#471: Jefferson Airplane, ‘Surrealistic Pillow’

RCA, 1967

This album is credited for kicking off the California psychedelic rock music scene and everything that goes with it. This includes hippies, flower power, drugs and more drugs. 

Drugs freak me out. Psychedelics terrify me but as I took a deep dive in psychedelic rock this week, I realized that there is something safe and settling about this genre. It is a space that forces my brain to just chill and be okay with the chaos and movement around me.

Psychedelic rock is all about change and finding peace in not having any control in these bonkers moves. It’s about watching the colors and shapes pass by without touching your own psyche or causing emotional harm.  

As I sit in the middle of the spiral around myself, I stare at my makeup stained pillowcase and hold onto the chaos around me like it is the only stability I am comfortable with. I am nervous I am becoming addicted to the mellow yellows of the changes swirling around my body. 

And that is all I have to say. I have been working on this response for two weeks now and I can’t pull anything out of my crumpled brain about this album or the 60s or drugs or anything like that. 

This much I know: I used to romanticize the 60s. The revolutions, the protests, the clear line between right and wrong, the curtain being pulled in DC revealing just how scummy our politicians turned out to be. 

I know longer romanticize the 60s. I don’t care for drug experimentation, I am tired of scummy politicians and scummy hippies who claim moral superiority as they equate love to personal freedom and not sacrifice for the greater good. 

I am done with this 60s revival we are in. 

And I am done feeling like Alice wandering with bouts of vertigo and asking all the wrong people where she should go, only to wake up suspecting it was all just a terrifying, psychedelic little dream. 

Top songs: Somebody to Love, My Best Friend, Today, Comin’ Back to Me, How Do You Feel, Embryonic Journey, White Rabbit, Plastic Fantastic Lover, In The Morning, J.P.P. Mc Step B. Blues