The room was massive, so we basically set up the instrumentation in the middle of this room and played it live onto four-track. And in the following month, the band set out to record Surrealistic Pillow.Ĭasady recalls the day Jefferson Airplane recorded it: “We recorded it out at Sunset and Ivar, in a huge room at RCA where they used to record A Hundred And One Strings. What I like about Grace was the fact she stood right at the end of the stage and made good contact with the audience.”Īirplane manager Bill Thompson drafted Grace’s contract for a measly $750 and Slick was signed, replacing the clear belled folk tones of Anderson with a fiery, strident approach. “I liked Grace’s singing because we wanted a good, aggressive singer for the band,” says Casady, “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. Airplane bassist Jack Casady had seen Grace several times and wanted her in. Sharing the bill with a crumbling Great Society were Jefferson Airplane, then searching for a new singer. Then came a benefit show at the Fillmore in September 1966. It was Eastern flavoured, with an improvised raga intro and Slick’s vocals were more contrived. Sitting at over six minutes the original version was much trippier, and three times the length, of Airplane’s single version. Then she presented it to her bandmates, San Francisco raga-folk avatars the Great Society, who included Grace’s husband, drummer Jerry Slick, brother-in-law Darby Slick on lead guitar, bassist Peter Van Gelder on bass and rhythm guitarist Dave Minor. The Spanish beat that defines White Rabbit is also influenced by Ravel’s Bolero. Jerry and I put the piano in our living room.”įittingly, Slick wrote the piece at the end of an acid trip during which she listened to Miles Davis’ Sketches Of Spain for 24 hours straight. I didn’t play way up there anyway-the notes were too pingy-so I bought it. “It was painted about 90 coats of bright red and was missing around 10 keys in the upper register. 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. Slick wrote White Rabbit at her home in Marin County in 1966. He may have taken opiate-infused drug Laudanum (which was readily available to everyone in the 1860s), though his personal journals make no explicit mention of drugs or other mind-altering substances. Slick also sees the song as a liberating call to arms for intelligence and education, to ‘feed your head’.įunnily enough, Lewis Carroll indulged in drugs while he wrote Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. 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.” “They also seemed unaware that many books they read to us as kids had drug use as a subtext. Slick also blamed it on lousy parents with their “glasses of scotch.” It’s hypnotic.In 2016, at the age of 76, Ms. Slick remembers: “I took acid and listened to Miles Davis’s ‘Sketches of Spain’ album for 24 hours straight until it burned into my brain-particularly ‘Concierto de Aranjuez,‘ which takes up most of the first side. A 1960 album by jazz icon Miles Davis was also a major influence.

Musically, “White Rabbit” features a “march” tempo and instrumentation that was influenced by Spanish bolero music. ‘White Rabbit’ seemed like an appropriate title.” It was my Alice moment, heading down the hole. I went from the planned, bland ’50s to the world of being in a rock band without looking back. I was a product of ’50s America in Palo Alto, California, where women were housewives with short hair and everything was highly regulated. While the song is obviously about drugs, Slick also saw it as a metaphor for her own escape from society’s outdated rules: The Illinois Crime Commission released a list of “drug-oriented rock records” in which they said that “White Rabbit” was “extolling the kicks provided by LSD and other psychedelics.” The song’s metaphorical drug references flew largely over the heads of radio censors, but “White Rabbit” did eventually end up on “blacklists” at several stations once its meaning became apparent. The song became the band’s second biggest hit, peaking at #8 on the pop charts. Upon joining Jefferson Airplane in 1966, she offered up “White Rabbit” while the band was recording their seminal second album, Surrealistic Pillow. “White Rabbit” was written by San Francisco-based singer Grace Slick while she was still a member of her original band, The Great Society. One of the most iconic songs of ’60s psychedelic rock, “White Rabbit” uses imagery from Alice In Wonderland to illustrate the surreal effects of taking hallucinogenic drugs.

Jefferson airplane white rabbit