Unravelling the weird world of Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’
“Insignificant events can take on monumental proportions when your head is full of practically nothing.” — Grace Slick.
In 1963, the patent for LSD expired. There was a three-year period after that where the drug was legal. Although it seems very un-sixties-like to mention admin, it was this logistical oversight that defined an era. The kaleidoscopic headwind of acid blurred the zeitgeist in a tie-die swirl of peace, love and utter psychedelic mayhem. Released on this day in 1967, we’re venturing down the rabbit hole of the Jefferson Airplane song that seemed to distil a movement down to a chemically pure two-and-a-half-minute song. The band dropped the track onto the tongues of the freak masses all around the world, and the wavy ripples of that trip are still being felt to this day. It is the anthem that defines the heart counterculture more than any other. “One pill makes you larger/And one pill makes you small.”
“I always felt like a good-looking schoolteacher singing ‘White Rabbit’,” Grace Slick once said, “I sang the words slowly and precisely, so that people who needed to hear them wouldn’t miss the point. But they did.” The analogy of a schoolteacher is, of course, madder than a hermit crab with a mortgage, but there is no doubting that her near-unrivalled incantation-like vocal performance was a bid to get a message across, no matter how madcap and surrealist that message was. Slick’s searing singing performance could haunt an empty house. While she rattles the rafters of thunderclouds, the words that emanate from her tell the tale of the sixties and the racing melody that prophesied its inevitable demise. “And the ones that mother gives you/Don’t do anything at all.”
The song might seem as though it came out fully formed, as though it was fashioned in the studio in a violent eruption of sound, but the truth is that it took a long time in the making. Slick had ‘dropped some acid’ in her Californian condo when she plopped the needle into the murky depths of Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain record. “[It] was drilled into my head,” Slick explained as she sat there listening to his haunting horn “over hours and hours”, and then it “came squirting out in various ways as I wrote ‘White Rabbit’.” “Go ask Alice/When she’s ten feet tall.”
While the Vietnam War and various assassinations might have stolen the headlines, the retrospective narrative of the 1960s now can be defined by two words: swinging and drugs. The song’s lyrics, via the world of Alice in Wonderland, take on the latter. Far from just the perceived psychotropic hedonism, the era was awash with drugs of every kind, not just the ones being pedalled by groovy private school chaps. Purple Hearts, for instance, were pills that were a form of Benzedrine—the same Benzedrine that had been used to perk-up soldiers in World War II. With a surplus following its resolution, people began popping them like Smarties. So much so, in fact, that the punk poet John Cooper Clarke declared in his memoir that most of his school classmates were addicted. “And if you go chasing rabbits/And you know you’re going to fall.”
This craze of pick-me-up amphetamines and diet pills aplenty weren’t even seen as drugs, at least not in the narcotic sense. They were merely the modern miracle of Western medicine’s continued progress. If idiocy and hatred had plunged us into the depraved horrors of the war, then technology, progress and pills were going to get us out of it. In fact, your average churchgoing housewife in the late 1950s was full of so many appetite-suppressing amphetamines that if she were busted for parking in a restricted area, the street value of her stomach contents would make the evening news but f—k me were the houses clean! “Tell ‘em a hookah smoking caterpillar/Has given you the call.”
While British prime minister Anthony Eden was literally popping so many pills that he can’t be said to have been of sound mind during the Suez Crisis, he went unchallenged, as did everyone else, because the pills came with a label. However, the rising use of psychedelics was met with disdain, judgement and extreme condemnation. As far as Grace Slick was concerned, this was rank hypocrisy. The drugs were merely medicine to vivify the mundanity of beige society and lube its mechanical grind; popping them as a freewheeling youth trying to find your identity was no different to a copper having a coffee and a pro-plus before a nightshift. “Call Alice/When she was just small.”
This hypocrisy came to the fore in the 1967 summer of love. It was a summer that ‘White Rabbit’ would soundtrack, and a cultural event that the world is still rattling from, as Bob Dylan’s proclamation that the times were a-changing and those left behind should not criticise what they can’t understand was finally realised. That summer, counterculture announced that it was not some niche fad but a subversive force. The issue was that it was underpinned by a tailspin of hedonism impossible to sustain, but at this point, the song hadn’t reached its “throw the radio in the bath” peak yet. It was still in its authority-defying maelstrom of a middle eight. “When the men on the chessboard/Get up and tell you where to go.”
Up until the summer of love, the ‘60s had journeyed to the precipice, now as Grace Slick explained, it was ready to jump down the rabbit hole, the old pills were out, and the new pills were in: “I identified with Alice [in Wonderland]. I went from the planned, bland ‘50s, to the world of being in a rock band without looking back. It was my Alice moment, heading down the hole.” The same can be said of everyone who revelled in the music that the bands produced. “And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom/And your mind is moving low.”
There was something profound hidden among this idolatry. It was a sense of exploration in the extreme. As David Bowie would put it in his own highfalutin Nietzschean way, from Einstein to the bomb, “All of these things culminated in the idea that everything we’ve known before was wrong. Everything. So we start the 20th century with this clean slate. We are now the Gods… And I think that in itself…the repercussions of what we had done by standing in for this idea of morality, creating it all ourselves, so destroyed our fix on what we should be doing in life that we’re still living through that chaos right now. We have no spiritual lives to speak of…there is no direct sense of what our purpose is anymore.” Thusly, people went looking for purpose down a rabbit hole—they created their own sort of psychotropic spiritualism and set about assimilating the lore of it as quickly as possible. Preferably in three-minute bursts or less. “Go ask Alice/I think she’ll know.”
This was a generation brought up in the despair of war, or at the very least the depressive rationing era that followed. Therein lies the heart of all ’60s movements, whether that be the beatniks or the black panthers: A singular determination to march to the beat of a different drum and forgo this thing almost in defiance of their forbearers. If the kids of the summer of love were going to fail, then they were going to do so on their own terms, not the banal ones laid out by previous generations. “When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead/And the White Knight is talking backwards.”
And fail, they would. The glorious unfulfillable crescendo of ‘White Rabbit’ is the perfect allegory for the era. It sped off at 100mph with a tailwind of progress and hope right towards a red light. It was a whirlwind of beauty, teetering on the line between a tragic overture and ecstatic fun, it sounded glorious and by God if the first verse of ‘Somebody to Love’ (“When the truth is found to be lies/And all the joy within you dies/Don’t you want somebody to love?”) didn’t get close to answering the whole thing! But that rattling build-up forecast the delirium for Alice that lay ahead. “And the red Queen’s off with her head!”
The next page for Grace Slick was one of blacking up, shooting a gun at police officers with a head full of acid, and inevitably the synth-pop sedation of the uber commercial ‘We Built This City’. As another of the ’60s most beloved songbirds, Joni Mitchell, once said: “[In the 1970s] You watched that high of the hippie thing descend into drug depression. Right after Woodstock, then we went through a decade of basic apathy where my generation sucked its thumb and then just decided to be greedy and pornographic.” But it was certainly something, and the music produced in that sanguine sepia-toned spirit of the age has never been matched since. “Remember what the dormouse said:/Feed your head. Feed your head. Feed your head!”
When Jefferson Airplane’s acid dealer, the sound engineer for the Grateful Dead, Augustus Owsley Stanley III, was arrested. Hunter S. Thompson noted this as the end of an era. His epitaph read: “Tim Leary a prisoner of Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria, Bob Dylan clipping coupons in Greenwich Village, both Kennedys murdered by mutants, Owsley folding napkins on Terminal Island, and finally Cassius/Ali belted incredibly off his pedestal by a human hamburger, a man on the verge of death. Joe Frazier, like Nixon, had finally prevailed for reasons that people like me refuse to understand—at least not out loud.” The new Gods they created had died. The problem was that the movement that spawned them had failed to convince enough of the aged mainstream that this mass swing of liberation was a worthy pursuit. Counterculture, like ‘White Rabbit’, was simply too avant-garde in the strictest sense to get the majority vote. Its perpetuators waned and grew old, settled into civility, because there might be moisturisers that have solved seven signs of ageing, but the shift to the right is not one of them. “You can throw the radio in the bathtub now”.
