All for leverage.
The moar you know….
Catalog or Index?
“We are the people our parents warned us about,” Grace Slick yelled in the 60s. As the bluff lead singer with San Francisco band Jefferson Airplane, no-one embodied the free-thinking spirit of the times like she did. And if one song came to define the Haight-Ashbury counter-culture itself, it was Airplane’s White Rabbit.
Released in the loved-up summer of 67, its heavy allusions to the altered states in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, along with its exhortations to ‘feed your head’, seemed to invite a whole new generation to trip out on the pleasures of psychedelics. For those for whom love, peace and LSD were inseparable, it became an anthem. “It was timely for the era,” Airplane founder Marty Balin admitted years later. “The myth, the idea, the acid.”
But there was more to White Rabbit than that.
“It wasn’t actually a big hit,” Airplane bassist Jack Casady recalls, “but it was within the culture of the times. It became the signature for the people who were doing the things it had reference to. But does it work on different levels other than just a drugs song? Yeah, it does.”
Slick herself has always maintained that White Rabbit was aimed at hypocritical parents and their habit of reading drug-laced stories to children at their most impressionable age.
“In all those children’s stories, you take some kind of chemical and have a great adventure,” she told writer Mark Paytress. “Alice In Wonderland is blatant. Eat me! She gets literally high, too big for the room. Drink me! The caterpillar is sitting on a psychedelic mushroom smoking opium!”
She also argued that the song was about the importance of education: ‘Feed your head,’ the rousing climax to White Rabbit, was intended as a call to liberate brains as much as the senses.
Rabbits.