DB's Song of the Day (day 302): "WHITE RABBIT" (1967) Jefferson Airplane

Tomorrow is the birthday of Grace Slick, who sang lead on a number of my favorite Jefferson Airplane songs, particularly today’s song, which she wrote. I’m also very partial to “Somebody to Love” and “Lather.” In fact, I considered posting about the latter since it’s less well known, but, it being Halloween time and all, “White Rabbit” fills the bill better. We could say it’s all about tricks and treats.

The trick is the way the song quickly escalates into a heart-pounding shot of adrenalin. The treat is all the pills Alice is popping in the song—to get bigger and smaller, just like in Alice in Wonderland, though, of course, we know that’s not what’s really going on.  “And the ones that Mother gives you don’t do anything at all.” Well, they don’t have psychotropic properties, but one imagines that they might be birth control pills, so they definitely do something. Which reminds me not only of the Stones’ “Mother’s Little Helper”—those speed pills the average housewife is popping for weight issues and depression and that general feeling of lassitude, doctor—but also Elvis Costello’s line (in “You Little Fool”): “mother just gives her some pills to choose / and says go use / your imagination.”

So, yeah, mom and pills might lead to whatever we imagine. But let’s get back to our Alice, shape-shifting like a sonuvabitch. It’s all part of growing up in the high and happy days before things like LSD were outlawed, to say nothing of psilocybin mushrooms. The Airplane were a pretty trippy band and this song was sort of the theme song for mental exploration, set to an insinuating bolero-style lead-in that gets faster and faster till it seems the beginning of the song is ages past and it ends with a crescendoed slogan essentially (but I always wanted something a bit more revelatory for Slick to wail at the end): “Remember what the Dormouse said / Feed your head.”  I suppose “feed your head” is being attributed to the Dormouse, so, yeah, who wouldn’t take the advice of a talking furry critter?  We’ve all been colonized by Disney, ain’t we? They even have an animated version of Alice in Wonderland.

And let’s hear it for that “hookah-smoking caterpillar.” In fact, Lewis Carroll gives us this dude, a nod to, shall we say, the dreamy poppy that came to general knowledge via the Raj. And India—its drugs and its spiritual exercises—would be a hit with the kids of the TV generation . . . the Vietnam generation . . . the dropout generation . . . the Mod generation. All that. The Airplane, wittingly or not, created the go-to song for kids to get freaky in the rec-room. The phrase “go ask Alice” was even filched for one of those TV movies of the Seventies, maybe it was a book first, about a girl who gets strung out on drugs and comes to grief. A warning to you all not to become a wigged-out waif with a habit to support. I'm pretty sure we had to read it in middle school and it got me interested in today's song, and that got me interested in those bygone glory days of the Acid Generation. With all due respect for the dangers involved. And it’s true that Slick’s song does pack a certain malevolent energy. It’s when those distortions start kicking in—you feel the rising wave of the “bad trip” about to overwhelm the protagonist: When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead / And the White Knight’s talking backwards / And the Red Queen’s off with her head.  Well, when all that comes to pass, you’re tripping, girl! That's what you get for chasing rabbits down the rabbit hole.

But of course things even trippier happen in Carroll’s story. Which is a way of saying that one of the key factors of the psychotropic experience was how it opened not only what Huxley called “the doors of perception” (you see and hear and feel differently) but also the doors of imagination. Things you’d stored away, like details from childhood, could become re-animated with peculiar vividness, as though a part of your mind you had “outgrown” was fully available to you again. Some, like Timothy Leary, went further and claimed you could experience memories that were genetic, going back to ancestors, even to the primal soup of being. Well, sure, why not? Feed your head, Tim.

I will always associate this song with the scene in Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when Dr. Gonzo’s attorney, tripping on a whole blotter of acid in the tub, insists that the Doc chuck the tape player—playing “White Rabbit”—into the bath water as the song peaks. That part, as the attorney says, when the rabbit bites its own fucking head off (or words to that effect). Dr. Duke can’t bring himself to do so, and throws a grapefruit in instead, though it seems to achieve the same effect of causing the attorney to scream and thrash in some kind of death-trip ecstasy. And that’s part of Thompson’s brilliance in that book: seeing that much of what passed for the contagious drug-wisdom of the era was a death-trip. Seeking in hallucinogens and meditation and sexual be-ins an annihilation of the self. Getting back to the primal soup to which you once belonged. Which is why HST was so fond of Dr. Johnson’s statement as his epigram: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

So, sure, feed your head, but let’s keep it in perspective. It is your head. And always will be, world without end.

When the men on your chessboard get up and tell you where to go

DB's Song of the Day (day 29):"COMIN' BACK TO ME" (1967) Jefferson Airplane

Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow (1967) is a great album. That’s a statement I wouldn’t have made any time previous to the current decade. I picked up a copy of it somewhere in the late Seventies, but didn’t listen to it much. By then, the “San Francisco Sound” had become synonymous with acid rock and the likes of the still extant Grateful Dead. I bought it for its name recognition more than anything, I suppose. Though it concludes the first side of the album, today’s song is not one I remembered from that record. Two things happened later that altered those circumstances.


In 1991, Rickie Lee Jones released a great cover of this song on her album Pop-pop. I loved the song without immediately recognizing it as a song I already should have known. When I realized it was written by Marty Balin and was indeed included on Pillow, those facts didn’t send me back to the Airplane.

Along came the beginnings of my vinyl revival with the purchase of a new turntable in 2011. And the acquiring of Surrealistic Pillow in the mono vinyl version released by Sundazed. It was something of a revelation. The return to vinyl, for me, was marked by discovering mono recordings—like the Dylan catalog released by Columbia around that time, and, another neglected (by me) great, The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966) [OK, OK, I admit my general Easterner's hostility toward CA.]

To a degree, the music of the period 1965-1973 was my music, the “comfort music” that I always return to—to sustain my soul, as it were (or such as it is). There are many bands for whom some part of that period was their heyday—not least Jefferson Airplane. But I never really embraced them. In fact, sometimes, off the top of my head, I can still forget who’s who in the band. I would never mistake Wyman for Richards, you understand, but I sometimes forget which is Kastner and which Casady. And for a time I thought Casady was Jorma. That sort of thing.

clockwise: Casady, Balin, Kanter, Slick, Kaukonen, Dryden

Anyway, this song is sung by Marty Balin, the founder of the band, and the one most responsible, I’d say, for the “soft” songs of the LP. The band moved away from this kind of ballad-based music in favor of jams and political posturing, but, on Pillow, they created at times a very warm sound, as on this song. The flute does a lot of the work, on that score. And I love the sound of the acoustic guitars on this record: “the shape of sleepy music and suddenly you’re hooked.” The sound makes me think of sun-drenched old townhouses in San Francisco, at the height of the Haight. I wasn’t around for that stuff, of course, so it’s just a fantasy, but one that this record lends itself to, readily.

The song itself, when I heard Jones’ version, was very moving. The Airplane’s is almost as moving and could be said to be less histrionic than hers. It’s quieter, without quite the gasp of need and longing that Jones gives it. Balin’s vocal is more subdued, and for that reason more thoughtful. In Jones’ vocal I hear the despair in “I saw you / Comin’ back to me” because it’s not going to happen. It’s just an imagined thing. In Balin’s I’m not sure. He’s not so chastened; and he’s more definite about “the shadow in the mist could have been anyone.” And I believe he means it when he says “Most of the time I just let it go by / Now I wish it hadn’t begun.”  Jones does too, but with a greater sense of the toll that statement takes.

We’re with a man who still dreams of the lover’s return, though he knows better. And the more he thinks about it, the more certain he is that it won’t happen and shouldn’t happen. “I know what it always has been.”  A fantasy, even while it was happening.  And then the great concluding line “Was it something I made up for fun?” The entire romance could be that, and certainly the vision of “you comin’ back to me.”

It, like many of my favorite songs, is a reverie song. We could say that this “genre” is going to be cropping up a lot as we go on. Balin, here, seems, as so many did in that day and age, to steal some of his shadings from Dylan (listen to how he sings “through the rain upon the trees”), and that’s as it should be, as Dylan has more than his share of reverie songs. In a way, they’re all about something “comin’ back”—the past, the feeling, the knowledge, the vision, the “transparent dream / beneath an occasional sigh.”

Tomorrow is Marty Balin’s birthday; I hope it all comes back to him.