Jefferson Airplane were pioneers of psychedelic rock and were the first of the San Francisco bands to get a record deal with a major label. In fact, they were signed so early —in 1965, that recording sessions and touring obligations kept them out of San Francisco during many of the generation-defining events of late 1966-67 like the Human Be-In and the Acid Tests; as a result, their importance is often understated in histories of the period, in favor of later bands like Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead who seemed more intimately connected to the hippie counter-culture.
The group formed in the summer of 1965 from musicians connected to the San Francisco folk rock scene. Singer Marty Balin recruited a number of people he knew from various folk venues around town, and Jefferson Airplane (a pun on the name of blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson) soon built a local following at the Matrix Club. When Bill Graham opened the legendary Fillmore West he hired the Airplane for the premiere; by that time they had been signed by RCA records and made an album called Jefferson Airplane Takes Off.
After the debut, drummer Skip Spence and singer Signe Tolle Anderson left the group. They were replaced by Spencer Dryden and Grace Slick, the lead singer of another San Francisco group, the Great Society. Slick's powerful contralto was well suited to the group's increasingly psychedelic music; she was also a fine songwriter and brought with her some numbers she had written for the Great Society but not recorded. One was "White Rabbit," a song she wrote after an LSD trip spent listening to Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain album over and over. The lyrics were inspired by Alice in Wonderland, which featured a hookah-smoking caterpillar, magic mushrooms, and pills and vials of liquid that altered the reality of the protagonist, all of which seemed quite appropriate to the San Francisco drug culture of the late 1960s.
The album Surrealistic Pillow became a chart topping hit, and both the song and the album brought psychedelic rock into the mainstream. However, the only number one hits the group would have were in the 1980s with an incarnation called Starship, in which Grace Slick was the only "original" member. "We Built This City," written by Elton John lyricist Bernie Taupin, topped the charts for weeks in 1985 but has since been voted the worst single ever made in several magazine and radio polls.
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The Beatles, the Byrds, the Lovin' Spoonful, Buffalo Springfield, the Charlatans
Must Haves:
 "Somebody to Love"
"The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil"
"Feel So Good"
"White Rabbit"
Donovan, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Spirit, Heart, Rotary Connection
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