Initiation Rites
Not long after we'd formed The Great Society, we were approached by a couple of L.A. business/music men scouting for hippie talent. Jack Nitzsche, a Dutch Boy Paints look-alike, mumbled several things we didn't quite understand, but Howard Wolfe said, “Fifty-thousand-dollar contract with Columbia.” We all understood that, signed an exclusive deal with him, and the result was that Howard got fifty percent of publishing for “White Rabbit,” which he later sold to Irving Music. I still don't know exactly how it all worked, but one day, after The Great Society broke up, Howard Wolfe also “sold” me to Bill Graham for $750. Bill was now my new manager for a sum that was not bad for him, considering that Airplane's album Surrealistic Pillow cost eight thousand dollars to make and pulled in eight million in sales.
Concerning the split-up of Great Society, as far as I can remember, it happened after we'd played together for about a year. Darby Slick and Peter van Gelder had become so enthralled with the sounds of tablas and sitars, they were considering going to India so they could be near the source and study with the masters. At the same time, Jefferson Airplane singer Signe Anderson decided to move to Oregon to raise her child—away from the craziness of the rock community.
It was sometime in 1966, and I was up in the balcony at the Avalon Ballroom watching the crowd down below as they were slowly moving out after an Airplane concert, when Jack Casady, their bass player, came up to talk for a while. The rock and roll community was small, we all knew each other, we all went to clubs together, and we all watched each other play. So I was accustomed to hanging out and chatting with the guys from Airplane. But that night, seemingly out of nowhere, Jack said, “What do you think about singing with Airplane?”
My reaction to Jack was a calm (trying to be cool), “Yeah, that might work.”
What was I really thinking? ARE YOU KIDDING? FINALLY, I'M GOING TO BE ON THE FUCKING VARSITY SQUAD!
I didn't say that out loud, but for me, this was an initiation, an invitation to hold what I'd always thought was a lofty position reserved only for supermodels, movie stars, and great physical beauties ad nauseam. It felt like the flat-chested, kinky-brown-haired sarcastic bitch was breaking down another barrier in Barbie Land.
Grace, take a bow.
My mother was the first in a succession of blondes who solidified my early belief that blondes were always the first choice and everybody else, except Elizabeth Taylor (who was a blonde for her part in the first movie of Taylor's I saw, Little Women), had to stand in line for the scraps. Since I was blonde as a child, I'd figured things would be just fine when I was an adult, and until I was thirteen, my confidence in the successful transition was unquestioned. After all, I'd been born with the preferable hair color. If the prevailing color for female icons had been red, I would have been bedeviled by the likes of Botticelli's Venus on a half shell.
But that unlucky number, thirteen, was the year puberty kicked in, and instead of getting pimples, my father's genes came roaring into place. The fat, short, round-faced blonde that I was shot up from five feet, two inches to five feet, seven inches, my weight plunged downward, and my hair changed from a soft, textured curly blonde to fourteen inches of dark brown S.O.S. pad, all uncontrollable fuzz. All in the space of about two years.
Getting the weight off wasn't bad, but the rest of the genetic makeover had me inwardly screaming.
By the way, I've tested out my people-prefer-blondes theory. In the late seventies, I went to a bar in Mill Valley, California, once, with my own brown hair, my own unpainted face, regular clothes, and flat heels. I sat down for a half hour, and the only man in the room who spoke to me was the bartender. I went back home, put on a long black dress, makeup, high heels, and a long blonde wig. And then back to the same bar.
Instant popularity.
Come to think of it, maybe I was predestined to sport the darker look. During an acid trip, as odd as it was, I realized I had an almost eerie affinity for anything Spanish. In fact, I discovered that I could jam in the Eastern flamenco tradition easier than I could sing in the Western twelve-tone scale. I don't know where it came from, but the music, dance, architecture, and culture of Renaissance Spain is still burned into my psyche as if I had actually lived there. With no Spanish blood that I know of, and no Spanish influence (with the possible exceptions of California city and street names), I still gravitate to all aspects of that country as if it were my own.
Out of this same influence came the song “White Rabbit.” The music is a bolero (Spanish) rip-off, while the lyrics were inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. In part the lyrics allude to the hypocrisy of the older generation swilling one of the hardest drugs (alcohol) known to man, but telling us not to use psychedelics.
Well, how about their medicine chests?
Patriarch has to get it all done now? Take some speed.
Is Mom nervous about the kids? The PTA? The burnt dinner? Take some phenobarbital.
Need some sleep? Take some barbiturates.
The athletes want to jump higher? Take steroids.
How about the addict who wants to forget his painful day-to-day existence? Take heroin.
Take booze to get into the party mood. Take Valium for the nerves; Tagamet for the ulcers.
Contrary to popular belief, the “adults” were the original experimenters with the ups, downs, and sideways manufactured by the “legal” drug dealers—Roche, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Rorer, Eli Lilly, Yuban, Smirnoff, American Tobacco Company, and the list goes on. Fun with alcohol and cigarettes. Fun and deadly. Just like the rest of life.
Let's face it, we all want it—the smoke, the fat, the sugar, the booze, and the magic-bullet drugs to fix us up when all of the above have taken their toll. Prevention means you have to be responsible for your own health.
Fuck it, we want a Big Mac.
But—
One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small,
And the ones that Mother gives you
Don't do anything at all.
These were cautious mixed messages that seemed to be the way our parents dealt with the world. After listening to Miles Davis's and Gil Evans's Sketches of Spain about fifty times without stopping—a manic marathon of obsessive behavior—I went to my old red upright piano (with about ten keys missing), and crammed Alice in Wonderland–inspired lyrics into a bolero-style march that I called “White Rabbit.” Being totally honest with myself, I think I missed the mark with the lyrics, because what I'd intended was to remind our parents (who were sipping on highballs while they badgered us about the new drugs) that they were the ones who read all these “fun with chemical” children's books to us when we were small.
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.
Peter Pan sprinkles white dust on everybody and suddenly they can fly—cocaine.
Dorothy and her band of sweet misfits (a rock-and-roll band?) are off to see the wizard and they get off on poppies—opium.
Suddenly they encounter the fantastic Emerald City—a psychedelic wonderland.
Which brings us, last but not least, to the biggest druggie of them all, Alice, who uses chemicals that literally get her high, tall, and short—drink me, eat me. She takes a bite out of the Caterpillar's “magic” mushroom (psilocybin) and pulls a toke from his hookah (hashish). The girl is thoroughly ripped all the way through the book. And our parents wondered why we were “curiouser and curiouser” about drugs.
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.”
Whether or not the lyrics imparted what I wanted them to, the song still represents some of the attitudes of an era, so I suppose it was successful in a symbolic framework. With the spiritual/sexual warmth of “Somebody to Love” and the strange hybrid of “White Rabbit,” I brought two hits to the already popular set list of Jefferson Airplane.