This review is the result of diligent preparation, people! I deserve your full attention!

I arranged last month’s trip to Europe so that my flight home would land in San Francisco instead of Seattle. This allowed me to spend some time with my parents, experience a nurturing environment to help me through my jet lag and actualize a scheme I’d cooked up during my travels. The night before my departure, I called my parents to finalize arrangements.

“What do you want to do? Anything special? Do you want us to make dinner reservations?” Maman queried.

“Let’s just wing it for dinner, if that’s okay,” I replied. “But I do have one request. Is dad on the other phone?”

“Je suis ici,” he replied. He’s trying hard to master French but still has a long way to go so I ignored his implied invitation and responded in English .

“Dad, I want to sit with you and maman and immerse ourselves in the San Francisco Sound. Pull them all out: The Dead, The Fish, Big Brother, Quicksilver, The Airplane, Beau Brummels, the works.”

“Don’t tell me you want The Sons of Champlin, too,” he answered with a sigh.

“Yep, the whole shebang. I want to hear it all and hear what you two remember about those times.”

“Since we were stoned most of the time, I’m not sure how helpful we can be.” My father’s such a wit.

“Don’t worry, we’ll light some incense, turn on a black light and maybe you’ll have a flashback!”

That afternoon and evening turned out to be a blast! My mom even wore an old hippie headband and beads for the occasion, lit some cone incense and my dad pulled out his impressive psychedelic poster collection! We started with Sal Valentino’s Beau Brummels and listened to everything from It’s a Beautiful Day to early Santana to Cold Blood. Somewhere along the way we called for a pizza from Marcello’s and sat around drinking wine while I listened to the music and my parents shared their memories (and occasionally covered their faces in embarrassment). They described the excitement of the scene, how they’d often hitchhike to get to a concert (my mom was great bait in her youth), lectured me on the integration of music and “consciousness-raising,” and admitted that they did indeed fuck on one of the sofas at the back of the original Fillmore Auditorium during a set by Procul Harum. I heard about various be-ins, sit-ins and love-ins (they fucked at one of those, too). They also talked about Vietnam and the peace movement, but interestingly enough, the music we were hearing rarely dealt with the war at all, with Country Joe’s “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” a noticeable exception. The San Francisco Sound seemed a world unto itself.

We ended the extravaganza appropriately with “Colors for Susan,” a very long opus from Country Joe & The Fish that consists of nothing but chords to trip out on. When my father had carefully tucked that piece of vinyl into the sleeve, I sighed and said, “These bands weren’t very good, were they?”

Maman laughed, my dad tried to argue, but I have learned that it is impossible to have a rational discussion about music with someone when the music you’re talking about is the music they cherished in their youth. Certain generational preferences are simply inexplicable to other generations. My evaluation of what I heard was that Carlos Santana, Jerry Garcia and Jorma Kaukonen were the best pure musicians of the bunch by a comfortable margin; that Janis Joplin is the most overrated singer in history (and  her band flat-out sucked); and that most of the music defined as the San Francisco Sound was era-specific and fails to pass the test of timelessness that characterizes truly great music, whether it’s Kind of Blue, Revolver or “Waterloo Sunset.”

The experience also confirmed my original hunch that the strongest album from the Summer of Love was Surrealistic Pillow, the second effort from the Jefferson Airplane. I loved this album so much as a kid that it was one of the five vinyl recordings I selected from my father’s collection when I vacated the parental nest. Since returning to Seattle, I’ve listened to it the requisite three times and it still delights this Gen Y girl in the Year of Our Lord 2013. Although it does contain a couple of hopelessly dated passages, most of the songs demonstrate more life, more cohesion and far more talent than anything else that came out of San Francisco in the acid bath of the mid-60s.

One of the band’s special talents is beautifully demonstrated in the opening number, “She Has Funny Cars.” This is the melding of Marty Balin’s and Grace Slick’s voices. The two alternative verses (not really a middle, not quite a bridge) are completely enthralling, with Marty taking the lead and Grace delivering a counterpoint vocal that blends beautifully with his. It’s a shame that these two would soon grow to loathe each other, depriving Jefferson Airplane of a unique advantage that few bands ever had. At least Surrealistic Pillow provides us with several examples of the pairing of these two compatible voices.

Grace brought two songs with her from The Great Society, and both turned out to be the band’s biggest hits. In “Somebody to Love” she is in total command, belting out the vocal with high-powered intensity, holding those notes in lengthy, glorious streams of pure kinetic energy. Jorma Kaukonen gets to display his fingerboard talents with a sizzling lead, but as we’ll see, he was only getting warmed up..

“My Best Friend” follows, an orgy of harmony and counterpoint vocals that is one of the great feel-good tunes of all time. Jorma’s counterpoint guitar is often missed because of the exhilarating vocals, but deserves attention because it complements the sweetness with solid guitar riffs. Marty Balin’s gorgeous love song, “Today” follows, and though he can sound a bit over the top at times, the loveliness of the melody tempers his occasional departures into the maudlin, as does the sweet guitar counterpoint provided by guest Jerry Garcia. The even softer “Comin’ Back to Me” follows, with light acoustic guitars providing the background along with the organic sounds of a recorder (played by Grace Slick). This is a period piece of the best kind, a dreamy, reflective number that calls up images of long-haired ladies blowing on dandelions to scatter their seeds to the wind:

One begins to read between the pages of a look
The shape of sleepy music and suddenly you’re hooked
Through the rain upon the trees, the kisses on the run
I saw you, I saw you comin’ back to me.

“3/5ths of a Mile in 10 Seconds” is a cheeky little hippie rock number, complete with references to “blowing my mind,” freaks and inflation in the illicit drug market. The energy of the performance and the tightness of the band (particularly Paul Kantner’s steady rhythm guitar) save it from being relegated to the flower power heap. “D. C. B. A.-25” is an odd little song that demonstrates clearly that Paul Kantner and Grace Slick were not as strong a pairing as Marty and Grace (though Paul and Grace would wind up fucking each other). This segment of the album is rescued by the lush harmonies of “How Do You Feel?” another dreamy and thoroughly delightful display of joyful vocal interplay.

Jorma Kaukonen’s signature guitar piece, “Embryonic Journey” comes next, as fresh today as it must have sounded in the spring of 1967. This is a piece I could listen to again and again, marveling at Jorma’s ability to maintain the groove as his hands dance over keyboard and soundboard. I love the occasional forays into rough, rhythmic loudness, which help this sweet piece of music rise above the period’s passion for dreaminess.

“White Rabbit” is so iconic that it’s a wonder that, after all these years, it still manages to grab your attention through its steadily rising drama. Grace Slick never wrote a better song or delivered a stronger vocal. The bolero form certainly advances the sense of drama, as it did for Ravel and for Roy Orbison in “Distant Drums,” but the absolute command and confidence of Grace’s vocal as it slowly gathers strength until reaching its peak at the end provides more than enough drama all by itself.

Surrealistic Pillow closes with the sassy “Plastic Fantastic Lover,” the song on the album that I feel is most closely aligned with the times. That’s not to say it’s a throwaway; again, the energy and enthusiasm of the band make this one a keeper. But the lyrics . . . well, I guess you had to be there:

Her neon mouth with the blinkers-off smile
Nothing but an electric sign
You could say she has an individual style
She’s part of a colorful time
Secrecy of lady-chrome-covered clothes
You wear cause you have no other
But I suppose no one knows
You’re my plastic fantastic lover

Surrealistic Pillow remains my favorite window to a world I wish I’d experienced first-hand. Although much of that period may seem silly and muddled, it also loosened restrictions and expectations concerning what you wore, how you spoke, what you did and who you could become. For a brief time in our history, there were a significant number of people who believed in love over hate, peace over war, sexuality over prudishness and exploration over acceptance of the status quo. I’d take 1967 over 2013 any time, primarily because one quality that characterized 1967 was hope . . . something that is pretty much absent from the world today.