Psychedelic music
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Psychedelic music is a musical genre inspired by or attempting to replicate the mind-altering experience of drugs such as cannabis, psilocybin, mescaline, and especially LSD. It is not rigorously defined, and is sometimes interpreted to include everything from Acid Rock and Flower Power music to Hard Rock. However, an inner core of the genre that came to public attention in 1967 can be recognized by characteristic features such as modal melodies; esoteric lyrics often describing dreams, visions, or hallucinations; longer songs and lengthy instrumental solos; and recently invented "trippy" electronic effects such as distortion, reverb, and reversed, delayed and/or phased sounds.
While the first musicians to be influenced by psychedelic drugs were in the jazz and folk scenes, the first use of the term "psychedelic" in popular music was by the "acid-folk" group The Holy Modal Rounders in 1964. The first use of the word "psychedelic" in a rock music context is usually credited to the 13th Floor Elevators, and the earliest known appearance of this usage of the word in print is in the title of their 1966 album The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators. The psychedelic sound itself had been around at least a year earlier in the live music of the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd, and Donovan's hit Sunshine Superman. The genre reached its maximum popularity in 1967 and then quickly tapered off, though a number of bands continued and there has been a revival since the 1980s.
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History
The Beatnik counterculture included ideas of changed consciousness, shared with writers like Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley, whose book The Doors of Perception explored the idea of drugs stripping away barriers to thought and exposing unfiltered reality. Certain drugs including LSD were not illegal, and one of those experimenting was Ken Kesey who took part as a medical guinea pig in experiments with "psychomimetic" drugs in the late 1950s, and went on to gather like-minded people calling themselves the Merry Pranksters whose attempts to spread the message of psychedelic drugs developed into the Acid Tests of the mid 1960s and Psychedelia in art and music.
In 1962 British rock embarked on a frenetic race of ideas that spread back to the U.S. with the British Invasion. The folk music scene also experimented with outside influences. In the tradition of Jazz and blues music many musicians began to take drugs, and include drug references in their songs. In 1965 Bob Dylan was influenced by the Beatles to bring in electric rock instrumentation in his album Bringing It All Back Home, but The Byrds beat him to it with a jangling electric hit single version of a track from the album with hints of psychedelia, Mr. Tambourine Man.
U.S.A. in the 60s
Psychedelia began in the United States folk scene, with the Holy Modal Rounders introducing the term in 1964. From a background including folk and jug band music and influenced by The Byrds, The Grateful Dead went electric and fell in with Ken Kesey's LSD fuelled Merry Pranksters. The Dead played to light shows at the Prankster's Acid Tests, with pulsing images being projected over the group in what became a widespread practice, and developed Acid rock which they played at the Trips Festival of January 1966 along with Big Brother & the Holding Company. Soon the Fillmore was providing a regular venue for "San Francisco Sound" groups like Quicksilver Messenger Service, another former jug band Country Joe and the Fish, and the folk based Jefferson Airplane, whose debut album was recorded at the end of 1965 and later produced White Rabbit and Somebody to Love. The Byrds also contributed to psychedelia in 1966 with "Eight Miles High", a song with odd vocal harmonies and an extended guitar solo that guitarist Roger McGuinn states was inspired by Raga and John Coltrane, and later that year the 13th Floor Elevators titled their album The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators. The music increasingly became involved in opposition to the Vietnam War.
In 1965 members of Rick And The Ravens and The Psychedelic Rangers came together with Jim Morrison to form the Doors. Other bands in the vanguard included Spirit, SRC, the United States of America, Sly and the Family Stone, Love, Blue Cheer, The Amboy Dukes and Jefferson Airplane in the vanguard. January 1967 brought the first album from The Doors and their major hit single Light My Fire, and they went on to have a series of successes. The Grateful Dead made a number of records attempting to capture something of their live sound, with less commercial success.
Initially, the the Beach Boys, with their squeaky-clean image, seemed unlikely as psychedelic types. Their music, however, grew more psychedelic and experimental, perhaps due in part to writer/producer/arranger Brian Wilson's increased drug usage and burgeoning mental illness. In 1966, responding to the Beatles' innovations, they produced their album Pet Sounds and later that year had a massive hit with the psychedelic single Good Vibrations. Wilson's magnum-opus SMiLE (which was never finished, and was remade by Wilson with a new band in 2004) also shows this growing experimentation.
There were also less well known psychedelic bands in outlying regions, such as the 13th Floor Elevators and Bubble Puppy working out of Texas, and the Third Bardo in New York City, a group which had a brief revival in the 1990s. The influence was also felt in black music, where record labels such as Motown dabbled for a while with psychedelic soul, producing such hits as "Ball of Confusion (That's What the World is Today)" and "Psychedelic Shack" (by The Temptations), and "Reflections" (by Diana Ross & the Supremes), and the 11-minute-long "Time Has Come Today" by The Chambers Brothers, before falling out of favour.
Britain in the 60s
In the United Kingdom Donovan, going electric like Dylan, had a 1965 hit with Sunshine Superman, one of the very first overtly psychedelic pop records. Pink Floyd had been developing psychedelic rock with light shows since 1965 in the underground culture scene, and in 1966 the Soft Machine formed. In August 1966 The Beatles joined in the fun with their Revolver featuring psychedelia in Tomorrow Never Knows and in Yellow Submarine which combined these references with appeal to children and nostalgia, a formula repeated in Strawberry Fields Forever which would keep their music widely popular. From a blues rock background, the British supergroup Cream debuted in December. The Jimi Hendrix Experience with Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell brought Jimi Hendrix fame in Britain, and later in his American homeland.
Pink Floyd's Arnold Layne in March 1967 only hinted at their live sound, then after the Beatles' groundbreaking album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band ("Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds") was released in June, Pink Floyd showed their psychedelic sounds in The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Cream did the same in Disraeli Gears. In the folk scene itself blues, drugs, jazz and eastern influences had featured since 1964 in the work of Davy Graham and Bert Jansch, and in 1967 the Incredible String Band's The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion developed this into full blown psychedelia. Other artists joining the psychedelic revolution included Eric Burdon (previously of The Animals), and The Small Faces. The Who's Sell Out had an early psychedelic track "I Can See for Miles", but the album concept was out of tune with the times, and it was their later album Tommy that established them in the scene. The Rolling Stones had drug references and psychedelic hints in their 1966 singles 19th Nervous Breakdown and Paint it Black, then the fully psychedelic Their Satanic Majesties Request ("In Another Land") suffered from the problems the group was having at the time. In 1968 Jumpin' Jack Flash and Beggars Banquet re-established them, but their disastrous concert at Altamont ended the dream on a downer.
The End of the 60s
A good number of the bands who pioneered psychedelic rock gave it up by the end of the 1960s. The increasingly hostile political environment and the embrace of amphetamines, heroin and cocaine by the underground led to a turn toward harsher music. At the same time, Bob Dylan released John Wesley Harding and the Band released Music from Big Pink, both albums that rejected psychedelia for a more roots-oriented approach. Many bands in England and America followed suit. Eric Clapton cites Music from Big Pink as a primary reason for quitting Cream, for example. The Grateful Dead also went back to basics and had major successes with Workingman's Dead and American Beauty in 1970, then continued to successfully develop their rambling live music and produce a long string of records over the next twenty-five years.
The musicians and bands who continued to embrace psychedelia often went on to create progressive rock in the 1970s, which maintained the love of unusual sounds and extended solos but added jazz and classical influences to the mix. For example, progressive rock group Yes sprang out of three British psychedelic bands: Syn (featuring Chris Squire), Tomorrow (featuring Steve Howe) and Mabel Greer's Toy Shop (Jon Anderson). Also, psychedelic rock strongly influenced early heavy metal bands, Black Sabbath probably being the best example. Psychedelic rock, with its distorted guitar sound and adventurous compositions can be seen as an important bridge between heavy metal and earlier blues oriented rock.
Alongside the progressive stream, space rock bands such as Hawkwind, Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come and Gong maintained a more explicitly psychedelic course into the 1970s.
More recent bands
Phish, active from the early 1980s, played psychedelic music with a strong jazz influence and a great deal of technical skill, utilizing elaborate modal melodies and complex rhythmic accompaniment. In the mid 1980s a Los Angeles-based movement named the Paisley Underground acknowledged a debt to the Byrds, incorporating psychedelia into a folky, jangle pop sound. The Bangles were the most successful band to emerge from this movement; amongst others involved were Green on Red, the Three O'Clock and Dream Syndicate. Loxley Beade from Darmstadt/Germany created a very own mixture of Psychedelic, Folk-Rock and oriental influences by using exotic instruments.
A British counterpoint to the Paisley Underground was a number of post New Wave bands, most notably The Soft Boys and the solo albums of their singer Robyn Hitchcock, and The Teardrop Explodes and their vocalist Julian Cope. Hitchcock was heavily influenced by Syd Barrett and John Lennon, which accounts for part of the sound, though his famous flow-of-consciousness inter-song links in concerts is also responsible. In the mid 1980s, The Shamen began with a self-consciously psychedelic curriculum influenced by Barrett and Love, before re-orienting themselves towards rave. Other British dabblers in psychedelia include XTC and Martin Newell with The Cleaners from Venus and The Brotherhood of Lizards.
Alternative rock groups also dabbled in psychedelia, most famously, Nirvana on their debut single, 'Love Buzz'.
Recently the group Kula Shaker, under the leadership Crispian Mills, created much Indian-influenced psychedelic music such as their most recent album 'Peasants, pigs and Astronauts'. A number of bands such as Ozric Tentacles and the Welsh Gorky's Zygotic Mynci continue to play psychedelic music, in a tradition that goes back to the sixties via acts such as Steve Hillage, Gong and their assorted side projects.
British bands Anomie and My Bloody Valentine are standard-bearers for British garage psychedelia, citing Pink Floyd and Hawkwind as their musical influences. Some electronic or electronic-influenced music now termed "ambient" or "trance" would have fallen within the category of psychedelia in the 1966 to 1990 period, such as Aphex Twin or Orbital. Stoner rock acts like Kyuss and their successors also carry forward the flag of explicitly psychedelic music into the present day. The Smashing Pumpkins fused psychedelic rock sounds with heavy metal, becoming a highly successful alternative rock act in the 1990s.
Rising from the Japanese noise underground, Acid Mothers Temple mix the subtle, relaxing resonance of Blue Cheer and most obviously Grateful Dead's psychedelic sound, the thought provoking melodies of French folk, and concrete bursts of noise that run through music of Boredoms.
Other recent endevours include Neutral Milk Hotel, The Apples (In Stereo), Of Montreal, and Olivia Tremor Control: all members of the now defunct Elephant 6 musical collective, formally headquartered in Athens, Georgia.
See also
For a comprehensive list see: List of psychedelic music artists
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