White Rabbit - Live at The Woodstock Music & Art Fair, August 17, 1969

This was written by Jefferson Airplane frontwoman Grace Slick, who based the lyrics on Lewis Carroll's 1865 children's book Alice In Wonderland (officially Alice's Adventures in Wonderland). Like many young musicians in San Francisco, Slick did a lot of drugs, and she saw a surfeit of drug references in Carroll's book, including the smoking caterpillar, the mushroom, and lots of other images that are pretty trippy. She noticed that many 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 song after taking LSD and spending hours listening to the Miles Davis album Sketches Of Spain, especially the opening track, "Concierto de Aranjuez." The Spanish beat she came up with was also influenced by Ravel's "Bolero."

Slick wrote this song and performed it when she was in a band called The Great Society with her first husband, Jerry Slick. The Great Society made inroads in the San Francisco music scene, but released just one single, "Somebody To Love" (written by their guitarist, Jerry's brother Darby Slick), before calling it quits in 1966. Grace moved on to Jefferson Airplane, and the group recorded both "White Rabbit" and "Somebody To Love" for their first album with her, Surrealistic Pillow. The songs were the breakout hits for the band, with "Somebody To Love" reaching #5 US and "White Rabbit" following at #8. The Great Society version of "White Rabbit" was released in 1968 on an album called Conspicuous Only In Its Absence (credited to "The Great Society With Grace Slick"), a live recording of a show at The Matrix in San Francisco. This version runs 6:07 and meanders through four minutes of Indian stylings before Slick's vocals appear. The Airplane rendition is a tight 2:29 with a far more aggressive vocal from Slick.