“We are the people our parents warned us about,” Grace Slick yelled in the 60s. As the bluff lead singer with San Francisco band Jefferson Airplane, no-one embodied the free-thinking spirit of the times like she did. And if one song came to define the Haight-Ashbury counter-culture itself, it was Airplane’s White Rabbit.
Released in the loved-up summer of 67, its heavy allusions to the altered states in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, along with its exhortations to ‘feed your head’, seemed to invite a whole new generation to trip out on the pleasures of psychedelics. For those for whom love, peace and LSD were inseparable, it became an anthem. “It was timely for the era,” Airplane founder Marty Balin admitted years later. “The myth, the idea, the acid.”
