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Grace Slick, singer and songwriter
All the fairy tales read to little girls feature a prince charming who comes to save them. But not Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice was alone, and she was in a very strange place, but she went on and she followed her curiosity – it’s the White Rabbit. Many women could have gotten a message from this story about how you can move your own agenda forward.
The 1960s looked like Wonderland to me. Like Alice, I met all kinds of weird characters, but I was comfortable with it. I wrote White Rabbit on a red upright piano which cost me around $ 50. Eight or ten keys were missing, but that was okay because I could hear notes in my head that weren’t there. I have used this piano to write several different songs. When I started making money, I bought a better one.
In the 1960s, drugs weren’t drugs like heroin and alcohol that you take to wipe out a terrible life, but psychedelics: marijuana, LSD, and mushrooms. Psychedelic drugs have shown you that there are alternate realities. You open up to unusual and different things, and, realizing that there are other ways of looking at things, you become more accepting of the things around you.
The line of the song “feed your head” is about both reading and psychedelics. I was talking about feeding your head being careful: read books, be careful.
I heard Ravel’s Bolero on the radio and it really surprised me. I love Spanish music and I am inspired by things no matter how popular they are. Bolero starts with a few instruments, then more are added. It is as if an orgasm is being built. My song was also built in the same way.
The song is a little dark. This doesn’t mean that everything is going to be wonderful. The red queen shouts “with her head” and the “white knight speaks backwards”. Lewis Carroll looked at how things are run and the people who govern us.
I was playing White Rabbit with The Great Society and Jefferson Airplane asked me to join the group. I said “you bet!” because I really liked Jack Casady’s playing – the sound of his bass just blew me away. The song is in F sharp, which is difficult for guitarists because it requires complex fingering, but [lead guitarist] Jorma [Kaukonen] and Jack are very good musicians so they have been able to adapt to it and do it very well.
I was born in the year of the rabbit and all kinds of white rabbit stuff has happened to me. It’s almost witchcraft. I had a fire in my house – about 20 years ago – the only thing saved was a ceramic white rabbit. I still have ceramic white rabbits in the house and today people send me white rabbits.
White Rabbit has been making royalties for over 50 years. I still have to pay my bills for this song. That’s a good song!
Jack Casady, bassist
I moved to San Francisco in 1965 and there were a number of bands in the Bay Area that all knew each other, including The Great Society, of which Grace was a part. One of the reasons I wanted to bring Grace into Jefferson Airplane was because she walked over to the edge of the stage to sing directly in front of the audience and look you straight in the eye. Before that, I had only seen guys do that. The chord structures she wrote were really interesting and she allowed me to build her songs in a different way.
It’s hard to explain how innocent the early days of drug discovery was before people got so addicted to them, or their lives changed, or made some really bad life decisions. The song explores the simplest form: the idea of taking psychedelic drugs to open you up and make you more receptive.
Everyone was taking psychedelics but we rarely played them, unlike the guys from Grateful Dead. When I did it it got a little too weird for me – my bass was turning into a tree trunk and growing vines and I was like, “I have to move on here”. But it was part of the environment at the time and White Rabbit reflected that.
It’s always a compliment how much the song has been used in the movies. It’s because you hear White Rabbit and right away you’re sucked into his world – it’s like you’re Alice falling through the looking glass.
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