In 1967 the Beatles were in Abbey Road Studios putting the finishing touches on their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. At one point Paul McCartney wandered down the corridor and heard what was then a new young band called Pink Floyd working on their hypnotic debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. He listened for a moment, then came rushing back. "Hey guys," he reputedly said, "There's a new band in there and they're gonna steal our thunder."
With their mix of blues, music hall influences, Lewis Carroll references, and dissonant experimentation, Pink Floyd was one of the key bands of the 1960s psychedelic revolution, a pop culture movement that emerged with American and British rock, before sweeping through film, literature, and the visual arts. The music was largely inspired by hallucinogens, or so-called "mind-expanding" drugs such as marijuana and LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide; "acid"), and attempted to recreate drug-induced states through the use of overdriven guitar, amplified feedback, and droning guitar motifs influenced by Eastern music.
This psychedelic consciousness was seeded, in the United States, by countercultural gurus such as Dr. Timothy Leary, a Harvard University professor who began researching LSD as a tool of self-discovery from 1960, and writer Ken Kesey who with his Merry Pranksters staged Acid Tests--multimedia "happenings" set to the music of the Warlocks (later the Grateful Dead) and documented by novelist Tom Wolfe in the literary classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)--and traversed the country during the mid-1960s on a kaleidoscope-colored school bus.
"Everybody felt the '60s were a breakthrough. There was exploration of sexual freedom and [a lot of] drugs around that were essential to the development of consciousness," recalls British avant-garde filmmaker Peter Whitehead, whose movies include Tonite Let's All Make Love in London (1967) and the Rolling Stones documentary Charlie Is My Darling (1966). "The zeitgeist of the time was the final collapse of a certain kind of thinking. The seeds were sown for feminism, for the whole notion of cyberspace, ecology, and the whole philosophy of Gaia."
Suzy Hopkins, formerly Suzy Creamcheese, a dancer and inspirational figure on the underground scene in Los Angeles and London, remembers the visceral way psychedelic culture affected the senses. "There's a difference between a drug and a psychedelic. Drugs make you drugged and psychedelics enhance your ability to see the truth or reality," she says. For her, LSD and music created a kind of alchemy. "When I start to dance, at a certain point, the dance takes over and the music is dancing me. Dancing is this electric enhancement of your spine by sound."
Many psychedelic bands explored this sense of abandonment in their music, moving away from standard rock rhythms and instrumentation. The Grateful Dead of San Francisco, for instance, created an improvisatory mix of country rock, blues, and acid R&B on albums like The Grateful Dead (1967) and Anthem of the Sun (1968), while another 'Frisco band, Jefferson Airplane (fronted by the striking vocalist Grace Slick), sang of the childlike hallucinatory delights of an acid trip in the 1967 Top Ten hit "White Rabbit."
In Los Angeles the multiracial band Love played whimsical, free-flowing rock, fueled by the unique vision of their troubled frontman Arthur Lee. A typically eccentric line from their third album, Forever Changes (1968), satirizes hippie dinginess: "The snot has caked against my pants." Also from Los Angeles, the Byrds plowed a different furrow, creating a jangly psychedelic folk augmented by rich vocal harmonies and orchestration. With such hits as "Eight Miles High" and their cover of Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man," they, along with the brooding intensity of the Doors, were among the most commercially successful of the West Coast bands. Another important Los Angeles act was the United States of America, a band led by electronic music composer Joe Byrd, whose eponymous 1968 debut album blends orchestral pastoral with harsh, atonal experimentation.
Meanwhile the 13th Floor Elevators from Austin, Texas, epitomized the darker, more psychotic frenzy of acid rock. Featuring the wayward talent of Roky Erickson, a gifted musician and songwriter who was later hospitalized for mental illness, the band played visionary jug-blowing blues. The track "Slip Inside This House," for instance, on Easter Everywhere (1967), conveys a sense of mysticism and transcendence, enhanced by acid. Erickson's occult explorations took him so far that by the time the band split in 1969 he believed Satan was following him everywhere.
On the East Coast the Velvet Underground echoed the sonic techniques of psychedelia with their use of repetition and electronic improvisation. Their attitude, though, was more about nihilistic art-school cool than the more playful "flower power." This was accentuated in the drugs they celebrated in song--speed and heroin, for instance, rather than LSD.
Established rock bands began to introduce psychedelic elements into their music, notably the Beatles, with such records as Revolver (1966), featuring the pounding mantra of "Tomorrow Never Knows"; Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), with the trippy lyrics of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"; Magical Mystery Tour (1967), showcasing the swirling surrealism of songs like "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "I Am the Walrus"; and The Beatles (1968; the "White Album"), containing the standout track "Revolution 9," an experimental collage of found sounds.
The Beach Boys, too, branched out with the expansive, haunting Pet Sounds (1966), an album masterminded by an introspective Brian Wilson. The Yardbirds, with Jeff Beck on guitar, scored a hit with the echo-laden "Shapes of Things" (1966). Encouraged by Brian Jones, who was drawn to instruments like the sitar and ancient Eastern percussion, the Rolling Stones dipped their feet into the scene with songs like "Paint It Black" (1966) and the less-successful album Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967).
In Britain psychedelic pioneers created music that was steeped in whimsy and surrealism and was less aggressive and minimalist than their American counterparts. The scene revolved around venues such as London's UFO club (a predecessor to festivals like Glastonbury) and Middle Earth and such events as the 14-Hour Technicolour Dream, a happening in April 1967 in the Alexandra Palace that featured an enormous pile of bananas and bands like Pink Floyd, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, and the Utterly Incredible Too Long Ago to Remember Sometimes Shouting at People. A benefit for the alternative newspaper IT (International Times), the event also drew counterculture celebrities such as John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Andy Warhol.
Pink Floyd was the leading light of the British underground scene, with vocalist/guitarist Syd Barrett the main writer behind such hits as "Arnold Layne" (a quirky, controversial song about a transvestite), and the spacey, driving instrumental "Interstellar Overdrive." He was a strong creative force until his worsening schizophrenia led to him being edged out of the band in 1968. Other British acts included the anarchic Tomorrow, which specialized in droning raga feedback and wild drumming; the operatic, flamboyant Arthur Brown; the R&B-flavored Pretty Things, and the Canterbury band Soft Machine, which incorporated "harmolodic" jazz into their psychedelic rock.
"Musically people were experimenting, trying to convey that transcendant feel. Even the Stones did it, shooting off at an angle that didn't suit them," sums up Andy Ellison, lead vocalist with John's Children, the first band of Marc Bolan, who later fronted T. Rex. "It was like soul music came from white boys on acid and took on a whole different meaning."
Psychedelic rock--which had already revolutionized fashion, poster art, and live performance--continued to grow after the 1960s, influencing a host of subgenres, including heavy metal, progressive and art rock, "Kraut-rock" (experimental electronic music by German bands such as Tangerine Dream), and the space-age funk of Parliament-Funkadelic (which, along with Jimi Hendrix, proved to be a key connection between black funk and psychedelia). Moreover, psychedelic rock's influence was evident in later genres, from punk to trip-hop to acid-house dance.
As Paul McCartney said in 1967, psychedelia meant musical liberation: "The straights should welcome the Underground because it stands for freedom."
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