White Rabbit

Listen while you read:  Go ask Alice.

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

And if you go chasing rabbits, and you know you're going to fall
Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call
And call Alice, when she was just small

When the men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom, and your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice, I think she'll know

When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backward
And the Red Queen's off with her head
Remember what the Dormouse said
Feed your head
Feed your head

~  Grace Slick (Jefferson Airplane)

A defining song of the "Summer of Love" (1967), "White Rabbit" captured everyone's attention for many reasons. Grace Slick's powerful voice, lyrics that reminded us of our childhood fascination with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the rising crescendo of the music, and the drug references all converged into an anthem for a generation of Baby Boomers. I recall the song being played over and over again on the jukebox at The Tail o' the Pup, a popular hangout for all of us when we needed a break from driving around aimlessly and endlessly. It is part of Jefferson Airplane's second album, Surrealistic Pillow, whose title was inspired by Jerry Garcia.

Grace Slick and the other members of the Airplane were no strangers to drugs. After taking LSD and listening to the Miles Davis album, Sketches of Spain, Slick was inspired to write the song while she was still in a band called The Great Society with her first husband. When she joined the Airplane in 1966, she offered them the song. It became one of their biggest hits. The video is of a 1967 performance on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. It's quite trippy. Perhaps the best-known performance of the song, however, was on August 17, 1969 . . . at Woodstock.

It was on this day, November 26, in 1865 that Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was first published in America. Although many of us were introduced to it through the 1951 Disney cartoon movie, the book remains a classic in children's literature. In 1971, a "diary" of a drug addict was published, aptly titled Go Ask Alice. It scared the crap out of us.

But scarier now is the current political climate which reminds us daily just how far down the rabbit hole we have fallen. We seem to be moving swiftly to the time when logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead.

Be wary of the men on the chessboard.