Psychedelic music

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Psychedelic music is a term that covers a sprawling family of sounds, from folk singers in 1960s San Francisco to Chicago DJs building tracks around the Roland TB-303 synthesizer, to Manchester club-goers dancing through a Second Summer of Love. What binds this music together is not a single instrument or tempo but a shared ambition: to mirror, summon, or intensify altered states of consciousness. Author Michael Hicks traced that ambition to three specific psychological effects of LSD. The first is dechronicization, which breaks the user free from normal time perception. The second is depersonalization, which dissolves the self into what Hicks describes as an awareness of undifferentiated unity. The third, citing Timothy Leary, is dynamization: the sense that familiar objects bend, dance, and flow. Music that is truly psychedelic, Hicks argues, mimics all three. That framework helps explain why the sonic signatures of psychedelic music look the way they do: disjunctive song structures, modal melodies, drones, extended improvisation, sitar, tabla, backwards tapes, Mellotrons, and the swooshing wash of electronic phasing. How a style built around personal drug experience became one of the most influential forces in twentieth-century popular music is the thread this documentary follows.

• 2. Seeds Before the Sixties

  ›

  William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg were using and writing about drugs, including cannabis and Benzedrine, from the second half of the 1950s onward. Their visibility raised awareness well before the word psychedelic was applied to music. In the early 1960s, advocates for consciousness expansion such as Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, and Arthur Koestler pushed further, and historian Laurence Veysey observed that they profoundly shaped the thinking of a new generation. The first major underground LSD factory was established in California by Owsley Stanley, who also financed the band then called the Warlocks and later known as the Grateful Dead. From 1964, novelist Ken Kesey's loosely organized Merry Pranksters used Stanley's LSD supply at a series of events called the Acid Tests, pairing the drug with light shows, film projection, and improvised music. Their cross-country trips in a psychedelically decorated school bus brought them into contact with key figures of the Beat movement, and Tom Wolfe chronicled the whole arc in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, published in 1968. Folk guitarist John Fahey had already been experimenting with backwards tapes and unusual instrumental pairings in the early 1960s. His nineteen-minute piece "The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party" was later recognized as having anticipated elements of psychedelia through its nervy improvisations and odd guitar tunings. Sandy Bull's 1963 album Fantasias for Guitar and Banjo, which incorporated folk, jazz, and Indian and Arabic-influenced drones, has been described as one of the very first psychedelic records. The earliest known use of the word psychedelic in music itself came from the New York folk group the Holy Modal Rounders, who put the term on their 1964 recording of Lead Belly's "Hesitation Blues."

• 3. Naming a New Genre

  ›

  In May 1965, drummer John Densmore joined guitarist Robby Krieger in a Los Angeles band called the Psychedelic Rangers. The pair took LSD legally, wrote just two songs, one of them titled "Paranoia," and dissolved before leaving any lasting recordings. A different group using the same name briefly existed that same year in New York, formed by John Townley and David Blue. Densmore and Krieger later joined the Doors in late 1965. The naming race that was quietly underway had a clearer winner in January 1966, when the Texan band the 13th Floor Elevators printed the term psychedelic rock on business cards bearing the image of a third eye. In October of that year the band released The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, the earliest known album title to carry the word psychedelic. Within a month, New York acts the Deep and Blues Magoos released Psychedelic Moods and Psychedelic Lollipop respectively. The first mention of LSD on a rock record had arrived even earlier, on the Gamblers' 1960 surf instrumental "LSD 25." By 1965 the New York group the Fugs had put a lyrical reference to LSD into their song "I Couldn't Get High." The transition from underground slang to genre label was swift, and once the 13th Floor Elevators stamped the phrase onto a commercial release, the term began spreading through the music press and onto record sleeves across two continents.

• 4. Peak and Backlash

  ›

  From 1967 to 1968, psychedelic rock was the prevailing sound of rock music on both sides of the Atlantic. A softer, more whimsical British variant coexisted with a harder American West Coast acid rock style. The 1967 Summer of Love in America was introduced by the Human Be-In event and reached a highpoint at the Monterey International Pop Festival. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, and Santana were all part of the bill at the 1969 Woodstock Festival, which assembled most of the major psychedelic acts of the era. The contraction that followed was shaped by events both legal and violent. LSD was declared illegal in both the United States and the United Kingdom in 1966. The Manson Family murders of Sharon Tate and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, linked in the press to Beatles songs including "Helter Skelter," fueled an anti-hippie backlash. On the 6th of December 1969, the Altamont Free Concert in California, headlined by the Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane, ended not as a celebratory milestone but as a scene of tragedy: Meredith Hunter, a Black teenager, was fatally stabbed by Hells Angels security guards. The optimism that had driven the psychedelic moment was not, after Altamont, easy to sustain.

• 5. Rock's Inheritance

  ›

  Musicologist Frank Hoffman traced the emergence of post-psychedelic hard rock to the varied rock scene of the late 1960s, identifying it by more cinematic guitar stylings and evocative lyric imagery, heard in the work of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Robin Trower. Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, both former Yardbirds guitarists, went on to form The Jeff Beck Group and Led Zeppelin, carrying the distorted guitar and extended solo vocabulary of psychedelic rock into what became heavy metal. Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Judas Priest, and UFO also began as blues-based psychedelic bands before pioneering the metal genre. At the more experimental end, academic Christophe Den Tandt pointed to a stricter professionalism and the adoption of classical music structures, visible in the concept albums of Pink Floyd and the virtuosic playing of Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Yes. King Crimson's 1969 album In the Court of the Crimson King has been identified as a bridge between psychedelia and progressive rock. German bands including Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Can, and Faust moved away from psychedelic roots toward heavy electronic instrumentation, developing the style known as kosmische musik, which the British press labeled Krautrock. Den Tandt also observed that post-psychedelic musicians like Brian Eno and Robert Fripp advocated a deliberate distance between artist and commercial identity, a stance he traced forward to post-punk: the blurry cover photographs on the first four albums by The Cure, and Factory Records' dark covers with serial numbers, both drew on that lineage.

• 6. Soul, Funk, and Hip Hop

  ›

  Following Jimi Hendrix's late 1960s work, psychedelic techniques spread widely among African American musicians. Sly and the Family Stone absorbed wah pedals, fuzz boxes, echo chambers, and vocal distorters from psychedelic rock, and blended them with blues rock and jazz in an approach that Parliament-Funkadelic later extended further, adding synthesizers and rock-oriented guitar to open-ended funk jams. Producer Norman Whitfield applied this sensibility to Motown recordings, including the Temptations' "Cloud Nine" in 1968 and Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" in 1969. Psychedelic soul, influenced by the civil rights movement, carried a darker and more politically charged edge than its rock counterpart. Sly and the Family Stone pioneered the style with songs including "I Want to Take You Higher" in 1969, while the Temptations contributed "Runaway Child, Running Wild" and "Psychedelic Shack," both also from 1969. Hip hop's connection to psychedelia emerged through the Native Tongues collective in New York, anchored by De La Soul, Jungle Brothers, and A Tribe Called Quest, along with Shock G. Cloud rap, a later subgenre identified primarily with rapper Lil B and producer Clams Casino, extended the hazy, dreamlike mood of psychedelia through trap-influenced production. Its name referenced both its internet origins and an ethereal sonic quality.

• 7. Dance Floors and Acid House

  ›

  Acid house originated in Chicago in the mid-1980s, built from the house music of DJs including DJ Pierre, Adonis, Farley Jackmaster Funk, and Phuture. The last of those groups coined the term with their track "Acid Tracks" in 1987. The defining texture came from the Roland TB-303 synthesizer, whose squelchy sounds and deep basslines gave the genre its character. Singles reached the United Kingdom, where the sound was re-created beginning with small warehouse parties in London in 1986-87. During 1988's Second Summer of Love, it became a mainstream phenomenon as thousands of clubgoers travelled to mass raves. Acts including M/A/R/R/S, S'Express, and Technotronic pushed the sound into the British pop charts by the early 1990s. Trance music developed from the German techno and hardcore scenes of the early 1990s, with the goal of inducing a trance-like state through repeated synthesizer lines and minimal rhythmic changes. A Billboard magazine writer described it as a mixture of 1970s disco and 1960s psychedelia. Influential releases included "Energy Flash" by Joey Beltram and "The Ravesignal" by CJ Bolland, followed by the Harthouse label's widely imitated "Acperience 1" by duo Hardfloor in 1992. Madchester, meanwhile, was a Manchester-centered scene of the late 1980s in which artists merged alternative rock with acid house and dance culture. The Hacienda nightclub, co-owned by members of New Order, served as a central catalyst. Primal Scream's Screamadelica, released in 1991 and drawing from house music, LSD, and MDMA culture, won the first Mercury Music Prize in 1992 and has since sold over three million copies worldwide.

• 8. Chillwave, Therapy, and What Remains

  ›

  In July 2009, a blogger using the pseudonym Carles coined the term chillwave on the Hipster Runoff blog, naming a cluster of similarly sounding bands in a post to his accompanying radio show. The following month, music journalist David Keenan introduced the separate label hypnagogic pop to describe a developing trend in which artists engaged with cultural nostalgia, childhood memory, and outdated recording technology. A 2009 Pitchfork review by Marc Hogan of Neon Indian's album Psychic Chasms treated the terms chillwave, glo-fi, hypnagogic pop, dream-beat, and hipster-gogic pop as interchangeable, defining the shared sound as psychedelic music that was synth-based, homemade-sounding, 1980s-referencing, cassette-oriented, and hazy. Synthedelia, a separate fusion genre, was coined by music journalist Simon Reynolds to describe the pairing of psychedelia and early electronic music popular on both the American West and East Coasts in the mid-to-late 1960s. The New York band Lothar and the Hand People, who formed in 1965, have been identified as the first rock band to build their sound around an electronic instrument, specifically the theremin. Research into psychedelic-assisted therapy has also brought music back into a clinical context, with studies showing that a curated playlist can function as part of a favorable therapeutic setting. The study of how sound shapes altered experience, which began informally at Acid Tests in 1964, continues as a formal field of inquiry.