24 June, 1967.

The Summer of Love is alive and well in my head this morning, and feeling ever so groovy in the sunshine.

This was written by Grace Slick whilst she was still performing with The Great Society but when that group disbanded in 1966 she joined Jefferson Airplane (later Jefferson Starship and then Starship), taking this song and Somebody To Love with her. Both would become iconic songs for the group.

Allegedly written after an acid trip, the song is based on the characters and imagery from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the sequel Through the Looking Glass. It’s essentially a song about following your curiosity, with the White Rabbit representing that curiosity.

Slick claimed this song was a slap in the face to parents who would read these stories to their children – and then wonder why they grew up to start taking mind altering drugs. Not surprisingly this became one of the first songs to sneak drug references into a song and fool the censors.

The song reached number one in the Canadian charts and number eight in the US on it’s release, but didn’t feature in the UK charts until 1987 when it spent a week on the chart and peaked at number ninety-four.