Grace Slick Wrote This Song In 1967 — Decades Later, A Box Office Flop Won A New Generation

A song Grace Slick wrote on a $50 piano in 1967 would earn Jefferson Airplane a whole new generation of fans 50 years later after it was used in a multimillion-dollar sci-fi epic. Unfortunately for the movie's producers, that's all that the film would earn; the big-budget bonanza flopped at the box office, failing to recoup its nearly $200 million budget before becoming one of the biggest box office bombs of the 2020s.

Perhaps the best thing about this whole incident was how many new listeners discovered "White Rabbit." The song was a top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, and in the decades since its release, it has become a generational anthem — a pop culture phenom that would forever be linked to flower power, Haight-Ashbury, and the mind-altering freedom that hippies sought during the Summer of Love. But to learn how it came to be and how Keanu Reeves gave the song new life, you have to just go down a certain rabbit hole.

"White Rabbit" was featured in the trailer for 2021's "The Matrix Resurrections," the fourth installment in "The Matrix" franchise (and the first since 2003's "The Matrix Revolutions"). Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss reprise their roles of Neo and Trinity, and the trailer featured the Jefferson Airplane song alongside images of Priyanka Chopra-Jonas' character, Sati, reading a copy of "Alice in Wonderland," and Jessica Henwick's rabbit tattoo.

At the time, fans praised the trailer, even if it was a bit literal. "When Grace Slick sings 'Alice,' they show the book 'ALICE IN WONDERLAND,' and when she says 'rabbit,' they show a rabbit tattoo. As a connoisseur of on-the-nose soundtrack work, I simply must stan," said critic Steven Hyden. Others praised the use of the original "White Rabbit" and not "some slow, twee cover that sounds like it's being sung by a Dickensian ghost..."

However, "The Matrix Resurrection" flopped. It only made $157 million worldwide (on a reportedly $190 million budget). Was it the lingering fears over the COVID-19 pandemic that kept people away, or because it was released simultaneously in theaters and HBO Max? Was it just a sequel nearly 20 years too late? You'd have to go ask Alice.

However, you don't need to ask a Mad Hatter about the origin of "White Rabbit"; Grace Slick has been open about how she wrote it after taking LSD (the same drug they wanted to dose Richard Nixon with) and listening to Miles Davis and Gil Evans' 1960 album, "Sketches of Spain," for about 24-hours straight. Afterwards, she went to her $50 red upright piano that had eight or 10 keys missing and put together the song. "White Rabbit" is a haunting bolero that rises with each passing minute, leading to a dynamic crescendo where Slick bellows "Feed your head!" as if it were the dawn of creation.

Slick used the imagery of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" to lash back at her elders. "[I wanted] to remind our parents (who were supping 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," Slick wrote in her 1998 memoir, "Somebody To Love?"

And the final line — "feed your head!" — was all about opening your mind to knowledge. "Our parents wanted us to get educated, and we did," she told The Guardian. "We found that you could either get married and live in a suburb ... Or you could live like Alice B. Toklas, Picasso, or Diaghilev. We chose the latter, to live a relatively free and artistic life. The phrase is: 'F–k you, we do what we want.'"