Psychedelic music (sometimes called psychedelia)C. Heylin, The Act You've Known for All These Years: the Life, and Afterlife, of Sgt. Pepper (London: Canongate Books, 2007), , p. 85. is a wide range of popular music styles and genres influenced by 1960s psychedelia, a subculture of people who used psychedelic drugs such as DMT, LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin mushrooms, to experience synesthesia and altered states of consciousness. Psychedelic music may also aim to enhance the experience of using these drugs and has been found to have a significant influence on psychedelic therapy.
Psychedelia embraces visual art, movies, and literature, as well as music. Psychedelic music emerged during the 1960s among folk and rock bands in the United States and the United Kingdom, creating the subgenres of psychedelic folk, psychedelic rock, acid rock, and psychedelic pop before declining in the early 1970s. Numerous spiritual successors followed in the ensuing decades, including progressive rock, krautrock, and heavy metal. Since the 1970s, revivals have included psychedelic funk, neo-psychedelia, and stoner rock as well as psychedelic electronic music genres such as acid house, trance music, and new rave.
Characteristics "Psychedelic" as an adjective is often used loosely, with many acts playing in a variety of styles. Acknowledging this, author Michael Hicks explains:
A number of features are signatures of psychedelic music. Eastern instrumentation, with a particular fondness for the sitar and tabla, is common.R. Rubin and J. P. Melnick, Immigration and American Popular Culture: an Introduction (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2007), , pp. 162–4. Songs often have more disjunctive song structures, key and time signature changes, modal melodies, and drones than contemporary pop music. Surreal, whimsical, esoterically or literary-inspired lyrics are often used.G. Thompson, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), , p. 197.V. Bogdanov, C. Woodstra and S. T. Erlewine, All Music Guide to Rock: the Definitive Guide to Rock, Pop and Soul (Milwaukee, WI: Backbeat Books, 3rd edn., 2002), , pp. 1322–3. There is often a strong emphasis on extended instrumental segments or jams.Hicks 2000, p.64-66 There is a strong keyboard presence, in the 1960s especially, using electronic organs, harpsichords, or the Mellotron, an early tape-driven 'sampler' keyboard.D. W. Marshall, Mass Market Medieval: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture (Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2007), , p. 32.
Elaborate studio effects are often used, such as backwards tapes, panning the music from one side to another of the stereo track, using the "swooshing" sound of electronic phasing, long delay loops and extreme reverb.S. Borthwick and R. Moy, Popular Music Genres: an Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), , pp. 52–4. In the 1960s there was a use of electronic instruments such as early synthesizers and the theremin. Later forms of electronic psychedelia also employed repetitive computer-generated beats.
1960s: Original psychedelic era
Early psychedelia From the second half of the 1950s, Beat Generation writers like William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen GinsbergJ. Campbell, This is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), . wrote about and took drugs, including cannabis and Benzedrine, raising awareness and helping to popularise their use.R. Worth, Illegal Drugs: Condone Or Incarcerate? (Marshall Cavendish, 2009), , p. 30. In the early 1960s the use of LSD and other psychedelics was advocated by new proponents of consciousness expansion such as Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley and Arthur Koestler,Anne Applebaum, "Did The Death Of Communism Take Koestler And Other Literary Figures With It?", The Huffington Post, 26 January 2010. and, according to Laurence Veysey, they profoundly influenced the thinking of the new generation of youth.L. R. Veysey, The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Communities in Twentieth-Century America (Chicago IL, University of Chicago Press, 1978), , p. 437.
The psychedelic lifestyle had already developed in California, particularly in San Francisco, by the mid-1960s, with the first major underground LSD factory established by Owsley Stanley.J. DeRogatis, Turn On Your Mind: Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock (Milwaukie, Michigan: Hal Leonard, 2003), , pp. 8–9. From 1964, the Merry Pranksters, a loose group that developed around novelist Ken Kesey, sponsored the Acid Tests, a series of events involving the taking of LSD (supplied by Stanley), accompanied by light shows, film projection and discordant, improvised music by the Grateful Dead (financed by Stanley), then known as the Warlocks, known as the psychedelic symphony.M. Hicks, Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions Music in American Life (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000), , p. 60. The Pranksters helped popularise LSD use, through their road trips across America in a psychedelically decorated converted school bus, which involved distributing the drug and meeting with major figures of the beat movement, and through publications about their activities such as Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 1968.J. Mann, Turn on and Tune in: Psychedelics, Narcotics and Euphoriants (Royal Society of Chemistry, 2009), , p. 87.
San Francisco had an emerging music scene of folk clubs, coffee houses and independent radio stations that catered to the population of students at nearby Berkeley and the free thinkers that had gravitated to the city.R. Unterberger, Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock's Flight from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock (London: Backbeat Books, 2003), , pp. 11–13. There was already a culture of drug use among jazz and blues musicians, and in the early 1960s use of drugs including cannabis, peyote, mescaline and LSDT. Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay area, 1945–1980: an Illustrated History (University of California Press, 1985), , p. 166–9. began to grow among folk and rock musicians.J. Shepherd, Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World: Media, Industry and Society (New York, NY: Continuum, 2003), , p. 211. The earliest known usage of the term "psychedelic" in music was by the New York-based folk group The Holy Modal Rounders on their version of Lead Belly's "Hesitation Blues" in 1964.M. Hicks, Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions (University of Illinois Press, 2000), , pp 59–60. Folk/avant-garde guitarist John Fahey recorded several songs in the early 1960s experimented with unusual recording techniques, including backwards tapes, and novel instrumental accompaniment including flute and sitar. His nineteen-minute "The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party" "anticipated elements of psychedelia with its nervy improvisations and odd guitar tunings". Similarly, folk guitarist Sandy Bull's early work "incorporated elements of folk, jazz, and Indian and Arabic-influenced dronish modes". His 1963 album Fantasias for Guitar and Banjo explores various styles and "could also be accurately described as one of the very first psychedelic records".
The first mention of LSD on a rock record was the Gamblers' 1960 surf instrumental "LSD 25". In 1965, New York band the Fugs would make mention of LSD on their song "I Couldn't Get High". In May 1965, drummer John Densmore joined guitarist Robby Krieger in a band called the Psychedelic Rangers which was formed in Los Angeles, California. The duo took LSD legally and wrote only two songs, one of them called "Paranoia". The group was one of the earliest instances of a band referring to themselves as "psychedelic". However, John Townley and David Blue formed a short-lived group of the same name that same year in New York. Townley compared the band to the Holy Modal Rounders and had also been roommates with Steve Weber. Densmore and Krieger later joined the Doors in late 1965. In January 1966, Texan band the 13th Floor Elevators would coin the term "psychedelic rock" on business cards which contained an image of a third eye. That same year, the band released The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators in October, which was later recognized as the earliest known use of the term "psychedelic" in an album title. This was followed by New York acts the Deep and Blues Magoos releasing Psychedelic Moods and Psychedelic Lollipop in November.
Peak era and decline Soon musicians began to refer (at first indirectly, and later explicitly) to the drug and attempted to recreate or reflect the experience of taking LSD in their music, just as it was reflected in psychedelic art, literature and film.M. Campbell, Popular Music in America: And the Beat Goes on (Boston, MA: Cengage Learning, 3rd edn., 2008), , pp. 212–3. This trend ran in parallel in both America and Britain and as part of the interconnected folk and rock scenes.C. Grunenberg and J. Harris, Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), , p. 137. As pop music began incorporating psychedelic sounds, the genre emerged as a mainstream and commercial force.[ "Psychedelic pop"], Allmusic, retrieved 27 June 2010. Psychedelic rock reached its peak in the last years of the decade. From 1967 to 1968, it was the prevailing sound of rock music, either in the whimsical British variant, or the harder American West Coast acid rock. In America, the 1967 Summer of Love was prefaced by the Human Be-In event and reached its peak at the Monterey International Pop Festival.W. E. Studwell and D. F. Lonergan, The Classic Rock and Roll Reader: Rock Music from its Beginnings to the mid-1970s (Abingdon: Routledge, 1999), , p. 223. These trends climaxed in the 1969 Woodstock Festival, which saw performances by most of the major psychedelic acts, including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane and Santana.A. Bennett, Remembering Woodstock (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), .
By the end of the 1960s, the trend of exploring psychedelia in music was largely in retreat. LSD was declared illegal in the United States and the United Kingdom in 1966.I. Inglis, The Beatles, Popular Music and Society: a Thousand Voices (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), , p. 46. The linking of the murders of Sharon Tate and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca by the Manson Family to Beatles songs such as "Helter Skelter" contributed to an anti-hippie backlash.D. A. Nielsen, Horrible Workers: Max Stirner, Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Johnson, and the Charles Manson Circle: Studies in Moral Experience and Cultural Expression (Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2005), , p. 84. The Altamont Free Concert in California, headlined by the Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane on December 6, 1969, did not turn out to be a positive milestone in the psychedelic music scene, as was anticipated; instead, it became notorious for the fatal stabbing of a black teenager Meredith Hunter by Hells Angels security guards.J. Wiener, Come Together: John Lennon in his Time (Chicago IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991), , pp. 124–6.
Revivals and successors
Rock and pop Post-psychedelic era: Progressive rock and hard rock
By the end of the 1960s, many rock musicians had returned to the rootsy sources of rock and roll's origins, leading to what Barney Hoskyns called a "retrogressive, post-psychedelic music" development; he cited the country rock and blues/soul-inspired rock of the Rolling Stones, The Band, Delaney & Bonnie, Van Morrison, and Leon Russell. At the same time, a more avant-garde development came with the contingent of artists associated with Frank Zappa, including The Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart, Wild Man Fischer, The GTOs, and Alice Cooper.