How Jerry Garcia became Jefferson Airplane’s “spiritual advisor”
Before Starship’s perm-mullet soft rock clogged up the charts in the 1980s, the roots of the band were as core fixtures of the 1960s West Coast psychedelic scene, the lysergic-soaked rock of Jefferson Airplane seeing them play the holy trilogy of countercultural American festivals with headline slots at Monterey, Woodstock, and Altamont, plus Isle of Wight’s first festival for good measure.
Cutting one of the era’s most enduring anthems with ‘White Rabbit’, their 1967 sophomore album Surrealistic Pillow credited Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia with the immortal mantle ‘musical and spiritual advisor’.
Barely two weeks after replacing the original singer with Grace Slick, the band headed to Hollywood’s RCA Victor studios to record their follow-up to Jefferson Airplane Takes Off. Before the Dead had even recorded their own debut, Garcia was entrusted as an intermediary between the band and the studio’s suits.
Garcia shed some nonchalant light on his involvement: “…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.”
There’s been great speculation as to Garca’s direct musical contributions to Surrealic Pillow, in addition to giving its title, but pressed in a 1967 interview regarding ‘How Do You Feel’: “Yeah, I played flattop on that. I didn’t play flattop in My Best Friend. Skip Spence did – he wrote the song. Let’s see, on Today I played the high guitar line, and I played on Plastic Fantastic, and I played on Comin’ Back To Me… I’m fond of the songs that Grace is in: I like 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.”
Despite a lack of LP, Garcia had had some experience as a session musician and had soaked up some of the studio’s protocols to act as associate sage for the group. Guitarist Jorma Kaukonen bestowed high praise for Garcia’s presence: “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. I remember one evening, he said to us, ‘It’s not what you play. It’s what you don’t play that’s important.’ In terms of dynamics and just plain letting the music speak for itself. As a band leader, he was really ahead of the rest of us.”
So why the mystical credit? Aside from reflecting the far-out scene at the time, it’s possible it was label politics. Being signed to Warner Bros and working on an RCA record could’ve caused contractual issues, and so Garcia enjoyed the ‘spiritual advisor’ guru tag instead, befitting the two bands and their mutual swack.
Guitarist and future Jefferson Starship pilot David Freiberg was candid about Garcia’s magic: “He sure did help the Airplane with Surrealistic Pillow. I don’t know what that would have been without him. 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 would never have been there if it wasn’t for him. Because it wasn’t on any other album they ever did.”
