The Mock Turtle Song/Steely Dan

The Mock Turtle Song never appeared on a Steely Dan studio album, but they have performed it live and it can be found on a number of compilations of outtake and demos by the duo, including Found Studio Tracks, released in 2007. The lyrics come virtually verbatim from Chapter X of Lewis Carroll's 1865 fantasy Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and begin: "Will you walk a little faster?" said a whiting to a snail"--whiting being a type of fish related to the cod. In the book, they are sung by the Mock Turtle as he and the Gryphon demonstrate for Alice a bizarre dance called the Lobster-Quadrille. (This is normally performed with actual lobsters, but the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon make do.) Fortunately Carroll records Alice's reaction to the performance: "'Thank you, it's a very interesting dance to watch,' said Alice, feeling very glad that it was over at last: 'And I do like that curious song about the whiting!'" (This same passage from Alice provided the title for actress Lilli Palmer's 1975 memoir, Change Lobsters and Dance.)

I Am the Walrus/The Beatles

"I Am the Walrus," from The Beatles' 1967 album Magical Mystery Tour, was actually created out of three songs that John Lennon was working on. Unable to finish them, he combined them into one. The idea for the walrus came from Lewis Carroll's poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter," found in his 1871 book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, a sequel of sorts to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In a 1980 Playboy Magazine interview, Lennon said: "It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist and social system. I never went into that bit about what he really meant, like people are doing with the Beatles' work. Later, I went back and looked at it and realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said 'I am the carpenter.' But that wouldn't have been the same, would it?" And we always thought the walrus was Paul. (Let's not overlook the other literary reference in the song: Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe.)

Submitted by William Scheckel

White Rabbit/Jefferson Airplane

Another blast from the psychedelic Sixties, this classic from Jefferson Airplane's 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow combines imagery from two novels by Lewis Carroll--Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865, and its 1871 sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There--with a lot of drug references. The song seems to suggest that this type of literature, in which characters consume magic mushrooms and drink potions to make themselves bigger or smaller, might induce children to take drugs.

Submitted by Carrie Jenott