Psychedelic music
In 1964, the New York folk group The Holy Modal Rounders used the word psychedelic on a recording of Lead Belly's Hesitation Blues. This marked the first known usage of the term in music history. By that same year, folk guitarist John Fahey recorded The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party, a nineteen-minute track featuring nervous improvisations and odd guitar tunings. Fahey employed backwards tapes and novel instruments like flutes and sitars to create sounds that anticipated the genre. Folk artist Sandy Bull released Fantasias for Guitar and Banjo in 1963, blending Indian and Arabic dronish modes with jazz and folk elements.
The cultural groundwork was laid by Beat Generation writers such as William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg during the late 1950s. These figures wrote about and consumed drugs including cannabis and Benzedrine, raising public awareness of their use. In the early 1960s, proponents like Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley advocated for consciousness expansion through substances like LSD. Their ideas profoundly influenced the thinking of a new generation of youth across America.
San Francisco became the epicenter of this movement by the mid-1960s. Owsley Stanley established the first major underground LSD factory there. From 1964, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters sponsored Acid Tests, events combining light shows, film projections, and improvised music from the Grateful Dead. The band, then known as the Warlocks, received financial support from Stanley. These gatherings popularized LSD use through cross-country road trips in a decorated school bus and publications like Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test published in 1968.
Eastern instrumentation defined much of the genre, with artists showing particular fondness for the sitar and tabla. Songs often featured disjunctive structures, key changes, time signature shifts, modal melodies, and drones that differed sharply from contemporary pop music. Surreal lyrics drew inspiration from literature or esoteric themes to match the altered states of mind associated with the culture.
Extended instrumental segments and jams became a hallmark of psychedelic recordings. Keyboard presence was strong during the 1960s, utilizing electronic organs, harpsichords, and the Mellotron tape-driven sampler. Elaborate studio effects included backwards tapes, stereo panning, electronic phasing swooshes, long delay loops, and extreme reverb. Electronic instruments such as early synthesizers and the theremin appeared frequently in these productions.
Later forms of electronic psychedelia employed repetitive computer-generated beats alongside traditional rock elements. The Gamblers released the surf instrumental LSD 25 in 1960, marking the first mention of LSD on a rock record. In May 1965, drummer John Densmore and guitarist Robby Krieger formed the Psychedelic Rangers in Los Angeles. They wrote only two songs including one titled Paranoia before joining the Doors later that year.
From 1967 to 1968, psychedelic rock reached its commercial peak as the prevailing sound of rock music. This era featured both whimsical British variants and harder American West Coast acid rock styles. The Human Be-In event prefaced the Summer of Love in America, which culminated at the Monterey International Pop Festival. These trends climaxed with the 1969 Woodstock Festival, showcasing major acts like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, and Santana.
Musicians began to explicitly reference drugs and attempt to recreate or reflect the experience of taking LSD within their compositions. This trend ran parallel across America and Britain within interconnected folk and rock scenes. As pop music incorporated these sounds, the genre emerged as a mainstream force. By the end of the decade, however, the exploration of psychedelia was largely in retreat due to legal crackdowns and cultural backlash.
LSD became illegal in the United States and the United Kingdom in 1966. The linking of Sharon Tate and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca murders by the Manson Family to Beatles songs such as Helter Skelter contributed to an anti-hippie sentiment. The Altamont Free Concert on the 6th of December 1969, headlined by the Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane, did not turn out positively. It became notorious for the fatal stabbing of Meredith Hunter by Hells Angels security guards.
By the late 1960s, many rock musicians returned to rootsy sources leading to what Barney Hoskyns called retrogressive post-psychedelic music. Artists like the Rolling Stones, The Band, Delaney & Bonnie, Van Morrison, and Leon Russell embraced country rock or blues-soul inspired styles. A more avant-garde development emerged with Frank Zappa's contingent including The Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart, Wild Man Fischer, The GTOs, and Alice Cooper.
Post-psychedelic hard rock distinguished itself through cinematic guitar stylings and evocative lyric imagery found in Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Robin Trower. Music scholar Edward Macan noted these styles emphasized blues progressions while maintaining a weaker connection to hippie ethos. Two former Yardbirds guitarists Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page formed key acts in this new genre known as The Jeff Beck Group and Led Zeppelin respectively.
German bands from the psychedelic movement developed kosmische musik or Krautrock by placing increasing emphasis on electronic instrumentation. Groups including Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Can, and Faust adopted electronic synthesizers alongside jazz styles explored by Soft Machine and Can. This created a distinctive brand of electronic rock that influenced subsequent developments. By mid-1975, punk rock reinscribed rock autonomy through cultural means opposite to those developed ten years earlier.
Neo-psychedelia originated in the 1970s as an outgrowth of the British post-punk scene. Practitioners drew from unusual sounds of 1960s psychedelic music either updating or copying approaches from that era. Bands like the Soft Boys, Teardrop Explodes, and Echo & the Bunnymen became major figures within the movement. Some groups included forays into psychedelic pop, jangly guitar rock, heavily distorted free-form jams, or recording experiments.
The early 1980s Paisley Underground movement followed neo-psychedelia originating in Los Angeles. Young bands took different elements of late 1960s psychedelia while remaining distinct from one another. The term expanded to include others outside the city. Madchester developed in Manchester during the late 1980s merging alternative rock with acid house dance culture and other sources including 1960s pop.
Madchester's most famous groups included Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets, Charlatans, and 808 State. The Haçienda nightclub co-owned by New Order members served as a major catalyst for this distinctive musical ethos called the Second Summer of Love. Primal Scream released Screamadelica in 1991 marking a significant departure from their indie rock sound. The album won the first Mercury Music Prize in 1992 and sold over three million copies worldwide.
Acid house originated in mid-1980s Chicago through DJs like DJ Pierre, Adonis, Farley Jackmaster Funk, and Phuture. Phuture coined the term on his track Acid Tracks released in 1987. This style mixed house music with squelchy sounds and deep basslines produced by Roland TB-303 synthesizers. As singles reached the UK, the sound was recreated in small warehouse parties held in London between 1986 and 1987.
During 1988, acid house hit the mainstream during the Second Summer of Love when thousands traveled to mass raves. The genre penetrated British pop charts with hits for M/A/R/R/S, S'Express, and Technotronic by early 1990s before giving way to trance music popularity. Trance emerged from German techno and hardcore scenes in early 1990s emphasizing brief repeated synthesizer lines with minimal rhythmic changes.
Trance aimed at putting listeners into a trance-like state using occasional synthesizer atmospherics. A writer described it as a mixture of 70s disco and 60s psychedelia. Singles including Energy Flash by Joey Beltram and The Ravesignal by CJ Bolland helped develop the genre. Releases by Robert Leiner, Sun Electric, Aphex Twin, and Hardfloor's Acperience 1 followed. By the 2010s artists like Bassnectar Tipper and Pretty Lights dominated more mainstream psychedelic cultures.
Following Jimi Hendrix's late 1960s work, psychedelia began having widespread impact on African American musicians. Black funk artists such as Sly and the Family Stone borrowed techniques from psychedelic rock including wah pedals fuzz boxes echo chambers and vocal distorters. They also incorporated elements of blues rock and jazz into their sound. Groups like Parliament-Funkadelic continued this sensibility employing synthesizers and rock-oriented guitar work within open-ended funk jams.
Producer Norman Whitfield drew on this sound for popular Motown recordings including Temptations Cloud Nine released in 1968 and Marvin Gaye I Heard It Through the Grapevine from 1969. Psychedelic soul carried a darker political edge influenced by the civil rights movement compared to much psychedelic rock. Songs like I Want To Take You Higher by Sly and the Family Stone exemplified this new direction alongside The Temptations Runaway Child Running Wild and Psychedelic Shack both from 1969.
Psychedelic rap fused hip hop music with psychedelia using pioneers like New York Native Tongues collective headlined by De La Soul Jungle Brothers and A Tribe Called Quest. Shock G also contributed to the genre. Cloud rap emerged later as a subgenre known for hazy dreamlike relaxed production styles. Rapper Lil B and producer Clams Casino identified as early pioneers of cloud rap derived from internet origins and ethereal style.
Common questions
When was the term psychedelic first used in music history?
The New York folk group The Holy Modal Rounders used the word psychedelic on a recording of Lead Belly's Hesitation Blues in 1964. This marked the first known usage of the term in music history.
Where did the psychedelic music movement become an epicenter by the mid-1960s?
San Francisco became the epicenter of this movement by the mid-1960s. Owsley Stanley established the first major underground LSD factory there and Ken Kesey sponsored Acid Tests combining light shows with improvised music from the Grateful Dead.
What year did LSD become illegal in the United States and the United Kingdom?
LSD became illegal in the United States and the United Kingdom in 1966. The linking of Sharon Tate and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca murders by the Manson Family to Beatles songs such as Helter Skelter contributed to an anti-hippie sentiment following this legal change.
Which bands developed kosmische musik or Krautrock during the German psychedelic movement?
German bands including Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Can, and Faust adopted electronic synthesizers alongside jazz styles explored by Soft Machine and Can. This created a distinctive brand of electronic rock that influenced subsequent developments.
When was the album Screamadelica released by Primal Scream?
Primal Scream released Screamadelica in 1991 marking a significant departure from their indie rock sound. The album won the first Mercury Music Prize in 1992 and sold over three million copies worldwide.