Psychedelic rock

Definition

As a musical style, psychedelic rock attempted to replicate the effects of and enhance the mind-altering experiences of hallucinogenic drugs, incorporating new electronic sound effects and recording effects, extended solos, and improvisation. Common features include:

The term "psychedelic" was first coined in 1956 by psychiatrist Humphry Osmond as an alternative descriptor for hallucinogenic drugs in the context of psychedelic psychotherapy. As the countercultural scene developed in San Francisco, the terms acid rock and psychedelic rock were used in 1966 to describe the new drug-influenced music and were being widely used by 1967. The terms psychedelic rock and acid rock are often used interchangeably, but acid rock may be distinguished as a more extreme variation that was heavier, louder, relied on long jams, focused more directly on LSD, and made greater use of distortion.

Precursors and influences

In the popular music of the early 1960s, it was common for producers, songwriters, and engineers to freely experiment with musical form, arrangements, unnatural reverb, and other sound effects. Some of the best known examples are Phil Spector's Wall of Sound production formula and Joe Meek's use of homemade electronics for acts like the Tornados. XTC's Andy Partridge interprets the music of psychedelic groups as a "grown-up" version of children's novelty records, believing that many acts were trying to emulate those records that they grew up with; "They use exactly the same techniques—sped-up bits, slowed-down bits, too much echo, too much reverb, that bit goes backwards. ... There was no transition to be made. You go from things like 'Flying Purple People Eater' to 'I Am the Walrus'. They go hand-in-hand." Music critic Richie Unterberger says that attempts to "pin down" the first psychedelic record are therefore "nearly as elusive as trying to name the first rock & roll record". Some of the "far-fetched claims" include the instrumental "Telstar" (produced by Meek for the Tornados in 1962) and the Dave Clark Five's "massively reverb-laden" "Any Way You Want It" (1964). The first mention of LSD on a rock record was the Gamblers' 1960 surf instrumental "LSD 25".

American folk singer Bob Dylan was a massive influence on mid 1960s rock music. He led directly to the creation of folk rock and the psychedelic rock musicians that followed, and his lyrics were a touchstone for the psychedelic songwriters of the late 1960s. Meanwhile in British folk, blues, drugs, jazz and eastern influences had featured since 1964 in the work of Davy Graham and Bert Jansch, which was an integral precursor to the folk rock that followed. Molly Longman of mic.com writes that, in terms of bridging the relationship between music and hallucinogens, the Beatles and the Beach Boys were the era's most pivotal acts. In 1965, the Beach Boys' leader Brian Wilson started exploring song composition while under the influence of psychedelic drugs, and after being introduced to cannabis in 1964 by Dylan, members of the Beatles also began using LSD. The considerable success enjoyed by these two bands allowed them the freedom to experiment with new technology over entire albums. Producer George Martin, who was initially known as a specialist in comedy and novelty records, responded to the Beatles' requests by providing a range of studio tricks that ensured the band played a key role in the development of psychedelic effects.

In Unterberger's opinion, the Byrds, emerging from the Californian folk scene, and the Yardbirds, from England's blues scene, were more responsible than the Beatles for "sounding the psychedelic siren ... With their ominous minor key melodies, hyperactive instrumental breaks (called rave-ups), and use of Gregorian chants". Drug use and attempts at psychedelic music moved out of acoustic folk-based music towards rock soon after the Byrds "plugged in" to produce a chart topping version of Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" in the summer of 1965, which became a folk rock standard. In the song's lyric, the narrator requests: "Take me on a trip upon your magic swirling ship". A number of Californian-based folk acts followed the Byrds into folk-rock, bringing their psychedelic influences with them, to produce the "San Francisco Sound".

On the Yardbirds, Unterberger identifies lead guitarist Jeff Beck as having "laid the blueprint for psychedelic guitar", and the band for defining psychedelic rock's "manic eclecticism". The Beatles introduced guitar feedback with "I Feel Fine" (1964) and incorporated drug-inspired drone on "Ticket to Ride" (1965). The Kinks and the Yardbirds also incorporated droning guitars to mimic the qualities of the sitar, but the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" (from the December 1965 album Rubber Soul) marked the first released recording on which a member of a Western rock group played an Indian instrument. The song is generally credited for sparking a musical craze for the sound of the sitar in the mid-1960s – a trend which would later be associated with the growth of the essence of psychedelic rock. According to music journalist Mark Ellen, Rubber Soul "sow[ed] the seeds of psychedelia", while author George Case recognises Rubber Soul as one of two Beatles albums that "marked the authentic beginning of the psychedelic era".

Formative psychedelic scenes

According to music journalist Barry Miles: "Hippies didn't just pop up overnight, but 1965 was the first year in which a discernible youth movement began to emerge. Most of the key "psychedelic" rock bands formed this year." On the West Coast, underground chemist Augustus Owsley Stanley III and Ken Kesey (along with his followers known as the "Merry Pranksters") helped thousands of people take uncontrolled trips at Kesey's "Trips Festivals" and in the new psychedelic dance halls. In Britain, Michael Hollingshead opened the World Psychedelic Centre while Beat Generation poets Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso read at the Royal Albert Hall. Miles adds: "The readings acted as a catalyst for underground activity in London, as people suddenly realized just how many like-minded people there were around. This was also the year that London began to blossom into colour with the opening of the Granny Takes a Trip and Hung On You clothes shops." Thanks to media coverage, use of LSD became widespread.

Author Jim DeRogatis says the birth date of psychedelic (or acid) rock is "best listed at 1966". The San Francisco music scene developed in 1965–66 as The Fillmore, the Avalon Ballroom, and The Matrix began booking local rock bands on a nightly basis. Performances were accompanied by psychedelic-themed light shows in order to replicate the visual effects of the psychedelic experience. A major figure in the expansion of the genre was promoter Bill Graham, whose first rock concert in 1965 was a benefit that included Allen Ginsberg and the then unknown Jefferson Airplane on the bill. He produced shows attracting most of the major psychedelic rock bands and operated The Fillmore. According to Kevin T. McEneaney, the Grateful Dead "invented" acid rock in front of a crowd of concertgoers in San Jose, California on December 4, 1965, the date of the second Acid Test held by author Ken Kasey. Their stage performance involved the use of strobe lights to reproduce LSD's "surrealistic fragmenting" or "vivid isolating of caught moments". The Acid Test experiments subsequently launched the entire psychedelic subculture.

Growth and early popularity

Music journalists Pete Prown and Harvey P. Newquist locate the "peak years" of psychedelic rock between 1966 and 1969. 1966 saw the media coverage of rock music change considerably as the music became reevaluated as a new form of art in tandem with the growing psychedelic community. In March 1966, the Byrds moved rapidly away from folk rock with their single "Eight Miles High", which made use of free jazz and Indian ragas, and the lyrics of which were widely taken to refer to drug use. The result of this directness was limited airplay, and there was a similar reaction when Dylan, who had also electrified to produce his own brand of folk rock, released "Rainy Day Women ♯ 12 & 35" (April 1966), with its repeating chorus of "Everybody must get stoned!".

Contributing to psychedelia's emergence into the pop mainstream was the release of Beach Boys' Pet Sounds (May 1966) and the Beatles' Revolver (August 1966). Often considered one of the earliest albums in the canon of psychedelic rock, Pet Sounds contained many elements that would be incorporated into psychedelia, with its artful experiments, psychedelic lyrics based on emotional longings and self-doubts, elaborate sound effects and new sounds on both conventional and unconventional instruments. Scholar Philip Auslander says that even though psychedelic music is not normally associated with the Beach Boys, the "odd directions" and experiments in Pet Sounds "put it all on the map. ... basically that sort of opened the door — not for groups to be formed or to start to make music, but certainly to become as visible as say Jefferson Airplane or somebody like that." Like Pet Sounds, Revolver explored musical soundscapes that could not be replicated in concert, even with the addition of an orchestra. The Beatles' May 1966 B-side "Rain", recorded during the Revolver sessions, was the first pop recording to include reversed sounds. Author Steve Turner recognises the Beatles' success in conveying an LSD-inspired worldview on Revolver, particularly on "Tomorrow Never Knows", as having "opened the doors to psychedelic rock (or acid rock)".

The first acid (or psychedelic) rock single to break into the top 10 in popular music charts was Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction" (June 1966). As in most early acid rock music, the song's most characteristic element was its replacement of the melodic electric guitar with howling feedback and distortion. In August 1966, the Texas band 13th Floor Elevators debuted with The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators. They were the first group to advertise themselves as psychedelic rock, having done so since the end of 1965. The Beach Boys' October 1966 single "Good Vibrations" was another early pop song to incorporate psychedelic lyrics and sounds. Upon release, the single prompted an unexpected revival in theremins and increased the awareness of analog synthesizers. By the end of the year, the Beatles and the Beach Boys ("Good Vibrations") were the only acts to have high-charting psychedelic rock songs. As psychedelia gained prominence, Beach Boys-style harmonies would be ingrained into the newer psychedelic pop.

Continued development and British variants

1967 was when psychedelic rock received widespread media attention and a larger audience beyond local psychedelic communities. From 1967 to 1968, psychedelic rock was the prevailing sound of rock music, either in the whimsical British variant, or the harder American West Coast acid rock. Since most of the US acts had yet to release records in the UK, most of the British groups based their sound on what they'd simply read or heard about psychedelic music. Compared with American psychedelia, British psychedelic music was often more arty in its experimentation, and it tended to stick within pop song structures. Pink Floyd's "Arnold Layne" (January 1967) and "See Emily Play" (May 1967), both written by Syd Barrett, helped set the pattern for British pop-psychedelia.

Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow (February 1967) was the first album to come out of San Francisco during this era, which sold well enough to bring the city's music scene to the attention of the record industry: from it they took two of the earliest psychedelic hit singles: "White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love". That same month, the Beatles released the double A-side "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane", which Ian MacDonald says opened a strain of "British pop-pastoral" music explored by late 1960s groups like Pink Floyd, Traffic, Family, and Fairport Convention. Soon, British clubs like the UFO Club, Middle Earth Club, The Roundhouse, the Country Club and the Art Lab were drawing capacity audiences with psychedelic rock and ground-breaking liquid light shows. A major figure in the development of British psychedelia was the American promoter and record producer Joe Boyd, who moved to London in 1966. He co-founded venues including the UFO Club, produced Pink Floyd's first single, "Arnold Layne", and went on to manage folk and folk rock acts including Nick Drake, the Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention.

Psychedelic rock's popularity accelerated following the success of the Monterey Pop Festival and the release of the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in the same week of June. The album was the first commercially successful work that critics heralded as a landmark aspect of psychedelia, and the Beatles' mass appeal meant that the album would be played virtually everywhere. The Summer of Love of 1967 saw a huge number of young people from across America and the world travel to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, boosting the population from 15,000 to around 100,000. It was prefaced by the Human Be-In event in March and reached its peak at the Monterey Pop Festival in June, the latter helping to make major American stars of Janis Joplin, lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jimi Hendrix, and the Who. Existing "British Invasion" acts now joined the psychedelic revolution, including Eric Burdon (previously of The Animals) and The Who, whose The Who Sell Out (December 1967) included psychedelic influenced tracks "I Can See for Miles" and "Armenia City in the Sky". The Incredible String Band's The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion (July 1967) developed their folk music into full blown psychedelia, which would be a major influence on psychedelic rock.

According to author Edward Macan, there ultimately existed three distinct wings of British psychedelic music. The first was based on a heavy, electric reinterpretation of the blues played by the Rolling Stones, adding guitarist Pete Townshend of the Who's pioneering power chord style to the mix. Groups of this nature were dominated by Cream, the Yardbirds, and Hendrix. The second drew strongly from jazz sources and was represented early on by Traffic, Colosseum, If, and the Canterbury scene spearheaded by Soft Machine and Caravan. Their music was considerably more complex than the Cream/Hendrix/Yardbirds approach. The third wing was represented by the Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, and the Nice, who were influenced by the later music of the Beatles, unlike the other two wings. Several of the English psychedelic bands who followed in the wake of the Beatles' psychedelic Sgt. Pepper's developed characteristics of the Beatles' music (specifically their classical influence) further than either the Beatles or contemporaneous West Coast psychedelic bands.

International expansion

The US and UK were the major centres of psychedelic music, but in the late 1960s scenes began to develop across the world, including continental Europe, Australasia, Asia and south and Central America.

In the later 1960s psychedelic scenes developed in a large number of countries in continental Europe, including the Netherlands with bands like The Outsiders, Denmark where it was pioneered by Steppeulvene, and Germany, where musicians began to fuse music of psychedelia and the electronic avant-garde. 1968 saw the first major German rock festival in Essen, and the foundation of the Zodiak Free Arts Lab in Berlin by Hans-Joachim Roedelius, and Conrad Schnitzler, which helped bands like Tangerine Dream and Amon Düül achieve cult status.

A thriving psychedelic music scene in Cambodia, influenced by psychedelic rock and soul broadcast by US forces radio in Vietnam, was pioneered by artists such as Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Sereysothea. In South Korea, Shin Jung-Hyeon, often considered the godfather of Korean rock, played psychedelic-influenced music for the American soldiers stationed in the country. Following Shin Jung-Hyeon, the band San Ul Lim (Mountain Echo) often combined psychedelic rock with a more folk sound. In Turkey, Anatolian rock artist Erkin Koray blended classic Turkish music and Middle Eastern themes into his psychedelic-driven rock, helping to found the Turkish rock scene with artists such as Cem Karaca, Mogollar and Baris Manco.

Decline

Psychedelic trends climaxed in the 1969 Woodstock festival, which saw performances by most of the major psychedelic acts, including Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, and the Grateful Dead. By the end of the 1960s, psychedelic rock was in retreat. In 1966, LSD had been made illegal in the US and UK. In 1969, the murders of Sharon Tate and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca by Charles Manson and his "family" of followers, claiming to have been inspired by Beatles' songs such as "Helter Skelter", has been seen as contributing to an anti-hippie backlash. At the end of the same year, the Altamont Free Concert in California, headlined by the Rolling Stones, became notorious for the fatal stabbing of black teenager Meredith Hunter by Hells Angel security guards.

Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac and Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd were early "acid casualties", helping to shift the focus of the respective bands of which they had been leading figures. Some groups, such as the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream, broke up. Hendrix died in London in September 1970, shortly after recording Band of Gypsys (1970), Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose in October 1970 and they were closely followed by Jim Morrison of the Doors, who died in Paris in July 1971. Many surviving acts moved away from psychedelia into either more back-to-basics "roots rock", traditional-based, pastoral or whimsical folk, the wider experimentation of progressive rock, or riff-based heavy rock.

Soul and funk

Following the lead of Hendrix in rock, psychedelia began to influence African American musicians, particularly the stars of the Motown label. This psychedelic soul was influenced by the civil rights movement, giving it a darker and more political edge than much acid rock. Building on the funk sound of James Brown, it was pioneered from about 1968 by Sly and the Family Stone and The Temptations. Acts that followed them into this territory included Edwin Starr and the Undisputed Truth. George Clinton's interdependent Funkadelic and Parliament ensembles and their various spin-offs took the genre to its most extreme lengths making funk almost a religion in the 1970s, producing over forty singles, including three in the US top ten, and three platinum albums.

While psychedelic rock began to waver at the end of the 1960s, psychedelic soul continued into the 1970s, peaking in popularity in the early years of the decade, and only disappearing in the late 1970s as tastes began to change. Acts like Earth, Wind and Fire, Kool and the Gang and Ohio Players, who began as psychedelic soul artists, incorporated its sounds into funk music and eventually the disco which partly replaced it.

Prog, heavy metal, and krautrock

Many of the British musicians and bands that had embraced psychedelia went on to create progressive rock in the 1970s, including Pink Floyd, Soft Machine and members of Yes. King Crimson's album In the Court of the Crimson King (1969) has been seen as an important link between psychedelia and progressive rock. While bands such as Hawkwind maintained an explicitly psychedelic course into the 1970s, most dropped the psychedelic elements in favour of wider experimentation. The incorporation of jazz into the music of bands like Soft Machine and Can also contributed to the development of the jazz rock of bands like Colosseum. As they moved away from their psychedelic roots and placed increasing emphasis on electronic experimentation, German bands like Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Can and Faust developed a distinctive brand of electronic rock, known as kosmische musik, or in the British press as "Kraut rock". The adoption of electronic synthesisers, pioneered by Popol Vuh from 1970, together with the work of figures like Brian Eno (for a time the keyboard player with Roxy Music), would be a major influence on subsequent electronic rock.

Psychedelic rock, with its distorted guitar sound, extended solos and adventurous compositions, has been seen as an important bridge between blues-oriented rock and later heavy metal. American bands whose loud, repetitive psychedelic rock emerged as early heavy metal included the Amboy Dukes and Steppenwolf. From England, two former guitarists with the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, moved on to form key acts in the genre, The Jeff Beck Group and Led Zeppelin respectively. Other major pioneers of the genre had begun as blues-based psychedelic bands, including Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Judas Priest and UFO. Psychedelic music also contributed to the origins of glam rock, with Marc Bolan changing his psychedelic folk duo into rock band T. Rex and becoming the first glam rock star from 1970. From 1971 David Bowie moved on from his early psychedelic work to develop his Ziggy Stardust persona, incorporating elements of professional make up, mime and performance into his act.