A couple years back, I was at a local grocery store, where the song "White Rabbit" by The Jefferson Airplane was playing over the PA system. I commented to the clerk that I had heard the song ever since I could remember. Being considerably younger than I, he asked,"Does it take you back?" "About like it takes you back," I replied, "It's always been around, right?" I'd been at single-digit age during the band's heyday, so the "hippie" esthetics didn't stick on me. I recall being at a park where a bunch of hippies would hang out and sing songs like "Suite Judy Blue Eyes" by CSN&Y. I sat there, looking at them, thinking about how outmoded they'd look in 10 years' time. (Really, at age nine I was that perspicacious.) The punk-rock esthetic damn sure did stick to me when I came of-age, however, for better and worse, though in my own case it met my having been conditioned for nihilism and darkness – hardly hippie vibes, for sure.
Nevertheless, when I was about 19, I would hang-out with some people my age who were all about the likes of the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, and other musicians of that ilk, so I wasn't unfamiliar with the music. I just couldn't understand why it, especially, in the case of the 'Dead, would cause them to uniformly bliss-out and get all "nudge-wink" in discussing the bands. It might be that I had never taken LSD, but I couldn't hear anything particularly exceptional in the music that a substance might deem warp-worthy. The names of band members were dropped with tidbits of lore. I might have wanted to gain a better education in the music, but the 'Dead just sounded like a wimpy country band to me, and the 'Airplane, though powerful and melodic, sounded archaic to me just a decade or so past their heyday.
What I've always had to grant the Jefferson Airplane, however, is their solid musicianship and their vocalists who sang like grown-ups, with mature skill, conviction and confidence. Although they were in their 20s at the time, they weren't singing like nor for teenagers. Contrast this to popular music in later decades, when it became common for young adults to sing like kids, and for guys to sing like girls. I've previously made the case that indie rock made it "okay" to sing like shit, but just a decade after the heyday of the 'Airplane, punk-rockers were vocalizing like snotty brats. Verbal communication in general has deteriorated among the American populace. Listen to interviews of regular people from 50+ years ago, and one hears complete sentences and clear cadences, pronunciations and inflections. Listen to the average person now, and it's incomplete thoughts, shredded dipthongs, vocal fries, and limited vocabulary.
What has recently gotten me to seriously and extensively listen to the Jefferson Airplane is the video of them performing, in a recording studio, their song "We Can Be Together," which for years I've liked but just now had me jacked into something that I'd been missing about the band. I could finally hear the soul of the organism. There are some songs of theirs which I have to excuse as sounding cool "for the time," but others don't require any relativistic bridge at all. I've learned to hang with the bass's being panned hard-left and the drums hard-right in my headphones. What I seem to be gleaning from this music is a sense of what's been lost along with everyday articulate speech over the past 50+ years, thanks to the forces of nihilism and darkness that hijacked my youth and whatever makes it difficult for people now to look one another in the eye as they converse sincerely, which makes one doubt whether they're sincere. Even if there had been anything pretentious about the 'Airplane's songs and music, it's outweighed by the sincerity of passion that drove it before the band became commercially self-conscious. It's the sound of living in a big house together with each others' bodily odors and musical ideas in the air, and the freedom to just let loose with whatever is in one's heart, despite that its sincerity will sound outmoded in just 10 years' time.