Friday, June 3, 2016

"White Rabbit" - Excellent Cover by Pink (video)

We're fiercely protective of "White Rabbit" since the song is the Nirvana in all the fairy tales of psychedelia.  We loved Janis Joplin just as much but her blues are timeless like good blues will always be while Grace Slick was singing of something which happens right now.

For we of the Rockhouse, blues give us the all-encompassing vibe of life which means the same to a caveman as it does to an astronaut because everyone gets the blues.  Psychedelia gave us the existentialism in which time and space don't matter since the increase or decrease at will but the perception within remains constant even while the perception of without changes radically.

The musical key to the song for we of the Rockhouse is the magnificently subtle use of vibrato in her voice.  This is the fundamental of the psychedelia in which it grows and swells but with such infinite subtlety.  It remains the hallmark for one of the most brilliantly creative works of art from that time and, for we of the Rockhouse, it's the wellspring.



Here is Grace Slick talking of how she wrote "White Rabbit" and it makes me love her even more since she did it on a broken piano with some broken or missing keys.  There are only two broken on the Rockhouse since but, just the same, it's played in F# minor a lot because of them.  Those physical keys don't apply to that musical key except as accidentals so F# works fine on a broken synth just as it apparently did for Grace Slick when she wrote the song.  (Wall Street Journal:  How Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick Wrote ‘White Rabbit’)

Note:  congrats to that classy Wall Street Journal crew for seeking to make a buck on Memorial Day with a flag and a sale on subscriptions.  That's so thoroughly, um, Wall Street of them.


From the article, we also learned Grace Slick is eleven years older so we never had a chance with her anyway since she was dropping acid in '63 and we were only just getting off the boat (i.e. Boeing 707 from Sydney).

What the hell, rolling it one more time because of the mad unrequited love ("White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love"):

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