One day in 1963, Grace Slick, a model who worked in a San Francisco department store, took the fashionable psychedelic drug LSD and listened to Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain “about 50 times without stopping”, by her own account.
She particularly loved “Concierto de Aranjuez”which accounts for virtually the whole of the first side. It’s the trumpeter’s take on the mournful second movement of the work of the same name by Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo.
Slick, born in 1939, the same year that Rodrigo wrote the concerto, found Davis’s interpretation “hypnotic”. Two years later, when she was composing the music for some Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland-inspired lyrics she had written, “Sketches of Spain was drilled into my head and came squirting out in various ways.”
Her band, The Great Society, would perform this song at their gigs around San Francisco and when she jumped ship for Jefferson Airplane in 1966, “White Rabbit” was one of two numbers she brought with her. They recorded it for the album Surrealistic Pillow, released in February 1967.
“White Rabbit”opens with a bolero-style bassline (Airplane bassist Jack Casady has said he was “ripping off” Ravel’s Boléro) and a military beat on the snare drum before a sinuous Spanish-inflected electric guitar figure leads in Slick’s vocal: “One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small…”
The White Rabbit of the title is the one that Alice follows down the hole and the song is filled with imagery from Lewis Carroll’s classic and with drug references. It builds quickly to an intense climaxin which Slick exhorts the listener to “Feed your head”.
Jefferson Airplane performed “White Rabbit” on the hugely popular US TV show The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in May 1967 — the hint of a smirk playing across Slick’s face — and put it out as a single in June. It reached number eight in the US charts and became part of the soundtrack for the Summer of Love, chiming with the counterculture zeitgeist. Slick would later claim that “Feed your head” was intended as an endorsement of the value of education, not simply as a rallying cry for hippies wigging out on psychedelics. However, Slick, a born mischief-maker, was an enthusiastic advocate for LSD and once, when accidentally invited to the White House, plotted to spike Richard Nixon’s drink with the drug. She was apprehended before she could implement her plan.
Of the many covers of “White Rabbit”, guitarist George Benson’s jazzy 1971 versionis one of the most interesting, seeming to pay tribute to both Rodrigo and Davis as well as Jefferson Airplane. The Damned,in the process of broadening their sound from straightforward punk, released a rocked-up version as a single in 1980 but it didn’t trouble the upper reaches of the charts.
Patti Smithrecorded an especially trippy version for her 2007 album of covers, Twelve. She has described first hearing Slick’s voice on the radio as a “revelation” and wrote: “Make no mistake; we all owe her a debt. She was like no other and opened a door that will never close again.” Another successful interpretation is Pink’s powerful rendition, which was used in a trailer for the 2016 film Alice Through the Looking Glass.
Usually when the song appears in films, it is associated with drugs or disorientation. It features in Oliver Stone’s Vietnam movie, Platoon, in a scene in which the soldiers get stoned in an underground bunker. It’s used in Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in the sequence in which the acid-crazed lawyer demands the writer throw a tape machine playing “White Rabbit” into the bath with him.
“White Rabbit” was given another lease of life three years ago when Susan Doran, who runs Living Archives, a consultancy with particular focus on the San Francisco Bay Area counterculture, uploaded a track of Slick’s vocal — minus the music — to YouTube. It showcases the extraordinary power of her soaring, spine-tingling voice and has had more than 2.3m views.
“A friend ended up locating the isolated vocals and shooting me a file of this holy grail, which he said had been floating around audio engineer discussion groups for years,” says Doran. “People are genuinely moved by it. There are more than 5,500 comments. Stories are shared, fond recollections unearthed, squibs of poetry proffered, confessions about themselves, marvels from younger people at whatever this is, laments of lives gone by too quickly, appreciation of art and music.
“There is something about the song, and Grace Slick's delivery, that seems to resonate with people as otherworldly or transcendent. It’s the most frequent theme reflected in listener feedback.”
What are your memories of ‘White Rabbit’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Spectra Jazz; RCA/BMG Heritage; Zig-Zag Territoires; Epic/Associated; Ace Records; Columbia/Legacy
Picture credit: William N. Jacobellis/New York Post Archives via Getty Images