I was pretty sure I knew everything I needed to know about Jefferson Airplane.
I knew they were a fairly important late-60s rock band, leaders of the San Francisco scene, at the forefront of the hippies-and-hallucinogens era of American music. I knew their lead singer, Grace Slick, had a powerful voice that always struck me as unsettling, perhaps because I couldn’t erase Jim Carrey’s impersonation of it from my memory.
I also knew that the band had gone through several lineup changes in the 1970s and 1980s, a slow decline into irrelevance accompanied by – for legal reasons – incremental changes to their name: from Jefferson Airplane to Jefferson Starship to Starship.
Something I didn’t know about Jefferson Airplane is that their guitarist, Jorma Kaukonen, was an absolute wizard on his instrument.
He was also (and this might be me reading into it a bit too much) a bit of an outcast in his own band. Being a blues purist, he didn’t particularly want to be in a rock band, and as their success grew, there was a tension between Kaukonen and Grace Slick. I don’t know whether the fact that Slick almost died in a car accident while racing against Kaukonen was the cause of this tension, but it probably didn’t help.
In the end, Kaukonen left to form another band, Hot Tuna, and so missed out on the many name changes and legal battles that followed the band through the ensuing decades.
This song, one of the few that Kaukonen wrote during his tenure with Jefferson Airplane, is from their critically acclaimed and ridiculously named 1967 LP Surrealistic Pillow. Of all the things I didn’t know about Jefferson Airplane, this track is the thing I’m happiest to have discovered.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. It was barely included on the album – apparently the other band members didn’t think it fit, and well, it kinda doesn’t. Sandwiched between the flute-infused “How Do You Feel” and Wonderland-inspired “White Rabbit,” this song feels like it would be more at home on a Don Ross set list than a classic LP from the Summer of Love.
2. It’s bright and happy, but Kaukonen isn’t strumming gently. There are times when he’s really banging away at the strings, and it lends the song an edge of urgency.
3. Despite being bright and happy, there’s also a nostalgic tinge to it. This leads me to the final thing I didn’t know about Jefferson Airplane: this song was the soundtrack to the final scene of a show you may have heard of.
Recommended listening activity:
Playing “Two Truths and a Lie” with people you think you know well.