• Slick wrote this song and performed it when she was in a band called The Great Society with her first husband, Jerry Slick. The Great Society made inroads in the San Francisco music scene, but released just one single, "Somebody To Love" (written by their guitarist, Jerry's brother Darby Slick), before calling it quits in 1966. Grace moved on to Jefferson Airplane, and the group recorded both "White Rabbit" and "Somebody To Love" for their first album with her, Surrealistic Pillow. The songs were the breakout hits for the band, with "Somebody To Love" reaching #5 US and "White Rabbit" following at #8.
• Grace Slick based the lyrics on Lewis Carroll's 1865 children's book Alice In Wonderland (officially Alice's Adventures in Wonderland). Like many young musicians in San Francisco, Slick did a lot of drugs, and she saw a surfeit of drug references in Carroll's book, including the pills, the smoking caterpillar, the mushroom, and lots of other images that are pretty trippy. She noticed that many children's stories involve a substance of some kind that alters reality, and felt it was time to write a song about it.
• Slick said the composition was supposed to be a slap to parents who read their children such novels and then wondered why their children later used drugs.
• Grace Slick wrote this song on an old upright piano she bought for $80. Some of the keys in the upper register were missing, but she didn't use those anyway.
• The vocals don't come in until 28 seconds into this song, but once they do, they don't abate until the song is finished - there is no guitar solo or other break. This put the focus for those two minutes squarely on Slick, who developed very deliberate stage movements designed to keep her on her feet because she was rather clumsy. Any live improvisation came at the beginning of the song before she started singing.
• The song begins in F-sharp minor, which Slick chose to suit her voice. The minor chords evoke a darkness and uncertainty as Alice finds herself in a strange world. In the "go ask Alice" part, it shifts to major chords to celebrate her courage and resourcefulness as she finds her way.
• 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.

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CATW