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This was written by Grace Slick, who based the lyrics on Lewis Carroll's book Alice In Wonderland. Like many young musicians in San Francisco, Slick did a lot of drugs. She saw lots of drug references in Carroll's book, including the pills, the smoking caterpillar, the mushroom, and lots of other images that are generally trippy. She noticed that lots of children's' stories involve a substance of some kind that alters reality, and felt it was time to write a song about it.
Slick got the idea for this after taking LSD and spending hours listening to the Miles Davis album Sketches Of Spain. The Spanish beat she came up with was also influenced by Ravel's "Bolero."
Slick wrote and performed this when she was in a band called The Great Society. She brought it with her, along with "Somebody To Love," when she joined Jefferson Airplane in 1966.
On an original recording by The Great Society, the song is barely recognizable due to Grace's higher voice before several throat operations to remove nodes that lowered her vocal range.
This is used in the stage production The Blue Man Group, and appears on their 2003 album The Complex. Music is a big part of the show, which features 3 blue guys engaging the audience with a combination of comedy, percussion, and sloppy stunts. They got a lot of attention when they were used in ads for Intel.
This was used as the theme song for a 1973 movie called Go Ask Alice.
The UK version of the album didn't have this on it.
This was one of the defining songs of the 1967 "Summer Of Love." As young Americans protested the Vietnam war and took a lot of drugs, this played in the background.
Did the band ever get sick of this song? Grace Slick answered this question in a 1976 interview with Melody Maker when she replied: "I can play around with a song on stage without ruining it. We stopped doing 'White Rabbit' for a couple of years because we were getting bored with it. I like it again and we included it last year 'cause it was the year of the rabbit."
The Airplane was often found giving free concerts around the Haight-Asbury area of San Francisco. They shared a large house with several musicians during the psychedelic '60s, often applying for and receiving parade permits to walk the streets. Grace was always a radical thinker, rejecting "Daddy's money." She once appeared on The Merv Griffin talk show made up in black face, causing a big controversy. (thanks, James - Ragin' Rochester, NY, for above 2)
"Go Ask Alice" which is a lyric from this song, inspired an anonymous author to put out a book with that same title. The book was a "diary" of a young girl in the 1960s who had a drug addiction and died. The diary owner's name is never given, and the diary is suspected to be fictional even after it was promoted as true, and the anonymous author is suspected to be Beatrice Sparks, the book's editor. (thanks, BustaJuss - SoPo, NJ)
This capped off Jefferson Airplane's set at Woodstock in 1969. They took the stage at 8am on the third day, following a performance by The Who that started at 3am.
According to Grace Slick's autobiography, the album name came when bandmate Marty Balin played the finished studio tapes to Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead, whose first reaction was "Sounds like a surrealistic pillow." Slick says that she loves the fact that the phrase Surrealistic Pillow "leaves the interpretation up to the beholder. Asleep or awake on the pillow? Dreaming? Making love? The adjective 'Surrealistic' leaves the picture wide open."
This song is heard multiple times in the movie The Game with Michael Douglas. It demonstrates the madness Douglas feels in the movie. (thanks, Nathan - Brugge, Belgium)
In the film Fear and Lothing in Las Vegas, there is a scene where Dr. Gonzo is in a bathtub and this song is playing on a tape player. In an effort to end his life, Gonzo implores Raoul Duke to put the tape player in the tub "When White Rabbit peaks." Instead of doing as instructed, Duke throws a grapefruit at Gonzo and unplugs the tape player. (thanks, Justin - Durango, CO)
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this song was recently used in Fringe. Series 04 episode 15 ( s04e15 - Walter in the lab / Walters lab).
http://www.tvrage.com/Fringe/episodes/1065147346
http://www.tvrage.com/Fringe/episodes/1065147346
I think it's very interesting, and maybe a little ironic, how "dark" and "ominous" sounding this song is, despite the fact that it's constructed entirely with Major chords.
Not an "unheard-of" cp, but quite unusual by most standards... 2 other examples of the "all Major" cp: "I Am the Walrus" (Beatles), "Everything in it's Right Place" (Radiohead)
Lewis Carroll was a pen name for the Reverad Charles Lutwig Dodgeson who was a mathmatics professor at Oxford. The dean at the time was Dean Liddel (it sounds like fiddle) and Dean Liddel had three daughters one of which was Alice. Alice was six at the time when he was much older. He and a friend took the girls on a boat ride one sunny day and they asked him to tell him a story and so he came up with Alice's Adventures Underground which was he original title of the first book. When he went to publish it he added two chapters and the original illistrations were done by himself. The first copy went to Alice Liddel and it was red with a rabbit on the cover. She had the book until she sold it in an auction after the end of the 19th century. Charles didn't not have a sexual attraction to any of the children. He hated boys and thought of girls in a purity sense. He never molested them. He took pictures (with their parents permission) of some of the children naked but if you look into it it was a trend for artists at the time to draw off of children's nude photographs. He later gave the photos back to the children or burned them as to keep them from embaressment. Charles never did drugs. Check your sources and facts people!
A very little known song that is even more that way is the Pink Floyd song "Cirrus Minor."
Check it out.
To Spencer in Los Angeles: There is no evidence the Lewis Carroll was a child molester. He may have had some pedophilic tendencies, but maybe not. He was a photographer when it was a rather new art form, and took nude artistic pictures of young girls. From what I have read, this was always done with parents in the room and was not sexual in any way. It seems odd to our jaded eyes that a man taking such pictures could be doing it for purely artistic reasons, but it did not raise any alarms in Carroll's time. We cannot know what thoughts were in Carroll's mind as he took these pictures, but since people willing allowed their daughters to be photographed, Carroll's contemporaries must have trusted him.
None of you can REALLY determine what a book is about. Only an author can say what their book is REALLY about. Lewis Carrol may have written Alice's Adventures In Wonderland about drugs, or maybe he didn't. It's not exactly up to us to define it. You can say what it means to you, but you have know idea what it might have meant to him.
I think this song has a similar theme to the one I've mentioned. The point is not whether Grace Slick or the other band members were doing LSD, pot, or any drugs at all. What matters is that they--and whether or not we--are willing to "feed our heads" and take the risk of seeing what we couldn't have seen before. I love the lyrics, Grace's singing and the chord progressions (even though I'm not a musician) on this track.
Contrarywise (using a Lewis Carroll word here), the song can be seen to refer to drugs. Some drugs can produce the hallucination that you're falling, even though you're steady, or in a position where you cannot fall (sitting or lying down). Some drugs (legal and illegal) will mess up your equilibrium, making you feel like you're swaying one way or the other, or else like I said earlier, make you feel like you're falling. In the story, Alice falls down a deep hole that seems to go on forever when trying to catch the white rabbit.
Alice = Mila
Rumor has it that "Feed your head" was a quote or paraphrase from a remark by Ted Kennedy, but I have no source on that. It may be nonsense, an attempt to insert meaning where none exists.
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OK, so first, Charles Dodgson IS Lewis Carroll. Second, I'm highly doubting that the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland is based in any way on Timothy Leary's book, since Timothy Leary hadn't even written the book yet.
Also, the book Go Ask Alice is known to be a fake, written by Beatrice Sparks. Sparks wrote numerous morality tales claiming they were true.
- Matt, Monroe, LA
>>The game was made in 1997
-Christian, Montreal.
Dr-Gonzo referes to the vocal climax at the end, as "where the rabbits bites its own head off" which is pretty cool, one of my friends drew the scene of the rabbit eating its own head, (starts with the ears and continues through) its damn freaky
"jefferson Airplane" is not another name for clip for holding a roach,
Also Jefferson Airplane did a gig with the rollingstones, everything was free, so as bouncers they got the Hells Angels, who they payed of with Speed and grog, ultimately 3 people got killied, 1 with a leaded pole cue (on stage), whilst the stones were playing only a few metres from Mick Jagger,
"White Rabbit" was used in the movie "Platoon", a movie about Vietnam written by the vietnam vet Oliver Stone. It's playing from a stereo in the scene where Chris takes drugs the first time.
Great song, BTW. Grace Slick is one of the all-time greatest female rock vocalists.