If JRR Tolkien was the primary literary influence upon prog rock, there’s an argument to be made that Lewis Carroll served a similar role during the psychedelic era just a few years before.
John Lennon’s work during this era – I Am The Walrus, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, Cry Baby Cry and more – is suffused by prolonged exposure to Carroll and his two Alice novels. And then there’s White Rabbit.
One of the signature hits of the Summer of Love, White Rabbit reached Number Eight in the Billboard charts, an extraordinary feat considering how unusual it was for its time – a Spanish bolero that doesn’t have a conventional verse or chorus but builds and builds until it reaches a strident crescendo.
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Then there are the lyrics. It’s hard to believe that the song’s writer, Grace Slick, got away with a song that – on the surface at least – seems to celebrate experimentation with drugs. But White Rabbit got radio airplay and TV exposure despite its references to pills, mushrooms and “hookah-smoking caterpillars”. Not to mention Slick’s closing exhortation to “feed your head”.
Slick wrote White Rabbit in early 1966 whilst she was in her previous band The Great Society. In a 2016 interview with the Wall Street Journal, she recalled how she put it together. “I found a small upright piano for $80 at a warehouse in San Francisco. It was painted about 90 coats of bright red and was missing around 10 keys in the upper register. I didn’t play way up there anyway – the notes were too pingy – so I bought it. Jerry (her husband) and I put the piano in our living room.”
The Great Society were starting to get some press attention, and Slick gave a press interview in which she spoke in favour of marijuana and LSD. “(It) got back to my parents. It was painful for them, I’m sure, but I didn’t care whether they minded. Parents were criticising a generation’s choices while sitting there with their glasses of scotch.”
“They also seemed unaware that many books they read to us as kids had drug use as a subtext. Peter Pan uses fairy dust and can fly, Dorothy and her friends in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz cut through a poppy field and wind up stoned and fast asleep.”
“I loved Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The stuff Alice drank and ate made her high (tall) or brought her down (small). There were all kinds of drug metaphors in there. The 60s were very much like that.”
One afternoon while her husband was out, Slick began work on a song inspired by Alice. First came the lyrics. Once those were completed, she moved over to her piano. “I worked on the chords, writing the names of the ones I liked over the phrases. I wrote the song in F-sharp minor, a key that’s ideal for my voice. Minor chords have a certain darkness and sadness.”
The music she came up with had a distinct Spanish flavour. A couple of years before, Slick had had a particularly intense experience listening to Miles Davis’s Sketches Of Spain whilst on LSD. She became obsessed with the album, playing it over and over. This all came out in White Rabbit.
“With the chorus – the Alice lines, like ‘Go ask Alice, when she’s 10 feet tall’ – I shifted to major chords for a release and to celebrate Alice’s courage following the white rabbit down the hole. Once down there, she didn’t have a Prince Charming. She had to save her own ass while going through all the insane hallucinogenic stuff.”
“I identified with Alice. I was a product of ’50s America in Palo Alto, California, where women were housewives with short hair, and everything was highly regulated.
“I went from the planned, bland 50s to the world of being in a rock band without looking back. It was my Alice moment, heading down the hole. White Rabbit seemed like an appropriate title.”
“I always felt like a good-looking schoolteacher singing White Rabbit,” she reflected. “I sang the words slowly and precisely, so the people who needed to hear them wouldn’t miss the point. But they did. To this day, I don’t think most people realise the song was aimed at parents who drank and told their kids not to do drugs.”
A version of the song with a lengthy raga-like introduction quickly became part of the band’s live repertoire. But by the summer of 1966 the Great Society were falling apart: a recording session with producer Sylvester Stewart was a disaster that saw the future Sly Stone walk out in exasperation. Some members were talking about going off travelling. Meanwhile, another up-and-coming Bay Area band were eyeing their singer up with interest.
Jefferson Airplane had already recorded their debut album Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, but when vocalist Signe Toly Anderson left to raise her newborn child, they needed a replacement. In a 2021 Guardian interview, bassist Jack Casady explained why they chose Slick:
“One of the reasons I wanted to get Grace into Jefferson Airplane is that she walked to the edge of the stage to sing right to the audience and look right at you. Prior to that I’d only seen guys doing that.
“The chord structures that she wrote were really interesting and she allowed me to construct her songs in a different manner.”
Slick brought with her both White Rabbit and a Great Society B-side, Someone To Love, which was retitled Somebody To Love. In her first rehearsal she taught the former to her new bandmates. “The song is in F sharp, which is difficult for guitar players as it requires some intricate fingering, but (lead guitarist) Jorma (Kaukonen) and Jack are very good musicians so they were able to adapt to it and do it very well.”
Just two weeks after joining Airplane, Slick and the rest of Airplane were at RCA Victor Studios in Hollywood recording their second album, which would be titled Surrealistic Pillow.
In a 2021 interview with the website Happy Mag, Casady recalled the November afternoon they cut White Rabbit. “We recorded it out at Sunset and Ivar, in a huge room at RCA where they used to record A Hundred And One Strings. The room was massive, so we basically set up the instrumentation in the middle of this room and played it live onto four-track.
“It was very simple to record. I just led the song out as a bass part like Bolero, ripping off Ravel. It was all slow and slinky, it gave us the atmosphere we wanted.”
The lengthy introduction of the Great Society’s version was hacked off so the new version was a succinct two minutes 27: ideal for radio play. “After we recorded White Rabbit, we all went into the control room to hear the playback on the monitor speakers,” Slick said in 2016. “I was blown away. I wasn’t aware I sounded like that, with all that power. I was impressed.”
Surrealistic Pillow was released in February 1967 and, though well received critically, took a while to take off. It took the Top Five success of the new version of Somebody To Love to open doors for the record. Then the follow-up White Rabbit completed the one-two punch that took Airplane, the San Francisco scene, and the Haight-Ashbury counterculture all overground.
Speaking in 2016, Slick remembered that: “After the White Rabbit single came out, RCA told us each week where the record stood on the charts. I didn’t pay much attention. I didn’t set out to write a hit single and I felt that radio only liked White Rabbit because it was short and they could get more ads in.”
Nevertheless, it reached Number Eight in August and would become one of the enduring aural mementoes of that epochal summer.
Jefferson Airplane too would become forever associated with the initial psychedelic explosion. Though they would never hit those commercial heights again, they carried on until they spluttered to a halt in 1973. Together with guitarist Paul Kantner, Slick then formed the successor band Jefferson Starship, remaining there even after they evolved into AOR rockers Starship.
Now 86 and retired from the music business, she’s still a curiously underrated figure in music history. Slick was one of the first women to play a creative role within a rock band, but her pioneering contributions have only rarely been acknowledged by those who walked through the doors she opened.
And White Rabbit not only pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in a pop song, but was a clarion call to a generation to open their minds in a more general sense. “Psychedelic drugs showed you that there are alternative realities,” Slick said in 2021. “You open up to things that are unusual and different, and, in realising that there are alternative ways of looking at things, you become more accepting of things around you.”
“The line in the song “feed your head” is about both reading and psychedelics. I was talking about feeding your head by paying attention: read some books, pay attention.”
