Jefferson Airplane Version
When Grace Slick departed to join Jefferson Airplane, she took this song with her, bringing it to the Surrealistic Pillow sessions, along with her own composition "White Rabbit". Subsequently, the Airplane's more ferocious rock and roll version became the band's first and biggest success; the single by Jefferson Airplane scored at #5 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song is in chromatic-minor.
"Somebody to Love" was also a track on their influential album released in February 1967, Surrealistic Pillow. Driven by Slick's forceful vocal, the song's hard-rock sound was atypical of the group's more folk-oriented psychedelia that comprised most of their previous style and some of the album. The lyrics are in the second person, with each two-line verse setting a scene of alienation and despair, and the chorus repeating the title of the song, with slight variations such as: "... / Don't you need somebody to love? / Wouldn't you love somebody to love? / ..." Like the album on which it appeared, this song was instrumental in publicizing the existence of the Haight-Ashbury counterculture to the rest of the United States.
This version appears in the film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when Raoul Duke reminisces about the first time he took LSD at The Matrix club in San Francisco in 1967. The song is also played during prologue in TV movie A Bright Shining Lie (1998), and in A Home at the End of the World (2004).
In the 1996 film The Cable Guy, Jim Carrey performs a karaoke version as his character Ernie "Chip" Douglas. Carrey's version is also on the movie's soundtrack.
The full, vocal version of the song can also be heard on a radio in the beginning of the Paramount film Four Brothers.
The song works as a metaphorical framing device for the Coen brothers' film A Serious Man. The senior Rabbi (Rabbi Marshak) quotes a slightly altered version of the first two lines of the song in his meeting with Danny following Danny's bar mitzvah.
The song is featured in episode five of season two of Being Human as the vampire Mitchell explores his residual humanity, through a relationship with a mortal woman.
The song was played on episode 3 of ITV drama Marchlands.
The song is a downloadable content for Rock Band 3.
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—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Even though I had let them choose their own socks since babyhood, I was only beginning to learn to trust their adult judgment.. . . I had a sensation very much like the moment in an airplane when you realize that even if you stop holding the plane up by gripping the arms of your seat until your knuckles show white, the plane will stay up by itself. . . . To detach myself from my children . . . I had to achieve a condition which might be called loving objectivity.”
—Anonymous Parent of Adult Children. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 5 (1978)
“If the only new thing we have to offer is an improved version of the past, then today can only be inferior to yesterday. Hypnotised by images of the past, we risk losing all capacity for creative change.”
—Robert Hewison (b. 1943)