Jefferson Airplane – White Rabbit
1967
506K Likes
Best comments
1.“It looks like she's staring through the camera into the future and knows I'm watching this on YouTube.”
More comments
- 2.“The problem with artists these days is very few are willing to take the heroic amounts of LSD it takes to make a classic like this.”
- 3.“Most people think this song is about drugs. It's actually about the book Alice in Wonderland. Which is about drugs. I'm writing this while high.”
The story
Grace Slick wrote White Rabbit before she was even in Jefferson Airplane. She played it with her earlier San Francisco band, the Great Society, then brought it along when she joined the Airplane in 1966. They cut it for Surrealistic Pillow, and the single climbed to number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 1967. Not bad for a two-and-a-half-minute song that builds like Ravel's Boléro and borrows its imagery from Alice in Wonderland.
The subject is drugs, and Slick never pretended otherwise. She meant it as a sly jab at older folks who sneered at the drug culture, and as a nod to curiosity and mind expansion. Music writer Jon Savage later called it one of the oddest records ever to crack the US Top 10. Hard to argue.
This performance comes from The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. The band made its first national TV appearance on that show in May 1967, and the broadcast threw in a copy of their swirling light show, the first time most of America had seen anything like it. The footage later turned up on the DVD Fly Jefferson Airplane. A prime-time comedy hour, a pop chart and a song about getting very, very curious. The sixties, folks.
