Jefferson Airplane – White Rabbit
About The Song
“White Rabbit” is a song written by Grace Slick and recorded by the American rock band Jefferson Airplane for their 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow. It draws on imagery from Lewis Carroll’s 1865 book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its 1871 sequel Through the Looking-Glass.
It was released as a single and became the band’s second top-10 success, peaking at number eight on the Billboard Hot 100. The song was ranked number 478 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2004, number 483 in 2010, and number 455 in 2021 and appears on The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.
Slick explained to The Guardian how she wrote “White Rabbit” on a piano that cost her around $50. “It had eight or 10 keys missing, but that was OK,” she said, “because I could hear in my head the notes that weren’t there. I used that piano to write several different songs.”
“White Rabbit,” in particular, was a product of its time. Appearing on Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 sophomore album Surrealistic Pillow, the first with Slick as a vocalist, the song closely resembled the decade – its ethos and the counterculture – and would soon become synonymous with it.
“The 1960s resembled Wonderland for me,” Slick told the outlet. “Like Alice, I met all kinds of strange characters, but I was comfortable with it.”
The song’s mind-expanding meaning came with the help of mind-expanding substances. “In the 60s, the drugs were not ones like heroin and alcohol that you take to blot out a terrible life, but psychedelics: marijuana, LSD and shroomies,” Slick said. “Psychedelic drugs showed you that there are alternative realities. You open up to things that are unusual and different, and, in realizing that there are alternative ways of looking at things, you become more accepting of things around you.”
She admits the tune is darkly tinged. “It’s not saying everything’s going to be wonderful,” she added. “The Red Queen is shouting off with her head and the White Knight is talking backwards. Lewis Carroll was looking at how things are run and the people who rule us.”
But the main message comes with the closing line feed your head, wailed in repetition. “[It is] both about reading and psychedelics,” she said of the lyric. “I was talking about feeding your head by paying attention: read some books, pay attention.”
The song explores psychedelics in their fundamental form, the band’s bassist Jack Casady echoed in the same interview. “The idea of taking psychedelic drugs to open you up and make you more receptive,” he added. Many people during that era took psychedelics, he explained. “That was part of the environment of the time and ‘White Rabbit’ reflected that.”
Video
Lyrics
One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don’t do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she’s ten feet tall
And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you’re going to fall
Tell ’em a hookah-smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call
Call Alice
When she was just small
When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice
I think she’ll know
When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head
Feed your head
