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Sat 21 June 2025 22:00, UK
Long before the perm-mullet horrors of Starship clogged the 1980s pop charts, their pre-predecessor, before Jefferson Starship, was Jefferson Airplane, the lysergic pop conjurers who anticipated the psychedelia that was looming before most of the West Coast generation.
Fixtures of the countercultural revolution, Jefferson Airplane could be found in all of the era’s prominent festivals and happenings, on the bill at Woodstock and Monterey Pop as well as the disastrous Altamont show organised by The Rolling Stones at the decade’s turbulent close.
Their second album, but the first with classic singer Grace Slick, 1967’s Surrealistic Pillow, would score the heady sea changes taking place across San Francisco and the nation as a whole as potently as that year’s The Doors or Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Slick’s recruitment was an essential element in Jefferson Airplane’s trajectory, presenting an arresting presence with her contralto voice and lysergic songcraft propelling the band to commercial heights.
Having resurrected ‘Somebody to Love’ from her previous band The Great Society, Slick dusted off another number she’d written with them that would endure as Jefferson Airplane’s defining track.
‘White Rabbit’ had been written at her Marin County home in 1966 on a beat-up piano with missing keys. Inspired by an LSD trip and a repeated spin of Miles Davis’ Sketches Of Spain for nearly 24 hours, its lyrical allusions to Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland perfectly bottled the psychedelic washes taking place in the American underground, as well as the youthful urges to wander off the beaten track toward realms of discovery far removed from their parents or the understanding of ‘The Man’. The White Rabbit served as a perfect vehicle to illustrate druggy curiosity and chemical beckon.
The single also was conceived as a slap around the face to ‘mom and pop’ about the free-spirited antics their little darlings were up to beyond any comprehension of the hippy idyll or lifestyle, utilising the unfolding children’s book and its possible pushes to the counterculture in such stories depicting young girls navigating strange lands just as Alice does, eating suspect mushrooms to alter her size.
Such tales were appealing to Slick for their lack of conventional, Prince Charming endings, too. “[She was] on her own… in a very strange place, but she kept on going and she followed her curiosity—that’s the White Rabbit,” she revealed to The Guardian in 2021. “A lot of women could have taken a message from that story about how you can push your own agenda”.
She added: “The line in the song ‘feed your head’ is both about reading and psychedelics…feeding your head by paying attention: read some books, pay attention”.
So, what did Jefferson Airplane want to ask Alice?
Slick never explicitly asks Alice anything, but when detailing the psychedelic drama of Alice’s trip through Wonderland, Jefferson Airplane push the listener to talk and seek advice from Alice as to how to embrace a world of rippling dimensions, shifting reality, and upside characters that are likely to be encountered, be it consuming one of Carroll’s ‘cakes’ or dropping several acid tabs.
“And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom / And your mind is moving low / Go ask Alice / I think she’ll know” offers no clarity or answers, but paints a lyrical vignette of psychoactive intrigue and cosmic discovery that surely makes the journey fun enough regardless of whether you arrive to any particular destination.
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