Like a lot of '60s classics I knew of White Rabbit long before I heard it. I finally heard it in a movie and then years after on a beaten up LP left among a pile of others in the first house I lived in after leaving home. A little later I heard Somebody to Love and was wowed by that, as well. With little information to hand I was left believing that Jefferson Airplane was Grace Slick's backing band. The album those songs appeared on had not been reissued. I left it at that.
Then with the rise of interest in the then less known bands of the later '60s that fed a lot of bands in the early '80s the story was fleshed out a little more and the reissue of Surrealistic Pillow appeared in the shops. I got mine some time in 1984 as part of my fortnightly trip to the Record Market on Queen Street, Brisbane. I studied the sleeve on the bus home. Pink-tinted black and white band shot on the cover with the title in the old-is-new art nouveau font telling everyone they're from late '60s San Francisco. Interview on the back where Grace Slick described her voice as "loud, unmistakably loud." Yeah, that'll do.
I put it on while I made the coffee and started the dishes in the kitchen. Apart from the big hits I heard a kind of meandering sloppy rock band alternating with endless acoustic numbers. After that I played it for the hits and was careful to have that stylus lifted before so much as a bar of the embarrassing Plastic Fantastic Lover could sound. That was me and the Airplane. Until now, when I came to list albums to write up about 1967 turning 50. So I read up a little and found a high res copy which had both stereo and mono mixes.
This post will mainly draw from the mono mix as it presents a punchier play and leaves most of the reverb at the door. The stereo mix suffers from the '60s phenomenon of producers believing they had to pan everything to either channel (George Martin was among them, so not even the Fabs escaped this). This sounded artificial and so masses of reverb was troweled on to cover for the resulting dryness. There is an archaeological interest in pursuing this but if you ever get into '60s rock music you should take advantage of the recent phenomenon of mono reissues as you will be hearing what the fans heard first time around. You'll hear of what the music meant.
So, side one, track one, She Has Funny Cars tells you everything you need to know about the rest of the album and if you are a careful listener you'll get it and relax into a fine late '60s experience. It's loose but not sloppy, rocking but relaxed, if someone's got something to sing they take the mic or get near it and add. Dig? It's like friends playing music together. This song has been long worked out at gigs and the in-our-nature groove of it is studied and perfected by the time it hits the console. Heard about the Frisco band sound in documentaries? This is it: high skill hippies strutti' the stage.
A couple of bars of tom toms bashing almost all the life out of a rumba beat before the bass and guitars come in with a descending run in the same rhythm. Easy to forget that the American bands of the later '60s brought something to the table that their British usurpers never thought of: jazz. It lapped from beneath the groove in the Byrd's most recent album and the just-released fellow Californians The Doors let it loose through their dark woods. I don't mean fusion or anything that just lay down and slumped like the rest of the adult orientation of the decade to come; this is still a rock band playing and they're slamming the syncopation rather than trying to impress with it.
Marty Balin at the mic also follows the rhythm, hitting every other tom beat in a lyric that talks of disorientation. This breaks for a jazzy guitar work out in the minor as the vocal reverses the confusion and sings about personal freedom. And then a cool female vocal pours through in counterpoint like a glass of sunlight. And then BAM both yell about the power of the individual mind. That's the structure, loose but sure. Things seem crazy but take a breath and look around. You're in control. I wonder how often those sentiments were heard on the corner of Haight and Ashbury at the time. Here, they sound sincere, not from the church of Tim Leary but from someone who stood outside and got what they needed from the sermon and the singing.
If you looked at the cover and wondered if the beautiful raven haired woman in the photo did besides some hippy interjections the wait is up. Grace Slick brought two songs to the band from her first one, The Great Society. They both proved mega hits and characterise the band to this day. She starts before the rest of the band:
When the truth is heard to be lies! The band thunders behind her as she admonishes the social casualty for shrivelling into loneliness in the free love crowd. Slick's note-perfect bellow berates and prescribes. Stop whingeing and get amongst it. The chorus tightens the order into compulsion and there can be no resistance:
Don't you want somebody to love? Don't you NEED somebody to love? Wouldn't you love somebody to lo-o-ove? You better find somebody to love. This tempestuous piece manages to both embody hippiedom's doctrine of love and scream its perceived relaxation into torn shame. Against the tide of decades it still stands and wins.
And then they go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like you're My Best Friend. After the cool and bold aesthetic manifesto of the opener and the banshee call of the follow up we get the Ringo song. I've seen commentaries that suggest that this one is a barely covert gay song but, really, if it is or isn't, it's a piece about intimacy. Drummer Skip Spence who left in a drug abuse cloud (admittedly to pretty big things) left this big hippy Hallmark card here. I hear the opening count-in an pretty much listen for the pleasant texture and the slightly elevated by Slick's beautiful response lines and descant harmonies.
Then we get a pair of songs to take us to the run out groove of the old LP side one. Today and Coming Back to Me form a kind of mini song cycle about love. But this is not the love that cures the miserable of the second track or even the goofy ya-big-lug friendship of My Best Friend. This is a understanding of love that is so intense and worshipful that it enters the realm of the nightmare. This is not the love song of Stephen Foster and his folky warmth, nor the worldly shrugging perversion of a Serge Gainsbourgh, this is a love song as lived and imagined many times by Edgar Allen Poe.
Today begins with a gentle acoustic guitar arpeggio played on the lower strings in a minor key. It's quiet but it's serious. It's joined by a soft and figure on an electric, plucked high on the E string, descending and curling modally (by an unaccredited Jerry Garcia). It's like a moment from a late '60s Miles Davis records but bottled and rotated as a loose riff. Distant and reverbant from the amp it adds a strange sheen to the chords, a kind of melting clock tick. Balin's plaintive tenor comes in:
Today, I feel like pleasing you more than before. Ok, an odd if pleasant sentiment but then:
Today, I know what I want to do but don't know what for. After this the normal love song hyperbole about living for someone else takes on something that is a little unsettling. He ends the verse with a line about his dreams coming true. The monologue continues, building, piece by piece, the narrator's adoration with the suggestion that he has yet to speak any of this to the person in question or, more terrifyingly, he serves them all the time in such a thrall that the only thing left of him is his love. If that love is the sole thing he can now register, as the one thing keeping him from self annihilation, keeping the life supply constant, it is the kind of love song one might sing to a parasite. She (I'm going to economise on pronouns here and go with a heterosexual relationship as it is the most likely one meant by the song's author) somehow compels him to say that he has changed. He counters (his own claim) by avowing that he cannot be anymore than all he already is. By this time Balin's disturbed prayer is joined by Grace Slick's descant harmony but it is distant in the reverb, not in the same room. A kick and snare drum also start, delivering a slow and steady one-two crash, like Grace it's from a distance and heavily reverb-ed. Another verse of increasing desperation gives way to a crying despair:
Please! Please! It's taken so long to come true. It's all for you. All for you. The song gently quietly lowers its head in a soft guitar lick that reaches to the major third but this slight smile of a note won't be heard by the narrator whose eyes are closed but whether it is a dream of a sleep of exhaustion or a vision of delusion will not be clear.
This lyric could be from a '90s band, couched in stalker references and rawly painful. I don't know if Balin is writing from his own experience or imagining himself inside this torment but his understanding of the kind of obsessed mind that, even directing this kind of concentrate anger at another cannot yet bring himself to recognise her faults (accepting any of the lines as compliments would be a major one). This is a genderless piece in that either male or female voice could sing it but I cannot imagine the mighty Grace giving this anything but rage. She might, on the other hand, play the song's object with daunting power. If you have ever fallen into a relationship like this (as I did more than once in my teens and twenties though cannot anymore) you will recognise its agony and probably find it hard to listen to.
Coming Back to Me begins with the kind of arpeggiated acoustic guitar chord that you'd hear under the credits of a movie from the time about a love affair scoured by mental illness or addiction (The Sterile Cuckoo, That Cold Day in the Park, or Believe in Me), a minor chord with a ninth thrown in which normalises into the fifth of the dominant. Then there's a slow smile of the relative major for a few bars before the repeat. The third time is joined by a dismal figure played low on a recorder which brings the troubled movie mood back into focus. Balin comes in with some pretty well wrought images about summer holding its breath and winter looking the same as it always does and then, for the major key lift: "... and through an open window where no curtain hung..." and back to the minor key "... I saw you coming back to me ..." the last word on the major in the first verse suggests a relief to the tension we get in the first few lines. But really we are just in for more tension. He describes more melancholy scenes from his loneliness before seeing her coming back through the rain in the trees or the mist at the hills by the sea and finally wonders if she or his infatuation was just something he made up for fun.
But fun is not what we get in the music or the delivery. This spooky girl who can turn up in the reflection in a teacup or a sudden glance never approaches nor speaks nor reveals any real sign of animation seems increasingly like a phantasm or, finally in admission, just another wish. This is the crushed figure from Today after his stay in care. Still on his prescription, clean shaven and with a more socially acceptable dress code and haircut, he is still visited by the spectre of the dominator or even just a girl he saw once (like Dante his Beatrice) whose apparition never left him. Never left? It's worse than that: she keeps returning to him like a prodigal lover. The acoustic guitar arpeggios are reinforced by a second player and the curlew-ish recorder slinks through the scale, avoiding all the defining thirds and tonics in clear suggestion of the ghostly figure at the edge of the singer's vision. The slow fadeout tells us this will never finish.
The thought occurred at one point while listening to this song that this might be the statement of Today's dominator getting sentimental about the last victim. Think of that when you listen with the lyrics close by and you will have nightmares. That said, the lyric, whose poetics float somewhere between Paul Simon's cute melancholy and Leonard Cohen's wry horror, really doesn't court the ambiguity that would allow this vision. Still ...
The old side two begins with a bang as bright crunching barre chords bang out a syncopated figure bonded by some deft lead noodling. We're back in Frisco rock world. Marty and Grace in harmony and pained expression declare that they need to do away with bad people, people who waste others' time or ridicule the hippy guys' long hair before, puzzlingly coming in with a wailing chorus of "
you know I love you, baby, yes I do" which sounds like the opposite of those words. The last verse is a mash of the fallen times of gleaming consumer goods and school kids selling drugs on the street for exorbitant rates. "...
know I love you, baby, yes I do!" If that declaration is at the centre of the social torment around them it offers little comfort. The title 3/5s of a Mile in Ten Seconds is screamed over the fade as the guitars wail high up on the fretboard. I always assumed that this was the speed of something every day like a sneeze or an "amazing fact" stumbled upon in a text book like the swiftness of human ejaculation (look up the meanings of the band names 10cc and Steely Dan for some later zeitgeisting adventures) but no one seems to know beyond the notion that Balin just saw the fraction and the word mile together and thought: "title". Well, what does She Has Funny Cars mean?
D.C.B.A. 25 begins with a beautiful '60s picked bass sound, descending through the notes in the title. Marty sings about breaking up and wandering about free and then Grace joins him in bright harmony over a rich bed of clean booming electrics. Going through crystal chandeliers and fields of purple pleasure to a state of great peace and understanding, the vibe is all flower power and acid (25 was the version of LSD current at that time) which could turn a boy and girl breaking up into a yellow bus trip to Ixtlan. The best lines include: "too many days I've left unstoned" and "I can but dance behind your smile." Slick provides a more inventive and melodic descant to snake around the second half of the verses, using variations of Balin's lines. If the band had thought they were just getting a big voice and a couple of sure-fire hit songs with Grace Slick the real story was that her native musicality lifted them from San Fransico hippies into well deserved global attention. Moments like these are evidence.
How Do You Feel is a big acoustic singalong that contains some studious making making. The words are about how happy a beautiful girl makes Marty Balin feel. While the initial recorder coo that introduces the song seems to promise a Hollywood hippy theme song the rest take it into a pleasantly loose pop song. The folky massed acoustic guitar and Mamas and Papas boy/girl harmonies and mid '60s tuneage float by under a cloud of reverb and everybody's happy. But what we're heading towards is, while not a radical twist, a different musical place as Balin supplies more of the same kind of lines about the girl Grace and he or one of the others answer with a stubborn "how do you feel?" It is the same every time, a gleaming fifth that does not waver so much as a microtone. It could be an organ chord. It isn't, though, it's how this band harmonises when it tries the block vocals of fellow West-siders like the Mamas and Papas, Beach Boys or the Byrds. The harmony shines through the reverb and glistening acoustics like an epiphany. Finally, there is a waver but it's intentional and just provides more perfectly pitched vocal sunshine. That's how I feel.
Embryonic Journey was an acoustic guitar instrumental piece that the effortlessly skilled Jorma Kaukonen. Kaukonen recorded it for the album at Balin's insistence. He had been shy of putting something as different on the album. Balin was right. The piece fits well with its bright strident chords and finger style noodles as it wanders into gentle contemplation and back to shining boldness. It's less than two minutes but, unlike most solo acoustic guitar, is not a bar too long.
Then there's White Rabbit. Never before or since has two and a half minutes of rock music sounded so epic. But there's a problem. Standing in as the go-to song for film scene that concerns unreality or psychedelic drugs, it now sounds to a world jaded of the connection. By the time Atom Egoyan used it in Where the Truth Lies where a girl dressed as Alice sings it during a drug delirium scene I was wincing. In this it joined the first half minute of Bach's Tocatta and Fugue in D minor as a kind of vaccination music whereby the now inert signifier of an emotion is inserted for your cultural antibodies to deal with. Fine, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds or Interstellar Overdrive would be too expensive to use but why oh why always that one? Well, there was a beginning and it isn't in the song's acid rock origin directly.
In the '70s you weren't a teenager whose conversation was complete if you hadn't read the paperback confession
Go Ask Alice. This thin borrowable found its way into every school port whose owner you could name and could stand. The byline was anonymous or Anonymous and it was a diary by a teenaged girl who falls into an ocean o' drugs, surfacing now and then before sinking into dark perdition. It was, I'll own, rivetting but it was rivetting in the same way that Reader's Digest short stories about alcoholism, heroin, lives of crime (and whatnot other bad stuff) in that it got to the nasty bits quickly and almost kept you up until the redemption or the grim life lesson. I used to think of the thick floppy mags that turned up regularly in our postbox as holiday or cyclone reading. That's when you opened them and it's when you closed them. Anyway, Alice was like that so when the movie came on tv everyone had to watch. It was ok as they go, the anti-drug sermonising which had seemed invisible in the book was writ large on the tv screen but it was set in the '60s, which I was rapidly preferring to the '70s I was stranded in, and featured some great songs. The best of which was the one that gave the story its title: White Rabbit. It plays over the opening credits and I couldn't believe anything as wild and powerful as that could have come from ten years before. The woman's voice at the centre of it was so commanding and the melody so curling and then steel hard. "
Go ask Aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice!"
I had to have the song. It wasn't in the shops. There were no home vcrs to record it with when it was on. I never heard it on the radio. By accident I found it on a strange LP crumbling in a corner of the Auchenflower house. The record was music that inspired Stardust (the David Essex vehicle). There were other great unsungs on the track list but my eye went straight to White Rabbit. An ex flatmate still had his old 3-in-one (i.e. turntable, cassette deck and radio) there so I made a tape of all the salvageable songs and made off to my room and heard the thing as though for the first time.
Bass and snare drums start rolling the rhythm from Ravel's Bolero (which isn't a bolero but more of a march). A clean but hot electric guitar snakes its way around an insistent semitone shift (F# to G) fluid and gentle at first but tightening. Then Grace Slick enters on the mic, her voice pure and cooling: "
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." The melody moves with the semitones on the backing with quick melismatic triplets that could be either Spanish or Arabic. The next verse is the same melodically but already is heating up. "Go ask Alice when she was just small."
The build beneath the voice, now stronger with piano chords and a tighter snare beat lurches into the middle section. Grace's voice is bigger and harder in the whirlwind: "
When men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go-o and you've just had some kind of mushroom and you're mind is moving slow. Go ask Aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice ..." It snaps from the E major back to the strident F# for the final section, the rhythm intense: "
When the logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead...." And then everyone in the world is playing behind her, as she bellows in the purest pitched bellow knowable to humanity, the surprise return of the A-C-D grind: "
Re-he-memberrrrrrrrrr what the dormouse saiiiiiiiiid." Bash bash bash bash. "
Feed your heeeeeeeead! Feed your heeeeeeead. Feed your heeeeeeeee-eh-eh-eheh-eh-ead!" The voice exhausted falling a little over the fade of the crash cymbal.
Hearing a great song for the first time is like a first kiss. Each new time is like the first and surprises with its softness and its power and, however short it is it lingers in the recollection as a whole night's sensation. So immersed are we in that moment that the nerves that give us the real world are pulled into that castle keep of sound with its dungeons and wings and ceremonial rooms, its nooks of function and shrines of trophy, each verse a new chamber of strength and the central hall of the chorus where everyone is always welcome and to which everyone returns. And then you do it again because, at least for that first time, one is ever enough.
Grace Slick brought this song from her old band The Great Society. They recorded it (and Somebody to Love) and it's worth the Youtube-ing. A long instrumental introduction of electric 12 string and a sax riffing around an eastern flavoured scale for about four minutes before a fairly mannered performance from Grace ends things. As Jerry Garcia was revealed to be more than the spiritual mentor that the album cover had him (some significant guitar parts were his and the arrangement of Somebody to Love was him recognising the power inside the pretty original) maybe it was he who drove home Slick's notion of using the Bolero rhythm and the notion of one single crescendo instead of the jammed piece that it had originally been. Some people remember the song as getting faster but it doesn't break a sweat as far as tempo goes, steady all the way. It does, however, get intense, more and more and more intense with a swell and drive that everybody who has ever experienced any kind of sexual pleasure is familiar with? Why is that important in a song based on Alice in Wonderland? Because it's about teenagers finding things out for themselves. Sex, yes, but everything else, too. And so they did, for themselves but if they heard this song it would have felt right as they went to the protests and happenings, the inner urban collectives and now-legendary rock concerts, feeding their heads.
At a second shy of two and a half minutes, that's a lot of doing.
And then they have to go and spoil it all ....
Plastic Fantastic Lover starts with an acoustic guitar vamp that tells you straight away that you're about to hear a Dylan-a-be. A big bass doop thunks in a few bars. Then Marty comes in with a Bob-like monotone snarl about an artificial woman who is so lifelike that no one suspects, possibly because they are too busy admiring her surface. He shows her off and enjoys his love life with her but she falls apart like any consumable and he has to go and spend more money. It's science's fault! Technology has made us need things we didn't know existed. Et cetera. Tongue in cheek of course but that's the problem. This was 1967 and the song from the year before so its hippy anti-establishment strut would have appealed with name checks of I.B.M. and collisions of real and mechanical rape. There's a little more to it but I never found out for years after owning the album as its smugness put it in the unintentional embarrassment file. It was hindered by the sound effects of a whirring electric motor (a mix master? a vibrator?). Yes, it need not be about a sex toy and the depth might come from the confusion of that with other consumables like stereos or tvs. But the righteous hippy being satirical cut the exact wrong way back in 1984 when I first heard it and there was a groove scratched to hell on that vinyl from me being as swiftly casual as I could as I sped to lift the stylus and pretend that White Rabbit was the crowning finale of the album. Now when I stroll long enough I still wince a little at the guitar opening but let it run. It's hardly noticeable after White Rabbit anyway.
