Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean
“White Rabbit”
Artist: The Jefferson Airplane
Music / Lyrics by Grace Slick
Label: RCA, (1967 ),( from the LP Surrealistic Pillow)
The Jefferson Airplane, like the Grateful Dead, epitomized classic San Francisco psychedelic rock: surreal, often drug-referenced lyrics; a song style that draws from both blues-based rock and the folk revival; and in live performance, loose arrangements that often featured long, meandering instrumental solos. Like a number of other rock legends, their rise to fame was catalyzed by their appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival, which was followed by a number of high-profile TV appearances and the 1967 LP Surrealistic Pillow, which included “White Rabbit.”
Musical style notes
The evocation of the exotic in American and European popular music often is achieved by borrowing elements from non-western music. The song “White Rabbit” is partly based on a scale known as the “Phrygian mode,” which was used in western music in medieval times but is now mostly associated with Spanish music by way of Spain’s Arabic past. It is also partly based on harmonic minor, which also gives it a slightly Middle-Eastern feeling. The instrumentation is very sparse, with Jack Casady’s bass playing the repeating “bolero” beat in support of Jorma Kaukonen’s undulating guitar solo, which snakes between Phrygian mode and the harmonic minor scale. These elements all combine to form a kind of “opium-den” ambience to “White Rabbit,” while Grace Slick’s edgy vocals and Alice-in-Wonderland-inspired lyrics add to the mood. The drug trip metaphor extends even into the musical structure; the song begins as a standard multiple verse melody (see sections A1 below), but it doesn’t do what you would expect. Section B starts out with a new melody, suggesting a standard pop-song verse-verse-bridge-verse form, but there is no clear break between bridge and verse. The musical material of the verse comes back halfway through the bridge, while the singer segues directly from the bridge into the third verse. The new verse retains the phrasing of previous verses, but features a new melody which becomes progressively higher in pitch and louder in volume, mirroring the increasing intensity of an LSD “trip.” Slick’s musical trip peaks at the song’s climactic psychedelic call to action, “Feed your Head.”
Musical “Road Map”
|Timings |Comments |Lyrics |
|0:00-0:28 |Instrumental introduction; | |
| | | |
| |eElectric bass begins; | |
| |snare drum enters at 0:05; | |
| |electric guitar enters at 0:09. | |
|0:28-0:55 |Verse 1 |One pill makes you larger. |
| | |And one pill makes you small… |
|0:55-1:23 |Verse 2 |And if you go chasing rabbits, and you know you’re going |
| | |to fall… |
|1:23-1:42 |“Bridge” |When men on the chessboard |
| | |Get up and tell you where to go; |
| |New melody introduced, with new lyrics. |And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom… |
| |Instrumental texture thickens; rhythm guitar adds chords; | |
| |vocals occur at a higher pitch, increasing sonic intensity; | |
| |continues directly into Verse 3. | |
|1:42-1:51 |Verse 3 |Go ask Alice…I think she’ll know… |
| | | |
| |Return of bass and drum part from Intro and verse 1; however, | |
| |note the new vocal melody, which has the same phrasing as the | |
| |previous verses but at a higher pitch level. | |
| | |When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead… |
| |The pitch and volume of the vocal line steadily increases, | |
| |hitting its climax with the last line -- | |
|1:51-2:16 |The pitch and volume of the vocal line steadily increases, |When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead… |
| |hitting its climax with the last line -- | |
|2:16-2:27 |The punchline: “Feed your head” |Feed your head… |
| | |Feed your head. |
|2:27-2:31 |Downbeat of final chord; fades to 2:31 | |
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