♫ White Rabbit ♫ (Redux)

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I seized upon 5 different songs tonight, found I had played them all within the past year … wouldn’t you think I could remember what I’ve played for a year or so?  Methinks my memory is going … going …   Anyway, being tired and having much left to do before I can go to bed tonight, I decided to redux this one because … I like it.  No other reason. 

I frequently make reference to being “down in the rabbit hole”, meaning my mood, mind and psyche are in a dark place, usually from the topics I write about, sometimes for more personal reasons.  But this song, written by Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, is about another sort of rabbit hole altogether.

Slick got the idea for this song after taking LSD and spending hours listening to the Miles Davis album Sketches Of Spain, especially the opening track, “Concierto de Aranjuez.”

Slick based the lyrics on Lewis Carroll’s book Alice In Wonderland. Like many young musicians in San Francisco, Slick did a lot of drugs, and she saw a surfeit of drug references in Carroll’s book, including the pills, the smoking caterpillar, the mushroom, and lots of other images that are pretty trippy. She noticed that many children’s stories involve a substance of some kind that alters reality, and felt it was time to write a song about it.

This is not necessarily one of my favourite songs of the 60s, but it is one of those songs that can get stuck in your head and just won’t leave.  And I do love the Spanish beat and the guitar sequence at the beginning.  Anyway, it got stuck in my head today as I was cleaning the bathroom, and as of this writing, at 11:00 p.m., it is still stuck there.  So, I thought it best to transfer it to your heads!  No thanks are necessary  😏

White Rabbit
Jefferson Airplane

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

And 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

Songwriters: Grace Wing Slick
White Rabbit lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

30 thoughts on “♫ White Rabbit ♫ (Redux)”

  3. Jill, the line I remember the most is “the ones that mother gives you, don’t do anything at all.” That shows the impact of the LSD era. Grace was a talented singer, but the band had rocky relationships throughout, as many do. I think she left the band, it was renamed “Starship” and then she returned later. It may have been as much to do with drug problems. The person I am surprised is still alive is Eric Clapton. His biographies lay out a huge heroin addiction problem. Yet, too many stars did not make it out of that era – Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Mama Cass, etc. Keith

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  7. Such a short song, even for those days, and one without a chorus, unheard of.
    Timothy Leary said it even quicker: “Tune in. Turn on. Drop out!” Then someone suggested we should “Find ourself.” So we did. Well, some of us did. Some lost themselves even more than they already were. Nothing’s ever perfect.
    Good memories, Jill.

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