends", as the camera pans through the empty apartment.
• Airplane Fan from St Petersburg Hi all, Does anyone know what guitar Jorma used to play Embryonic Journey? Thanks in advance.
• Apsa from Africa Brilliant finger-picking guitar playing. I heard that it actually was Rick Jarrard himself (RCA producer) who insisted for it to be included in the LP. Because he was too impressed.
• Kerry G. from Detroit Rock City, Mi To drive just werever with my head out the window, with the wind in my hair, listening to this song, is just truly magic.

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Jefferson Airplane: Surrealistic Pillow - Album Of The Week Club review

Every scene needs a song to carry its message to the world, and jefferson airplane’s surrealistic pillow provided two. but what of the rest.

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She Has Funny Cars Somebody to Love My Best Friend Today Comin' Back to Me 3/5 of a Mile in 10 Seconds D.C.B.A.–25 How Do You Feel Embryonic Journey White Rabbit Plastic Fantastic Lover

Every scene needs a song to carry its message to the world, and Jefferson Airplane ’s second album provided two. Somebody To Love and White Rabbit , delivered in former model Grace Slick ’s confident wail, were the twin clarion calls for San Francisco rock. Recorded mostly live, the album struck a pitch-perfect balance between Slick’s extroversion and Marty Balin’s softer folk offerings, such as How Do You Feel and Comin’ Back To Me . It also features some of the sweetest songs they ever wrote in Today and My Best Friend alongside some of their most ferocious: 3/5ths Of A Mile In 10 Seconds (the $65 that ‘make a poor man holler’ is a comment on the price of a kilo of marijuana) and Plastic Fantastic Lover . "That was the thing I liked about it,” said Slick. “It was like a smorgasbord. Jorma and Jack were more blues oriented; Paul was 12-string big, grand, Wagnerian cosmic political folk; I’m kind of dark and sarcastic and semi-classical; and Marty was a great love/pop song writer. So you got four for the price of one. And my way of treating stuff is different from Marty’s. And so on.” Suddenly the whole band were firing, individually and collectively. The Airplane were flying high, and Surrealistic Pillow became one of the West Coast sound ’s most durable albums.

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Other albums released in February 1967

• Deliver - The Mamas & the Papas
• Younger Than Yesterday - The Byrds
• Trogglodynamite - The Troggs
• A Hard Road - John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers
• Mellow Yellow - Donovan
• There's a Kind of Hush All Over the World - Herman's Hermits
• The Electric Prunes - The Electric Prunes

What they said...

"Half-live records like Quicksilver Messenger Service’s Happy Trails and the Grateful Dead’s Anthem of the Sun /came close to capturing the city’s ballroom experience on vinyl. But it was Surrealistic Pillow , the Airplane’s second LP, with its artful compound of modal folk minstrelsy and electric acid beat, that spread the Bay Area message of peace, love and dance throughout the land. ( Rolling Stone ) "Jefferson Airplane had an ear for dynamics that other bands had yet to expose, which enhanced the songwriting no end. The two hits, Somebody to Love and White Rabbit , have become increasingly discernible with age, standing as fitting representations of the colourful side of that decade. It’s no coincidence that these are the two tracks sung by Grace Slick — her vocal performances are absolutely astonishing, and continue to make a stunning impact." ( Audioxide ) "Every song is a perfectly cut diamond, too perfect in the eyes of the band members, who felt that following the direction of producer Rick Jarrard and working within three- and four-minute running times, and delivering carefully sung accompaniments and succinct solos, resulted in a record that didn't represent their real sound." ( AllMusic )

What you said...

Alex Hayes: This week's album choice makes me think back to the finale of the sitcom Friends in May 2004. Specifically, it makes me wonder just how many of the 52 million Americans that tuned into the show that night (not to mention the countless millions around the world who've watched the episode at their own leisure since then) were actually aware of the origins of the delightful acoustic instrumental that helps to close out the episode, as the titular friends leave Monica's apartment for the very last time. That piece is called Embryonic Journey , and it can be found on the second side of Jefferson Airplane's seminal second album, 1967's Surrealistic Pillow . It was composed by lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, the man that also provided the Airplane with their distinctive moniker. You would think that a pleasant little ditty like Embryonic Journey would stick out like a sore thumb on an album so closely connected to the counterculture of the late 1960s, but no, not a bit of it. It actually fits seamlessly into the flow of this album. I picked up a handful of Jefferson Airplane albums on a whim, many, many moons ago, Surrealistic Pillow amongst them. I have no idea what prompted me to do that, but I'm glad I did. Surrealistic Pillow is actually the most easy-going of them for me, especially when compared to After Bathing At Baxter's and Volunteers . It's quite a pleasing, folksy piece of work, that belies it's reputation as a pioneering example of early psychedelic rock. There's not much experimentation to be found in the likes of My Best Friend, Today and Comin' Back To Me , as engaging as all three are. I guess that much of the album's infamy rests on the track White Rabbit, one of two main showcases on the album for notorious new vocalist Grace Slick. By far the 'trippiest' number on Surrealistic Pillow , its eerie, otherworldly journey down Lewis Carroll's famous rabbit hole is actually the exception to this album, as opposed to the rule. It's also still quite brilliant to this day, long after the hippie ethos that fuelled both the song itself and the original Airplane has withered away. Apart from a couple of brief, drunken spells on the sidelines, Slick was the only constant presence in the band as the years and decades then went drifting by. A true stalwart, she stuck around as other musicians came and left at will, and Jefferson Airplane morphed firstly into Jefferson Starship, then simply Starship. Even when framed against the rapidly evolving, chameleon-like, nature of rock music back then, I still find it difficult to equate White Rabbit with the likes of We Built This City and Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now . Just 20 years have passed between those two eras, but there is no connecting thread to the music whatsoever. Completely different worlds. It's a great time capsule is Surrealistic Pillow , even if the music on it is a little misunderstood. Just three weeks after The Yardbird's Roger The Engineer , the Club has managed to serve up another slab of eccentric, but high quality, vintage rock. Like with Roger The Engineer, Surrealistic Pillow is music that is definitely of it's time, but is very much worth the trip back there.

Neil Immerz : A great band and a great album. I knew the two ‘Hits’ from a best-of my dad has and surprisingly, back in 1972, George Benson had an album called White Rabbit and he does his own instrumental version of the same song on that album. Evan Sanders : Such a classic album. The combination of folk and psychedelic rock set a standard for so many albums that followed. Listening to it now is a little jarring, as the juxtaposition is strange from the slow songs like Today and Comin' Back To Me to the psychedelics of Somebody To Love and White Rabbit , as well as the folksy How Do You Feel . It still deserves a permanent spot in the Classic Rock Hall of Fame. 9/10. John Davidson : An authentic slice of hippy trippy rock. It is largely a gentle, almost folky sound albeit with jangling electric guitars. White Rabbit is the recognised stand-out and rightly so. Somebody To Love is no slouch either. The rest are pleasant but not much of a draw to me. Chris Elliott: The obvious tracks are why I bought this ages ago. It's generally pleasant beyond the hits - it's problem is time. Someone's done everything (bar White Rabbit/ Somebody to Love ) better in the passing years. That and Plastic Fantastic is an awful end to the album.

Brian Carr : The music history geek in me knows full well the 1960s were the most important decade in rock history - when forward thinking musicians showed this style of music wasn’t just a fad or a different sounding bubble gum pop, but an art form that could venture forth in countless directions. Despite this understanding, the sixties will never be my personal favourite decade for music, and Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow is a perfect example why.

The two hits are so ubiquitous at this point they typically pass by without garnering thought - they were breakthrough songs for the band, but don’t really move my meter to the good or bad. Personally, I always approach previously unexplored albums (by me, of course) with hopes of discovering gems unmined by radio. And here we find my personal hang-up with so much sixties music: there’s just nothing here that piques my interest. Nothing I’d call a hook, nothing really skilful musically or vocally. Dated production that sounds like it’s recorded in a bathroom and a lot of gang vocals that contribute to the dated sound. I hate to sound like a curmudgeon, but I can’t help but ask what Jefferson Airplane did that made them “important” other than come along at a certain place and time?

Uli Hassinger : This album is one of the signature albums of 1967, and captures the spirit of this era best. Love it. The band's main attraction was the singer Grace Slick. A great and one-of-a-kind voice, a beauty with a huge aura and presence on stage. When I would have been old enough in 67 I would certainly had a crush on her. Besides she was the most badass rock chick around. Unfortunately she led the exaggerated life of a rock star - like many others back then - and took every drug which came her way, which really messed her up. The album combines tracks which are still beat rock (//My Best Friend) with psychedelic songs ( White Rabbit ) and flower power tunes. 1966 and 1967 were the years were rock music transformed and set the base for every genre yet to come. This album is a great example of that. I love all the tracks on it, but the best ones are the marvellous ballads Today and Coming Back To Me and the psychedelic Plastic Fantastic Lover and White Rabbit , which belongs to the 10 best songs of the late 60s to me. Grace's way of singing was very special and outstanding at this time. A masterpiece, and still a monument in rock history. Mike Canoe : Surrealistic Pillow is one of those "come for/stay for" albums. As in, come for the hits, Somebody To Love and White Rabbit , and stay for the rest. Actually, once you get past those two Grace Slick ripsnorters, the second Jefferson Airplane album is a much gentler, lighter flight. Surrealistic Pillow often detours into folk music, like guitarist Jorma Koukonen's pretty instrumental Embryonic Journey or Paul Kantner's D.C.B.A.-25 , which could have been inspired by the Byrds, inspiring to early REM, or both. Then there are Marty Balin's haunting ballads, Today and Comin' Back to Me , the latter with a melody played by Grace Slick on recorder (!). The recorder makes a reappearance of the beautifully kaleidoscopic, How do You Feel /, which has the multiple vocalists in the band chiming in and among each other. There are other psychedelic rockers too, but they rock relatively gently like She Drives Funny Cars, Plastic Fantastic Lover , or 3/5 of a Mile in 10 Seconds . Again, the intertwining vocals are always a joy to hear. I first bought Surrealistic Pillow the summer after my freshman year in college. Granted, it was a couple of decades after the Summer of Love, but I was still in the right headspace to receive it. It even inspired me to read Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures In Wonderland , which, sadly, was nowhere as cool or trippy as the song White Rabbit . I found the source material rather dull, but I still love the song and the album it came from.

Final score: 8.04 (42 votes cast, total score 338)

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