But does either work [White Rabbit / Alice in Wonderland] 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.
For Slick, the song “is about following your curiosity. The White Rabbit is your curiosity.”
In 2016, at the age of 76, Ms. Slick also blamed it on lousy parents 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.”
Slick also sees the song as a liberating call to arms for intelligence and education, to ‘feed your head’.
Slick wrote White Rabbit at her home in Marin County in 1966. 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.
“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 [Slick, Grace’s husband] and I put the piano in our living room.”
AI imagining Grace at the Red Piano:
Casady recalls the day Jefferson Airplane recorded [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.”
She said that the music was heavily influenced by Miles Davis’s 1960 album Sketches of Spain, particularly Davis’s treatment of the Concierto de Aranjuez (1939). She later said: “Writing weird stuff about Alice backed by a dark Spanish march was in step with what was going on in San Francisco then.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Slick mentioned that, in addition to Alice in Wonderland, her other inspiration for the song was Ravel’s Boléro. Like Boléro, “White Rabbit” is essentially one long crescendo.
[ed. note: no surprise, the late stage capitalistic Wall Street Journal has a massive pay wall]
Grace’s Relationship with the Bird
Quite the catalogue…
Only in America…..
Grace Slick and Big Bird
What have we done to our children?
Semi-Sequitur: Larry Bird and the Big Bird Connection
There is no connection.
Semi-Sequitur: Signe Anderson
Signe Anderson was one of the founding members of Jefferson Airplane, but left the band in 1966 after giving birth to her first child.
n July 1966, Anderson informed Bill Graham that she was quitting the band after a series of shows they were playing in Chicago; she had given birth to her and Jerry’s first child and realized that taking a newborn on the road was not feasible. However, Graham asked her to stay with the band through the October shows at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, to which she agreed. This gave the band time to search for her successor, eventually choosing Grace Slick after Sherry Snow declined their offer. Allegedly there were other factors, such as the hostility of other band members toward her husband.
Death Anderson died at her home in Beaverton, Oregon, at the age of 74 on January 28, 2016, from the effects of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). She died a few hours after Jefferson Airplane co-founder Paul Kantner died, also at age 74.
