The stories that inspired Jefferson Airplane song ‘White Rabbit’
The quintessential Jefferson Airplane song is, of course, ‘White Rabbit’. Grace Slick originally wrote the song in a band called The Great Society, in which she played with her first husband. When the band split in 1966, Slick took the track and another, Somebody to Love’, to her new band.
As for the song’s inspiration, Slick had been inspired by several children’s stories, particularly Lewis Carroll’s 1865 story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It is well known that Slick had a penchant for psychedelic drugs, and in Carroll’s text, she thought there were many underlying references to narcotics. Amongst these were the smoking caterpillar and the frequent talk of mushrooms, not to mention that Alice has to take a pill to see the reality of the world and that the everyday world of adults is based on an illusion. In many ways, this is the same way Neo understands the validity of the world in The Matrix when Morpheus offers him a choice of two pills.
Discussing the drugged-out literary influences on ‘White Rabbit’, Slick said: “They’d read us all these stories where you’d take some kind of chemical and have a great adventure. Alice in Wonderland is blatant; she gets literally high, too big for the room, while the caterpillar sits on a psychedelic mushroom smoking opium.”
However, Carroll’s story was not the only children’s fantasy where Slick saw seemingly blatant references to the power that drugs have in awakening a true sense of consciousness. She added: “In the Wizard of Oz, they land in a field of opium poppies, wake up and see this Emerald City. Peter Pan? Sprinkle some white dust-cocaine on your head, and you can fly.”
Slick had always been sure to get the point across to those who listened to the song. “I always felt like a good-looking schoolteacher singing ‘White Rabbit.’ I’d sing the words slowly and precisely, so the people who needed to hear them wouldn’t miss the point,” she said.
However, not everyone was alert to the fact that the song is essentially a pro-drugs anthem. “But they did,” she added. “To this day, I don’t think most people realize the song was aimed at parents who drank and told their kids not to do drugs. I felt they were full of shit, but to write a good song, you need a few more words than that.” Nowadays, the message of ‘White Rabbit’ is clear, as are the references to the stories that inspired it.
