Psychedelic Rock

The Grateful Dead, 1967

### Stylistic origins

Blues, jazz, folk music, Indian raga, Middle-Eastern, electronic, surf rock, psychedelic culture, British Invasion

### Subgenres

Neo-Psychedelia, heavy metal, progressive rock, space rock, shoegaze, psychedelic folk, freak folk, Krautrock, acid rock

**Psychedelic Rock**. What can really be said about this subgenre that has yet to be said. Originating in the mid-60s out of the psychedelic subcultures of Northern California and in Britain, psychedelic rock's goals is to make rock music that is meant to emulate (and enhance) the experience of taking psychedelic drugs.

Psychedelic rock's origins are difficult to pin down to one singular source, some would cite the Beatniks of the 1950s (who essentially were hippies ten years before they even existed) who indulged in psychedelia and smoking pot, as well as the surf music of the late 50s to early 60s, but most would agree that the movement officially became a worldwide thing in 1967 when The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper, after which it became a massive phenomenon in America and Britain and pretty much all other western countries at the time.

Psychedelic rock's golden years were spent from 1967 to 1969, with the Summer of Love centered on San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district which effectively forever made San Francisco be associated with psychedelia and the hippie subculture, and the 1969 Woodstock festival which basically was the concentration of everything the entire 1960s were building up to.

The movement is generally accepted to have been driven into decline by the 1969 Altamont Free Concert when the Rolling Stones attempted to start a second Woodstock that turned fatal, and the deaths of several key figures such as Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison made the movement no longer fun, and by the mid 1970s, the new hotness was disco, progressive rock, and large scale arena rock acts, though it has been revived several times, most recently in Australia and elsewhere in the 2010s.

## Pre-1967

As said before, psychedelic rock is difficult to pin down to one singular origin, but one major precursor that is often cited is the surf rock groups of the late 1950s and early 1960s who used a fuzzy, twangy, reverb driven guitar sound that was meant to capture the thrill of surfing. One early track described as a precursor to psychedelia is the instrumental "Telstar" by The Tornadoes, a 1962 Space Age Pop single produced by Joe Meek, who also recorded the album "I Hear A New World" in 1959 and released in 1960, which is in turn classed as a precursor to space rock.

The first rock single to make reference to LSD is the song "LSD-25" by The Gamblers, released as a single in 1960. Another influence would be outside the confines of western music; Middle Eastern digressions were massively influential, as well as the Indian ragas which could go on for up to 30 minutes and beyond, influencing the psychedelic scene's affinity for improvised jams.

The psychedelic aesthetic is generally accepted to have taken it's recognizable shape around 1965 to 1966; these young people which came to be known as hippies (though they preferred to refer to themselves as freaks or heads at the time) began growing out their hair, wearing colorful clothing, and consuming psychedelic substances such as LSD, which were all radically new concepts in America at the time given that up to this point all the uptight post-war American exceptionalism stuff from the 50s was still very much in place. In 1966, LSD was made illegal in California, but that didn't stop the hippies from getting their hands on it anyway.

Several prominent psychedelic bands formed during these two years, including the Grateful Dead (as the Warlocks until 1966), Jefferson Airplane (who were fronted by a girl, first by Signe Toly-Anderson until she quit, and then by Grace Slick, who is possibly one of the hottest women of the 60s), Pink Floyd in England (all formed in 1965), among others.

## It Begins (1967-1969)

In 1966, The Beatles began recording their newest album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the one album considered to have brought international attention to the psychedelic aesthetic and sound. This marked the beginning of the Beatles psychedelic period which included such works as Yellow Submarine and Magical Mystery Tour.

Also in 1966, a then unknown American guitarist by the name of James Marshall Hendrix, by then going by the name of Jimi, left the United States for England, where he met Chas Chandler of the Animals, and he helped Jimi put together a group consisting of Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, and they called themselves The Jimi Hendrix Experience. They put out a single, a cover of Hey Joe by The Leaves, in December 1966, and it became a hit. After months of hype, Are You Experienced was released, and it marked Jimi's legacy as the most influential rock guitarist in history.

Meanwhile in America, 1967 marked the start of the Summer of Love, centered on the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. This scene brought nationwide attention to the up to that point still very much stuck in the 50s American public with news reports such as The Hippie Temptation which gave mainstream America their first look at the Grateful Dead. The hippies as they were called, were often suspicious of the government, rejected the post war born consumerist culture, and were overwhelmingly opposed to the Vietnam War. This movement was later retroactively dubbed as the Counterculture of The 1960s, one of the first major movements of it's kind.

The 1967 Monterey Pop Festival was a massive landmark for the Counterculture, at the end of Jimi Hendrix's performance, he famously smashed his guitar to smithereens and set it on fire as a sacrifice to the rock and roll gods. 1967 marked the point when the psychedelic subculture entered mainstream culture, as the culture and aesthetics of the 1950s was gradually replaced with long hair, bell bottoms, and flowery shirts.

It all culminated into it's absolute ZENITH with the 1969 Woodstock Music and Arts Festival. Held in the state of New York in the town of Bethel, this one event managed to singlehandedly define the entire decade of the 1960s ignoring just about everything that came earlier, featuring performances by the Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Who (where Pete Townshend famously hit Abbey Hoffman with his guitar after he interrupted him), Mountain, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix (where he famously covered the Star Spangled Banner), and many MANY more.

In other parts of the world such as Mainland Europe, there existed little branches of psychedelia that could only have been bred in those regions. In Germany was birthed the Krautrock scene (or as they called it, Kosmiche Musik, or Cosmic Music) which involved the use of funk rhythms and free jazz influences. In France, a band called Gong was formed by Australian musician Daevid Allen, and created a band who's brand of psychedelic prog rock could only have existed in Europe.

## Decline, offshoots, and the present day

The psychedelic movement is generally accepted to have entered the downward spiral and lost it completely after the 1969 Altamont Free Concert, concieved as a Woodstock West (as it was held in California rather than in New York), turned fatal as the Hells Angels were hired for security and fucking killed a guy when the Rolling Stones were playing Under My Thumb. Along with that, by 1971, the movement had lost several of it's major players such as Brian Jones of the Stones (d. 1969), Jimi Hendrix (d. 1970), Janis Joplin (d. 1970), and Jim Morrison (d. 1971), all of whom died at age 27.

Jefferson Airplane all got sick of each other and broke up in 1972 and subsequently several former members formed into the arena act known as Jefferson Starship (later into the act simply known as Starship who went on to make WE BUILT THIS CITY), The Doors continued as a three piece after Jim Morrison's death until they realized, oh shit, Jim was our bread and butter and that this whole three piece thing wasn't working and disbanded by 1973. Several acts, however, kept on truckin, as the Dead continued touring for another 30 years until Jerry Garcia died in 1995, Gong kept on doing them and actually released their most acclaimed works around the time most people would consider the hippie movement to have ended (1973-74), proving the theory of them being a special brand of psychedelia that could only have existed in mainland Europe.

Psychedelic rock also gave way to early heavy metal, with early perpetrators such as Blue Cheer and Iron Butterfly in America, but codified by Black Sabbath in Britain, possibly the only early heavy metal group to still be classed as a true metal band.

In the 1980s came Neo-Psychedelic bands such as the Flaming Lips and Spacemen 3, which was basically early alternative rock and punk bands attempting to emulate the psychedelic sounds of the 60s but with punk's DIY approach and ragged intensity. Neo-psychedelia gave way to shoegazing, originally a very British centered movement started in the 80s and becoming a big damn deal in the early 90s in England. Shoegazing was named so because the bands used so many fucking pedals to achieve their coveted "walls of sound" that they would spend more time standing still staring at their pedal boards rather than moving around. The original British Shoegazing scene, dubbed the Scene That Celebrates Itself due to the fact the bands were usually all friends and didn't engage in superstar celebrity feuds and shit, killed itself when My Bloody Valentine, considered the face of the genre, released Loveless in 1991, an album so highly praised at the time that nobody thought it could ever be topped, and so the scene died off for a while to be replaced in the British rock consciousness by Britpop.

By the 2000s, psychedelic rock had gained a sizeable following in the underground scene, with the Flaming Lips being seen as the face of this new generation of psych rockers, as well as Connecticut band MGMT who toured with the Lips and had a trilogy of hit singles in the late 2000s. By the 2010s, something big was a brewin'. Psychedelic rock had a massive resurgence in popularity in Australia, which during psych rock's heyday had basically fuck all involvement with it, first sparked by Kevin Parker's project Tame Impala, formed in 2007, and then by the Melbourne giant King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, two of the most acclaimed rock bands of the new millennium. Whether this will lead to a new grunge, punk, or 80s metal style movement sweeping the world remains to be seen, but it's incredibly likely at this point given how King Gizzard just keep getting bigger and bigger and are due to play London's Alexandra Palace this October, promising an all new set and visual experience.