On Halloween of 1966, San Francisco’s Jefferson Airplane entered a Los Angeles studio with a new lead singer to begin recording their second album. The collection of songs—a curious blend of acid-dipped folk, harmony, and hard rock that came to define the San Francisco Sound—was completed in enough time for the band to make it home for Thanksgiving dinner. Upon hearing the tracks, their friend and mentor Jerry Garcia suggested that it “sounds like a surrealistic pillow,” and a classic psychedelic album was titled.

So what is a surrealistic pillow anyway? What does it sound like? And why, if you’re not familiar with it, should you care? I’m banking on the idea that any album whose 11 cuts keep comin’ back to me, 43 years after it was made, is worth having a look into and passing on, so for just this month, it’s the Origin of an Album rather than the customary song.

Following its release in February, four months before Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and a month before the Grateful Dead’s debut, throughout the Spring and Summer of Love, Surrealistic Pillow contributed toward turning the Airplane into Life magazine-styled pop stars. The Marty Balin-founded group and the steel voice of Grace Slick clicked with a growing international audience of West Coast hippie watchers and rock lovers ready to take a walk on the Technicolor side. As a child, I adopted them as my new family; like bigger siblings and fellow travelers (though at least two of them were older than my own dad and mom), I could’ve been their littlest flower child mascot. As the years passed, I grew increasingly fascinated by the story of the five young men and the young woman who put my hometown on the musical map, though despite attempting to divine through listening, reading everything I could get my hands on, speaking informally to its former members and crossing paths with their friends and at least two of their children, I’m only slightly closer to solving the mysteries of Surrealistic Pillow or “the Pink Album,” and its allure for me. Had the record been tinted blue, as Balin had intended it, as an old-world girl, I may not have even gravitated to it in the record racks at all. Decades later, its songs are still alive and green for me, though rarely do I listen to the album in parts; rather, it is as a comfortable whole that I find the greatest satisfaction in the Pillow. Perhaps it is fate that has bound me to the songs. Among the things my love and I share, beyond a mutual attraction, is a mutual affection for the Airplane: They were his first concert and Surrealistic Pillow was my first album. We also share his paperback copy of The Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound by one of rock journalism’s fathers, Ralph J. Gleason, from which I’ve gleaned many fine details on the band contained herein.

read more