Psychedelic music
Psychedelic music 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 misused, with many acts playing in a variety of styles. Acknowledging this, author Michael Hicks explains:A number of features are quintessential to psychedelic music. Eastern instrumentation, with a particular fondness for the sitar and tabla, is common. 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. There is often a strong emphasis on extended instrumental segments or jams. There is a strong keyboard presence, in the 1960s especially, using electronic organs, harpsichords, or the Mellotron, an early tape-driven 'sampler' keyboard.
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. 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 Ginsberg wrote about and took drugs, including cannabis and Benzedrine, raising awareness and helping to popularise their use. 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, and, according to Laurence Veysey, they profoundly influenced the thinking of the new generation of youth.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. 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, accompanied by light shows, film projection and discordant, improvised music by the Grateful Dead, then known as the Warlocks, known as the psychedelic symphony. 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.
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. 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 LSD began to grow among folk and rock musicians. 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. 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 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. This trend ran in parallel in both America and Britain and as part of the interconnected folk and rock scenes. As pop music began incorporating psychedelic sounds, the genre emerged as a mainstream and commercial force. 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. 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.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. 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. 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.
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.According to musicologist Frank Hoffman, post-psychedelic hard rock emerged from the varied rock scene, distinguished by more "cinematic guitar stylings and evocative lyric imagery", as in the music of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Robin Trower. Music scholar Edward Macan notes that the "post-psychedelic hard rock/heavy metal styles" that emerged had "a weaker connection to the hippie ethos" and "strongly emphasized the blues progression". Psychedelic rock, with its distorted guitar sound, extended solos, and adventurous compositions, had been an important bridge between blues-oriented rock and the later emergence of metal. Two former guitarists with the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, moved on to form key acts in the new blues rock-heavy metal genre, The Jeff Beck Group and Led Zeppelin, respectively. Other major pioneers of the heavy metal genre had begun as blues-based psychedelic bands, including Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Judas Priest and UFO.
According to American academic Christophe Den Tandt, many musicians during the post-psychedelic era adopted a stricter sense of professionalism and elements of classical music, as evinced by the concept albums of Pink Floyd and the virtuosic instrumentation of Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Yes. "Early-1970s post-psychedelic rock was hatched in small or medium-sized structures", he adds, naming record labels such as Virgin Records, Island Records, and Obscure Records. Many of the British musicians and bands that had embraced psychedelia moved into creating the progressive rock genre in the 1970s. King Crimson's album In the Court of the Crimson King has been seen as an important link between psychedelia and progressive rock. While some bands such as Hawkwind maintained an explicitly psychedelic course into the 1970s, most bands dropped the psychedelic elements in favour of embarking on wider experimentation. As German bands from the psychedelic movement moved away from their psychedelic roots and placed increasing emphasis on electronic instrumentation, these groups, including Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Can and Faust, developed a distinctive brand of electronic rock, known as kosmische musik, or in the British press as "Krautrock". Their adoption of electronic synthesisers, along with the musical styles explored by Brian Eno in his keyboard playing with Roxy Music, had a major influence on subsequent development of electronic rock. The incorporation of jazz styles into the music of bands like Soft Machine and Can, also contributed to the development of the emerging jazz rock sound of bands such as Colosseum.
Another development of the post-psychedelic era was more freedom with marketing of the artist and their records, such as with album artwork. Tandt identifies a recording artist's preference for anonymity in the economic market through the design of record sleeves having limited information about the musician or the record; he cites Pink Floyd's early 1970s albums, the Beatles' 1968 album, and Led Zeppelin's 1971 album, for which "there is up to this day no consensus about the title". According to him, post-psychedelic musicians like Brian Eno and Robert Fripp "explicitly advocated" this disconnection between the artist and their work or stardom. "In so doing", he adds, "they laid the foundations for a central tendency of post-punk" in the late 1970s, as evinced by the first four albums by The Cure and Factory Records' dark-colored covers with serial numbers.
By the mid-1970s, post-psychedelic music's emphasis on musicianship had "laid itself bare to an iconoclastic rebellion", as Tandt described: "Mid-1970s punk rock, with its genuine or feigned ethos of musical crudeness, reinscribed rock's autonomy through cultural means opposite to those developed 10 years earlier." Along with the psychedelic, folk rock, and British rhythm and blues styles that preceded it, the music of the post-psychedelic era later became associated with the classic rock category.
Stoner rock, also known as stoner metal or stoner doom, is a rock music fusion genre that combines elements of heavy metal or doom metal with psychedelic rock and acid rock. The name references cannabis consumption. The term desert rock is often used interchangeably with the term "stoner rock" to describe this genre; however, not all stoner rock bands would fall under the descriptor of "desert rock". Stoner rock is typically slow-to-mid tempo and features a heavily distorted, groove-laden bass-heavy sound, melodic vocals, and "retro" production. The genre emerged during the early 1990s and was pioneered foremost by Monster Magnet and the California bands Fu Manchu, Kyuss and Sleep.