If idiocy and hatred had plunged us into the depraved horrors of the war, then technology, progress and pills were going to get us out of it. They were merely the modern miracle of Western medicines continued progress. This craze of pick-me-up amphetamines and diet pills aplenty weren’t even seen as drugs, at least not in the narcotic sense. “And if you go chasing rabbits/And you know you’re going to fall.” So much so, in fact, that the punk poet John Cooper Clarke declared in his memoir that most of his school classmates were addicted. Purple Hearts, for instance, were pills that were a form of the Benzedrine’s that had been used to perk-up soldiers in World War II, and with a surplus following its resolution, people began popping them like Smarties. Far from just the perceived psychotropic hedonism, the era was awash with all kinds of drugs. The song’s lyrics, via the world of Alice in Wonderland, take on the latter. While the Vietnam War and various assassinations might have stolen the headlines, the retrospective narrative of the sixties now can be defined by two words: swinging and drugs.
“ was drilled into my head,” Slick explained as she sat there listening to his haunting horn “over hours and hours”, and then it “came squirting out in various ways as I wrote ‘White Rabbit’.” “Go ask Alice/When she’s ten feet tall.” Slick had ‘dropped some acid’ in her Californian condo when she plopped the needle into the murky depths of Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain record. The song might seem as though it came out fully formed, as though it was fashioned in the studio in a violent eruption of sound, but the truth is that it took a long time in the making. “And the ones that mother gives you/Don’t do anything at all.” While she rattles the rafters of thunderclouds, it is the words that emanate out from her that tell the tale of the sixties and the racing melody that prophesied its inevitable demise. Slick’s searing singing performance could haunt an empty house. But they did.” The analogy of a schoolteacher is, of course, madder than a hermit crab with a mortgage, but there is no doubting that her near-unrivalled chanted incantation-like vocal performance was a bid to get a message across, albeit a madcap surrealist one. Continued abuse of our services will cause your IP address to be blocked indefinitely.“I always felt like a good-looking schoolteacher singing ‘White Rabbit’,” Grace Slick once said, “I sang the words slowly and precisely, so that people who needed to hear them wouldn’t miss the point. Please fill out the CAPTCHA below and then click the button to indicate that you agree to these terms. If you wish to be unblocked, you must agree that you will take immediate steps to rectify this issue. If you do not understand what is causing this behavior, please contact us here. If you promise to stop (by clicking the Agree button below), we'll unblock your connection for now, but we will immediately re-block it if we detect additional bad behavior.
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