(Credit: Alamy)

On Jefferson Airplane’s breakthrough 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow, Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia is given a strange credit: “Musical and Spiritual Advisor”. It was perfectly in line with the psychedelic ethos of the time, especially when it came to the friendship shared between the Airplane and the Dead. But it doesn’t do much to answer the question of whether Garcia actually appeared on the album or not.

Here’s what we do know: Garcia joined the Airplane in the studio while they recorded Surrealistic Pillow. He was the one who came up with the album’s title, suggesting that the band’s music was as “surrealistic as a pillow is soft”. From there, it’s all speculation, with conflicting information coming from interviews and retrospective research.

The Airplane had already recorded their debut album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, a year earlier. But this was a new band in everything but name: Grace Slick had replaced vocalist Signe Toly Anderson, and Spencer Dryden had replaced drummer Skip Spence in the time between. Garcia was a leading figure in the emerging San Francisco psychedelic scene, but he himself had yet to record an official studio record, with the Grateful Dead entering RCA Studios in Los Angeles to record their debut LP two months after the sessions for Surrealistic Pillow ended.

If he was untested in the studio, why was Garcia invited down to Los Angeles with the Airplane? According to Garcia, it was about being an intermediary between the band and the studio personnel. “The Airplane thought it would be helpful to have somebody there who could communicate to their producer,” Garcia claimed. “And since they all knew me and I understood their music and understood pretty much what they were doing at the time, it would be far-out. I went down there and hung out and was a sort of go-between between them and their producer. I helped out with some arrangements and stuff – I just hung out.”

“Our first album had been made rather restrictive by RCA and we were sort of unhappy with the results, and we needed to get more communication between us and the studio, and in some idiotic fancy of mine, we figured Jerry Garcia would be the person to communicate some of the things we were trying to accomplish in the studio,” guitarist Paul Kantner remembered. “We would be rehearsing something out in the studio, [Garcia] would say, ‘I have a nice little part that would work in there; maybe you should play this.’ And he would pick up his guitar and go boom, ‘Why don’t you play that?’ and he would play it so good that we said, ‘Why don’t you play it? It sounds really good and we can’t play it better than that. Come on, help us out here.'”

“But mostly he was there to serve as sort of a buffer zone between us and the other side of the window,” Kantner added. “A lot of what we were trying to do, both sound-wise and lyric-wise was eased quite a bit by his very gentlemanly manner. He was not harsh, not abrasive…”

Garcia’s role in the album’s creation didn’t seem to have a specific role attached to it. The Airplane wanted him to communicate with the producers and engineers at RCA, while at the same time, Garcia seemed to have taken it upon himself to suggest musical additions and arrangement changes to the band. That’s all well and good, but did Garcia actually end up playing on the album?

According to his own recollection, the answer was yes. “I played flattop on [‘How Do You Feel’]. I didn’t play flattop in ‘My Best Friend’. Skip Spence did – he wrote the song,” Garcia recalled in 1967. “Let’s see, on ‘Today’ I played the high guitar line, and I played on ‘Plastic Fantastic [Lover]’, and I played on ‘Comin’ Back To Me’… I’m fond of the songs that Grace is in: I like ‘[White] Rabbit’ a lot, I like ‘Someone to Love’ – the original on the album is more or less my arrangement, I kind of rewrote it. I’ve always liked the song she used to do with the Great Society, but it didn’t have – the chord changes weren’t very interesting.”

On later compilation albums like Flight Log and Jefferson Airplane Loves You, Garcia is given guitar credit for the songs ‘Today’, ‘Comin’ Back to Me’, and ‘Plastic Fantastic Lover’, plus outtakes ‘In The Morning’ and ‘J.P.P. McStep B. Blues’ that were included as reissue tracks. However, credited producer Rick Jarrard downplayed Garcia’s contributions. “Jerry Garcia was never present on any of those sessions,” Jarrard claimed. “Jerry Garcia played no guitar on that album. I never met Jerry Garcia. I produced that album from start to finish, never heard from Jerry Garcia, never talked to Jerry Garcia. He was not involved creatively on that album at all.”

Still, testimonies from the band members themselves contradict that claim. “I used to think about him as co-producer, but now that I really know what a producer is, the producer of that record was Rick Jarrard. Jerry was a combination arranger, musician, and sage counsel,” guitarist Jorma Kaukonen wrote in his 2018 memoir Been So Long: My Life and Music. “When he worked with us on Surrealistic Pillow, he really helped discipline us. Because he had come from a band, and as a band leader and as an arranger, he just really knew what was important. He was really important in the formation of that record, and I know that personally he taught me a lot about playing in a band.”

Although he wasn’t in the band at the time, future member David Frieberg recalled the other members discussing Garcia’s involvement. “He sure did help the Airplane with Surrealistic Pillow. I don’t know what that would have been without him,” Frieberg said. “He was on every track, pretty near. I can hear him playing on Today. I always thought the sweetness that got put on that whole album never would have been there if it wasn’t for him. Because it wasn’t on any other album they ever did.”

Garcia’s involvement likely extended beyond the credits given to him on the actual album. There remains a theory that, as a newly signed artist to Warner Bros Records, Garcia could not legally be given traditional playing or arranging credits on Surrealistic Pillow. But it seems more likely that Garcia simply tagged along and contributed whatever he felt was necessary to the album, whether it was suggesting new arrangements or actually playing guitar lines. If you happen to be a major fan of either the Airplane or the Dead, listen closely for Garcia’s signature guitar style next time you put Surrealistic Pillow on.