Jefferson Airplane are among the few rock groups genuinely to qualify as unique, although they were not the only exemplar of the 1960s San Francisco sound: the Grateful Dead could equally claim to be the Summer of Love's house band. Comprising mainly vocal harmonies, two guitars, bass and drums, Airplane boasted no unusual instrumentation. The band's music was superficially derivative of many of their predecessors. They drew on the folk traditions of the Weavers and Pete Seeger; of legendary bluesmen Gary Davis and BB King; of soul giant Otis Redding; improvisatory masters from Miles Davis to Cream and even literary visionaries such as James Joyce and Lewis Carroll. Airplane shaped these influences into a single entity of one ex-model, two ex-folkies, one ex-jazzer and two ex-DC guitar slingers, setting them in Haight-Ashbury's dreamily LSD-drenched hippie heartland in 1966, then watching them burn fierce and bright before their decline with the death of that psychedelic dream. More than any other, the band and their recorded output were synonymous with the birth and death of the hippie era. his is the only work on Jefferson Airplane to combine a concise history of this magnificent ensemble incisive, entertaining reviews of its entire recorded canon.
