{"id":5204,"date":"2025-06-22T12:34:11","date_gmt":"2025-06-22T12:34:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/5204\/"},"modified":"2025-06-22T12:34:11","modified_gmt":"2025-06-22T12:34:11","slug":"what-did-jefferson-airplane-want-to-ask-alice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/5204\/","title":{"rendered":"What did Jefferson Airplane want to ask Alice?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Jefferson<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ Alamy)<\/p>\n

Sat 21 June 2025 22:00, UK <\/p>\n

Long before the perm-mullet horrors of Starship clogged the 1980s pop charts, their pre-predecessor, before Jefferson Starship, was Jefferson Airplane,<\/a> the lysergic pop conjurers who anticipated the psychedelia that was looming before most of the West Coast generation. <\/p>\n

Fixtures of the countercultural revolution, Jefferson Airplane could be found in all of the era\u2019s 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\u2019s turbulent close.<\/p>\n

Their second album, but the first with classic singer Grace Slick, 1967\u2019s\u00a0Surrealistic Pillow,\u00a0would score the heady sea changes taking place across San Francisco and the nation as a whole as potently as that year\u2019s\u00a0The Doors\u00a0or\u00a0Sgt Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Slick\u2019s recruitment was an essential element in Jefferson Airplane\u2019s trajectory, presenting an arresting presence with her contralto voice and lysergic songcraft propelling the band to commercial heights.<\/p>\n

Having resurrected \u2018Somebody to Love\u2019 from her previous band The Great Society, Slick dusted off another number she\u2019d written with them that would endure as Jefferson Airplane\u2019s defining track.<\/p>\n

\u2018White Rabbit\u2019 had been written at her Marin County home in 1966 on a beat-up piano with missing keys. Inspired by an LSD<\/a> trip and a repeated spin of Miles Davis\u2019 Sketches Of Spain for nearly 24 hours, its lyrical allusions to Lewis Carrol\u2019s Alice\u2019s 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 \u2018The Man\u2019. The White Rabbit served as a perfect vehicle to illustrate druggy curiosity and chemical beckon.<\/p>\n

The single also was conceived as a slap around the face to \u2018mom and pop\u2019 about the free-spirited antics their little darlings were up to beyond any comprehension of the hippy idyll or lifestyle, utilising the unfolding children\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Such tales were appealing to Slick for their lack of conventional, Prince Charming endings, too. \u201c[She was] on her own\u2026 in a very strange place, but she kept on going and she followed her curiosity\u2014that\u2019s the White Rabbit,\u201d she revealed to The Guardian in 2021. \u201cA lot of women could have taken a message from that story about how you can push your own agenda\u201d. <\/p>\n

She added: \u201cThe line in the song \u2018feed your head\u2019 is both about reading and psychedelics\u2026feeding your head by paying attention: read some books, pay attention\u201d.<\/p>\n

So, what did Jefferson Airplane want to ask Alice?<\/p>\n

Slick never explicitly asks Alice anything, but when detailing the psychedelic drama of Alice\u2019s trip through Wonderland<\/a>, 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\u2019s \u2018cakes\u2019 or dropping several acid tabs.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd you\u2019ve just had some kind of mushroom \/ And your mind is moving low \/ Go ask Alice \/ I think she\u2019ll know\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n

The Far Out Music Newsletter<\/p>\n

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Straight to your inbox.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ Alamy) Sat 21 June 2025 22:00, UK Long before the perm-mullet horrors of Starship…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":5205,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[6669,171,6670,6671,975,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-5204","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-alice-in-wonderland","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-grace-slick","11":"tag-jefferson-airplane","12":"tag-music","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5204\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}