THE WHITE RABBIT, 'OH DEAR! I SHALL BE TOO LATE!'

Today, The Grandma has been reading about White Rabbit, the song written by Grace Slick and recorded by the American rock band Jefferson Airplane for their 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow.

The White Rabbit is a fictional and anthropomorphic character in Lewis Carroll's 1865 book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. 

He appears at the very beginning of the book, in chapter one, wearing a waistcoat, and muttering Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late! Alice follows him down the rabbit hole into Wonderland.

Alice encounters him again when he mistakes her for his housemaid Mary Ann and she becomes trapped in his house after growing too large. The Rabbit shows up again in the last few chapters, as a herald-like servant of the King and Queen of Hearts.

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White Rabbit is a song written by Grace Slick and recorded by the American rock band Jefferson Airplane for their 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow.

It draws on imagery from Lewis Carroll's 1865 book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its 1871 sequel Through the Looking-Glass.

It was released as a single and became the band's second top-10 success, peaking at number eight on the Billboard Hot 100. The song was ranked number 478 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2004, number 483 in 2010, and number 455 in 2021 and appears on The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.

White Rabbit was written and performed by Grace Slick while she was still with The Great Society. Slick quit them and joined Jefferson Airplane to replace their departing female singer, Signe Toly Anderson, who left the band with the birth of her child. The first album Slick recorded with Jefferson Airplane was Surrealistic Pillow, and Slick provided two songs from her previous group: her own White Rabbit and Somebody to Love, written by her brother-in-law Darby Slick and recorded under the title Someone to Love by the Great Society.

The Great Society's version of White Rabbit was much longer than the more aggressive version of Jefferson Airplane. Both songs became top-10 hits for Jefferson Airplane and have ever since been associated with that band.

More information: Jefferson Airplane

White Rabbit is one of Grace Slick's earliest songs, written during December 1965 or January 1966. It uses imagery found in the fantasy works of Lewis Carroll -1865's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its 1871 sequel Through the Looking-Glass- such as changing size after taking pills or drinking an unknown liquid.

Slick wrote the lyrics first, then composed the music at a red upright piano she had bought for US$50 with eight or ten keys missing -that was OK because I could hear in my head the notes that weren't there"- moving between major chords for the verses and chorus. She said that the music was heavily influenced by Miles Davis's 1960 album Sketches of Spain, particularly Davis's treatment of the Concierto de Aranjuez (1939).

She later said: Writing weird stuff about Alice backed by a dark Spanish march was in step with what was going on in San Francisco then. We were all trying to get as far away from the expected as possible.

Slick said the composition was supposed to be a slap to parents who read their children such novels and then wondered why their children later used drugs. She later commented that all fairytales read to little girls have a Prince Charming who comes and saves them. But Alice did not; she was on her own in a very strange place, but she kept on going and followed her curiosity  -that's the White Rabbit.

A lot of women could have taken a message from that story about how you can push your own agenda. The line feed your head is about reading, as well as psychedelics feed your head by paying attention: read some books, pay attention.

Characters Slick referenced include Alice, the White Rabbit, the hookah-smoking caterpillar, the White Knight, the Red Queen, and the Dormouse.

More information: Louder Sound

Slick reportedly wrote the song after an acid trip.

For Slick, White Rabbit is about following your curiosity. The White Rabbit is your curiosity. For her and others in the 1960s, drugs were a part of mind expansion and social experimentation. With its enigmatic lyrics, White Rabbit became one of the first songs to sneak drug references past censors on the radio. 

Even Marty Balin, Slick's eventual rival in Jefferson Airplane, regarded the song as a masterpiece. In interviews, Slick has related that Alice in Wonderland was often read to her as a child and remained a vivid memory well into her adulthood.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Slick mentioned that, in addition to Alice in Wonderland, her other inspiration for the song was Ravel's Boléro. Like Boléro, White Rabbit is essentially one long crescendo. The music combined with the song's lyrics strongly suggests the sensory distortions experienced with hallucinogens, and the song was later used in pop culture to imply or accompany just such a state.

The song was first played by the Great Society in a bar in San Francisco in early 1966, and later when they opened the bill for bigger bands like the Grateful Dead. They made a series of demo records for Autumn Records, for which they were assisted by Sly Stone. 

Grace Slick said: We were so bad that Sly eventually played all the instruments so the demo would sound OK. When Slick joined Jefferson Airplane later in 1966, she taught the song to the band, who recorded it for their album Surrealistic Pillow.

White Rabbit is in the key of F-sharp which Slick acknowledges is difficult for guitar players as it requires some intricate fingering.

More information: Far Out Magazine

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall

 

Jefferson Airplane

CHARLES LUTWIDGE DODGSON A.K.A. LEWIS CARROLL

Lewis Carroll

Today, The Grandma is at home resting and preparing new exciting ideas for this year. She is working very hard in some interesting projects that she is going to explain in her blog.

Tomorrow, The Grandma is going to welcome a new member of her adventures, Jordi Santanyí, a magnificent writer who she has known in Palma. Jordi Santanyí is the character who is going to talk to you about Literature and Writing since tomorrow.

After an exciting night of Mallorcan culture, The Grandma has decided to not going out and stay at home reading interesting books like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a masterpiece written by Lewis Carroll an amazing author who was born on a day like today in 1832.

Before reading about Carroll, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Vocabulary 9).

More information: Vocabulary 9-Animals

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (27 January 1832-14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English writer of world-famous children's fiction, notably Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. He was noted for his facility at word play, logic and fantasy.

The poems Jabberwocky and The Hunting of the Snark are classified in the genre of literary nonsense. He was also a mathematician, photographer, and Anglican deacon.

More information: The British Library

Carroll came from a family of high church Anglicans, and developed a long relationship with Christ Church, Oxford, where he lived for most of his life as a scholar and teacher. Alice Liddell, daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, Henry Liddell, is widely identified as the original for Alice in Wonderland, though Carroll always denied this.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson a.k.a. Lewis Carroll

Dodgson's family was predominantly northern English, with Irish connections, conservative and high church Anglican. Most of Dodgson's male ancestors were army officers or Church of England clergy. His great-grandfather, also named Charles Dodgson, had risen through the ranks of the church to become the Bishop of Elphin. His paternal grandfather, another Charles, had been an army captain, killed in action in Ireland in 1803 when his two sons were hardly more than babies. The older of these sons –yet another Charles Dodgson– was Carroll's father.

He went to Westminster School and then to Christ Church, Oxford. He reverted to the other family tradition and took holy orders. He was mathematically gifted and won a double first degree, which could have been the prelude to a brilliant academic career. Instead, he married his first cousin Frances Jane Lutwidge in 1830 and became a country parson.

Dodgson was born in the small parsonage at Daresbury in Cheshire near the towns of Warrington and Runcorn, the eldest boy but already the third child. Eight more children followed. When Charles was 11, his father was given the living of Croft-on-Tees in North Yorkshire, and the whole family moved to the spacious rectory. This remained their home for the next 25 years.

More information: Oxford Dictionaries

Charles's father was an active and highly conservative cleric of the Church of England who later became the Archdeacon of Richmond and involved himself, sometimes influentially, in the intense religious disputes that were dividing the church. He was high church, inclining toward Anglo-Catholicism, an admirer of John Henry Newman and the Tractarian movement, and did his best to instil such views in his children. Young Charles was to develop an ambiguous relationship with his father's values and with the Church of England as a whole.

In 1846, Dodgson entered Rugby School where he was evidently unhappy. He left Rugby at the end of 1849 and matriculated at the University of Oxford in May 1850 as a member of his father's old college, Christ Church. After waiting for rooms in college to become available, he went into residence in January 1851. He had been at Oxford only two days when he received a summons home. His mother had died of inflammation of the brain –perhaps meningitis or a stroke– at the age of 47.

First Edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

His early academic career veered between high promise and irresistible distraction. He did not always work hard but was exceptionally gifted and achievement came easily to him.

In 1852, he obtained first-class honours in Mathematics Moderations and was shortly thereafter nominated to a Studentship by his father's old friend Canon Edward Pusey.

In 1854, he obtained first-class honours in the Final Honours School of Mathematics, standing first on the list, graduating Bachelor of Arts. He remained at Christ Church studying and teaching, but the next year he failed an important scholarship through his self-confessed inability to apply himself to study. Even so, his talent as a mathematician won him the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship in 1855, which he continued to hold for the next 26 years.

More information: BBC

Despite early unhappiness, Dodgson was to remain at Christ Church, in various capacities, until his death, including that of Sub-Librarian of the Christ Church library, where his office was close to the Deanery, where Alice Liddell lived.

From a young age, Dodgson wrote poetry and short stories, contributing heavily to the family magazine Mischmasch and later sending them to various magazines, enjoying moderate success.

Between 1854 and 1856, his work appeared in the national publications The Comic Times and The Train, as well as smaller magazines such as the Whitby Gazette and the Oxford Critic. 

Lewis Carroll

Most of this output was humorous, sometimes satirical, but his standards and ambitions were exacting. I do not think I have yet written anything worthy of real publication, but I do not despair of doing so some day, he wrote in July 1855. Sometime after 1850, he did write puppet plays for his siblings' entertainment, of which one has survived: La Guida di Bragia.

In 1856, he published his first piece of work under the name that would make him famous. A romantic poem called Solitude"appeared in The Train under the authorship of Lewis Carroll. This pseudonym was a play on his real name: Lewis was the anglicised form of Ludovicus, which was the Latin for Lutwidge, and Carroll an Irish surname similar to the Latin name Carolus, from which comes the name Charles.

The transition went as follows: Charles Lutwidge translated into Latin as Carolus Ludovicus. This was then translated back into English as Carroll Lewis and then reversed to make Lewis Carroll.

More information: The Guardian

Dodgson's existence remained little changed over the last twenty years of his life, despite his growing wealth and fame. He continued to teach at Christ Church until 1881 and remained in residence there until his death. The two volumes of his last novel, Sylvie and Bruno, were published in 1889 and 1893, but the intricacy of this work was apparently not appreciated by contemporary readers; it achieved nothing like the success of the Alice books, with disappointing reviews and sales of only 13,000 copies.

The only known occasion on which he travelled abroad was a trip to Russia in 1867 as an ecclesiastic, together with the Reverend Henry Liddon. He recounts the travel in his Russian Journal, which was first commercially published in 1935. On his way to Russia and back, he also saw different cities in Belgium, Germany, partitioned Poland, and France.

He died of pneumonia following influenza on 14 January 1898 at his sisters' home, The Chestnuts, in Guildford. He was two weeks away from turning 66 years old. His funeral was held at the nearby St Mary's Church. He is buried in Guildford at the Mount Cemetery.

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If you don't know where you are going, 

any road will get you there.

Lewis Carroll