Lyrics
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
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 backwards
And the Red Queen's off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head
Feed your head
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
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 backwards
And the Red Queen's off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head
Feed your head
This was written by Grace Slick,
who based the lyrics on Lewis Carroll's book Alice In Wonderland. Like
many young musicians in San Francisco, Slick did a lot of drugs. She saw lots
of drug references in Carroll's book, including the pills, the smoking
caterpillar, the mushroom, and lots of other images that are generally trippy.
She noticed that lots of children's' stories involve a substance of some kind
that alters reality, and felt it was time to write a song about it.
One of Grace Slick's earliest songs,
written during either late 1965 or early 1966, 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. It is commonly thought that these are also
references to the hallucinatory effects of psychedelic drugs, such as LSD and psilocybin mushrooms. Characters
referenced include Alice, the hookah-smoking
caterpillar, the White Knight, the Red Queen, and the Dormouse.
This was one of the defining songs
of the 1967 "Summer Of Love." As young Americans protested the
Vietnam War and experimented with drugs, "White Rabbit" often played in
the background.
Sources:
http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=1250
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rabbit_(song)
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