Unlike Surrealistic Pillow, released earlier the same year, After Bathing at Baxter's is classified as psychedelic rock because it eschews the more commercial type pop songs, such as "Somebody to Love," that appeared on the earlier LP. As such, it was a watershed album; Jefferson Airplane was now a much heavier rock group. Jorma Kaukonen's electric guitar was especially more to the forefront in both volume and tone. Divided into "suites," this musical shift is typified by longer and more experimental compositions such as the nine-minute instrumental "Spare Chaynge" and Grace Slick's mammoth and unusual "rejoyce," an homage to James Read more on Last.fm.
“Surrealistic Pillow” may have had the bigger hits but the Airplane never flew higher than this, far and away their trippiest album and for my money an even bigger touchstone for the 60s psychedelic movement than its classic predecessor. This is the album where Kantner and Slick really took control of the group and with the huge success of “Don’t You Want Somebody to Love” and the genius “White Rabbit” they were given full creative control to try and mimic the inner psychedelic experience.
Fans expecting the same folk-tinged psychedelia of “Pillow” are greeted with a surprise from the opening seconds of “Streetmasse:” a howling guitar gives way to an incessant beat and a slashing lead that sets the stage for the rest of the album. This is Jefferson Airplane even more stoned and loose than before, the only thing really resembling the previous album being “Young Girl Sunday Blues,” Marty Balin’s lone composition. Even the softer compositions like “Martha” are more far out than anything that came before, with assaultive sound effects hanging around the very fringes of the song, and tracks like “The Last Wall of the Castle” wail as hard as anything Hendrix was doing at the time. This is the sound of an unleashed band freely experimenting with expressive rock, creating the American psychedelic canon as if by accident.
The 9 minute elephant in the room is, of course, “Spare Chaynge.” It is, ultimately, the album’s lone major flaw – a free-form freakout that doesn’t hold up as well as similar excursions like those of Quicksilver Messenger Service or even more unknown psych units like The Beat of the Earth or Hapshash and the Coloured Coat. It seems, in retrospect, to be a sort of dry run for the sounds members Kaukonen and Casady would explore in Hot Tuna, though I’d still take it to most of that band’s output. I’m not saying it’s BAD, necessarily, just that with artistic freedom comes excesses and there are few more obviously glaring than “Spare Chaynge.” It makes perfect sense in the context of the album, though, and for people who like their psych-rock more far out this is the Airplane album of choice.