1967
WHITE RABBIT * JEFFERSON AIRPLANE * RCA VICTOR 1631 * UK
Known colloquially as The Airplane, this cut was taken from their Surrealistic Pillow album, it was written and sung by Grace Slick, who joined as vocalist in October of 1966. Set to a military beat this short song (I'll bet it was a lot longer when they played it live at the Berkeley Folk Festival, Monterey Jazz Festival, Monterey Pop Festival, Woodstock, and Altamont) is about drugs - both state sanctioned and state criminalized - based on the characters, images and situations in Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland. Lewis Carroll was very much a spirit of the age during the Hippy era, a guru or voice of wisdom, his books were mined and plagiarized fore all sorts of reasons, but it was the Surrealistic aspects read into his writing that were most favored. To-day his voice and wisdom is very much out of fashion, most likely due to his extra curricular interests being part of the current moral panic and the man himself representing a contemporary folk devil.