The room was massive, so we basically set up the instrumentation in the middle of this room and played it live onto four-track. According to Casady, Airplane were put in “a huge room at RCA where they used to record A Hundred And One Strings. With a brand new singer, Jefferson Airplane travelled to Sunset and Ivar studios to record ‘White Rabbit’. What I like about Grace was the fact she stood right at the end of the stage and made good contact with the audience.” “She had a unique timbre and sound to her voice Signe, who was our first singer, came out of a folk background and had a contralto voice with smooth harmonies. “I liked Grace’s singing because we wanted a good, aggressive singer for the band,” he recalled. Jack Casady had already seen Grace sing a few times and desperately wanted her for his band. At a benefit show at San Francisco’s Fillmore venue, the band appeared on the bill alongside a group called Jefferson Airplane. Unfortunately, Darby Slick’s excessive drug and the other internal conflicts plaguing the Great Society made Grace wonder if she was really in the right outfit. The track quickly became a staple of the Great Society’s live set. So Darby came back with a couple of songs and Grace came back with White Rabbit.” So Grace’s husband Jerry challenged them: ‘What are you gonna do? Let David write all the songs?’ Y’know, ‘Do something!’. “I was too busy keeping up with my various jobs. According to rhythm guitarist David Minor, the song came at exactly the right time: “When we started working, nobody had anything because I couldn’t write anymore,” he recalls. Slick then presented the new offering to her bandmates, the San Franciscan experimental folk outfit the Great Society. As a result, the flavour of both tracks became embedded in the fabric of ‘White Rabbit’. During her trip, she listened to Miles Davis’s ‘Sketches of Spain’ and Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ on repeat for 24 hours straight. Drink me! The caterpillar is sitting on a psychedelic mushroom smoking opium!” Slick wrote the track after taking LSD. Eat me! She gets literally high, too big for the room. So when Slick calls for the young people of America to “feed your head”, she is not just advocating drug use she is calling for young people to reach out and claim their own reality.Īt the same, Slick’s lyrics highlight how ironic the older generation’s dismissal of drug use really is: “In all those children’s stories, you take some kind of chemical and have a great adventure,” she told writer Mark Paytress. Slick seems to have recognised this, using images of “the pill that mother gives you” to comment on the way the individual’s reality is simply the reality they’ve been told to believe in by their parents. However, the hookah-smoking caterpillar in Caroll’s story is not so much a celebration of drug culture as he is a feature of a landscape that fails to adhere to the logic of the real world, which, in Alice in Wonderland, is synonymous with childhood. The singer based the lyrics on Lewis Carroll’s transgressive children’s book Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, which itself includes the occasional reference to drug use. But does it work on different levels.” For Slick, who penned the track, ‘White Rabbit’ was not simply a song about drugs but the subversion of authority. It became the signature for the people who were doing the things it had reference to. This quest for spiritual Enlightenment incorporated the use of hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD, which were promoted as a way of expanding one’s consciousness.’White Rabbit’ captured all that in under four minutes.Īs Airplane bassist Jack Casady once recalled: “It wasn’t actually a big hit, but it was within the culture of the times.

Adopting the facets of previous countercultural movements, they practised open sexual relationships and sought spiritual guidance from outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, embracing Buddhism, Hindusim and other Eastern religions. They advocated non-violent protest and preached openness and tolerance. With the world in ruins, hippies sought new ways of experiencing reality as a collective unit. Rather, its enduring popularity is down it the way it was adopted by the people who regarded drug use as one of the key tenants of the hippie ideology.

It may come as something of a surprise but ‘White Rabbit wasn’t even a hit on release. But as frontwoman Grace Slick herself observed, ‘White Rabbit’ was about more than the drugs. Released in 1967, the Jefferson Airplane freak-out tapped into the ideals of the hippie subculture with academic precision, quickly becoming an anthem for an entire generation of young people seeking new modes of living, most of which involved taking heaps of hallucinogens. Few songs evoke the acid-tinged revelry of the ‘Summer of Love’ quite like ‘White Rabbit’.

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