Jerry and I put the piano in our living room.”įittingly, Slick wrote the piece at the end of an acid trip during which she listened to Miles Davis’ Sketches Of Spain for 24 hours straight. I didn’t play way up there anyway-the notes were too pingy-so I bought it. “It was painted about 90 coats of bright red and was missing around 10 keys in the upper register. She had purchased a small upright piano for $80 at a warehouse San Francisco, on which she wrote many of Jefferson Airplane’s earliest songs. Slick wrote White Rabbit at her home in Marin County in 1966. He may have taken opiate-infused drug Laudanum (which was readily available to everyone in the 1860s), though his personal journals make no explicit mention of drugs or other mind-altering substances. Slick also sees the song as a liberating call to arms for intelligence and education, to ‘feed your head’.įunnily enough, Lewis Carroll indulged in drugs while he wrote Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. 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.”
“They also seemed unaware that many books they read to us as kids had drug use as a subtext. Slick also blamed it on lousy parents with their “glasses of scotch.” With character reference’s to a spacey Alice, the hookah-smoking caterpillar, the White Knight, Red Queen, the Dormouse, and of course the White Rabbit, the influence is clear.īut does either work explicitly relate to drugs? Despite encountering pills that make you larger or smaller and eating ‘some kind of mushroom’ that leaves ‘your mind moving low’, Grace Slick is adamant the song does not refer to drugs.įor Slick, the song “is about following your curiosity. Unsurprisingly, Slick took open inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s dreamscape masterpiece Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. The fluid surrealism and perceptive alterations imbued Carroll’s work with a notoriety for being acid-laced. The myth, the idea, the acid.” Lewis’s LSD As Airplane founder Marty Balin put it: “It was timely for the ear. Long names and even longer shadows.Ī nestled gem, the two and half minute trance sparkled amidst the golden plated Surrealistic Pillow, and broadcast the hippie ideals of its time. Rising amidst the boiling pot of artists that orbited around Haight-Ashbury in the sixties, Jefferson Airplane came to inhabit the dais of honoured talent shared by their Bay Area contemporaries The Grateful Dead, Sly & The Family Stone, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. The soundtrack of the Summer of Love 1967 perfectly captures the free-wheeling counterculture essence of the band’s leading lady, Grace Slick. Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit was famously the first pop song focused on the experience of hallucinogens that scored major air time on mainstream radio.
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