White Rabbit" is a song from Jefferson Airplane's 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow. It was released as a single and became the band's second top ten success, peaking at #8It was written by Grace Slick, who based the lyrics on Lewis Carroll's book Alice In Wonderland. Like many young musicians in San Francisco, Slick did a lot of drugs. She saw lots of drug references in Carroll's book, including the pills, the smoking caterpillar, the mushroom, and lots of other images that are generally trippy. She noticed that lots of children's' stories involve a substance of some kind that alters reality, and felt it was time to write a song about it.
Slick got the idea for this after taking LSD and spending hours listening to the Miles Davis album Sketches Of Spain. The Spanish beat she came up with was also influenced by Ravel's "Bolero."
Slick wrote and performed this when she was in a band called The Great Society. She brought it with her, along with "Somebody To Love," when she joined Jefferson Airplane in 1966. On an original recording by The Great Society, the song is barely recognizable due to Grace's higher voice before several throat operations to remove nodes that lowered her vocal range.
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