Psychedelic rock is a subgenre of rock music that originally emerged during the mid-1960s, inspired by psychedelic culture and primarily centered around the influence of psychoactive and hallucinogenic drugs. The music incorporated new electronic sound effects and recording techniques, extended instrumental solos, and improvisation. Features mentioned in relation to the genre include:
- electric guitars, often used with feedback, wah-wah and fuzzbox effects units;
- elements of Indian music and other Eastern music, including Middle Eastern modalities;
- non-Western instruments (especially in British psychedelia), specifically those originally used in Indian classical music, such as sitar, tambura and tabla;
- elements of free-form jazz;
- extended instrumental segments, especially guitar solos, or jams;
- disjunctive song structures, occasional key and time signature changes, modal melodies and drones;
- droning quality in vocals;
- electronic instruments such as synthesizers and the theremin;
- lyrics that made direct or indirect reference to hallucinogenic drugs;
- surreal, whimsical, esoterically or literary-inspired lyrics with (especially in British psychedelia) references to childhood;
- Victorian-era antiquation (exclusive to British psychedelia), drawing on items such as music boxes, music hall nostalgia and circus sounds.
The term "psychedelic" was coined in 1956 by psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in a letter to LSD exponent Aldous Huxley and used as an alternative descriptor for hallucinogenic drugs in the context of psychedelic psychotherapy. The New York-based folk group the Holy Modal Rounders would use the term "psychedelic" on their version of Lead Belly's "Hesitation Blues" in 1964. 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 rock 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. 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.
As the countercultural scene developed in San Francisco, the terms acid rock and psychedelic rock were used in 1966 to describe the new drug-influenced music and were being widely used by 1967. The two terms are often used interchangeably, but acid rock may be distinguished as a more extreme variation that was heavier, louder, relied on long jams, focused more directly on LSD, and made greater use of distortion.
Original psychedelic era
1960–1965: Precursors and influences
The first mention of LSD on a rock record was the Gamblers' 1960 surf instrumental "LSD 25". Music critic Richie Unterberger says that attempts to "pin down" the first psychedelic record are "nearly as elusive as trying to name the first rock & roll record". Some of the "far-fetched claims" include the instrumental "Telstar" (produced by Joe Meek for the Tornados in 1962) and the Dave Clark Five's "massively reverb-laden" "Any Way You Want It" (1964). A 1962 single by the Ventures, "The 2000 Pound Bee", issued forth the buzz of a distorted, "fuzztone" guitar, and the quest into "the possibilities of heavy, transistorised distortion" and other effects, like improved reverb and echo, began in earnest on London's fertile rock 'n' roll scene. By 1964 fuzztone could be heard on singles by P.J. Proby,
According to AllMusic, the emergence of psychedelic rock in the mid-1960s resulted from British groups who made up the British Invasion of the US market and folk rock bands seeking to broaden "the sonic possibilities of their music". In the British folk scene, blues, drugs, jazz and Eastern influences blended in the early 1960s work of Davy Graham, who adopted modal guitar tunings to transpose Indian ragas and Celtic reels. Graham was highly influential on Scottish folk virtuoso Bert Jansch and other pioneering guitarists across a spectrum of styles and genres in the mid-1960s. Jazz saxophonist and composer John Coltrane had a similar impact, as the exotic sounds on his albums My Favorite Things (1960) and A Love Supreme (1965), the latter influenced by the ragas of Shankar, were source material for guitar players and others looking to improvise or "jam".
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". 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". In 1965, New York band the Fugs would make mention of LSD on their song "I Couldn't Get High".
According to music critic Jim DeRogatis, writing in his book on psychedelic rock, Turn on Your Mind, the Beatles are seen as the "Acid Apostles of the New Age". Producer George Martin, who was initially known as a specialist in comedy and novelty records, responded to the Beatles' requests by providing a range of studio tricks that ensured the group played a leading role in the development of psychedelic effects. Anticipating their overtly psychedelic work, "Ticket to Ride" (April 1965) introduced a subtle, drug-inspired drone suggestive of India, played on rhythm guitar. Musicologist William Echard writes that the Beatles employed several techniques in the years up to 1965 that soon became elements of psychedelic music, an approach he describes as "cognate" and reflective of how they, like the Yardbirds, were early pioneers in psychedelia. As important aspects the group brought to the genre, Echard cites the Beatles' rhythmic originality and unpredictability; "true" tonal ambiguity; leadership in incorporating elements from Indian music and studio techniques such as vari-speed, tape loops and reverse tape sounds; and their embrace of the avant-garde.
thumb|left|Producer [[Terry Melcher in the studio with the Byrds' Gene Clark and David Crosby, 1965]]
In Unterberger's opinion, the Byrds, emerging from the Los Angeles folk rock scene, and the Yardbirds, from England's blues scene, were more responsible than the Beatles for "sounding the psychedelic siren". Drug use and attempts at psychedelic music moved out of acoustic folk-based music towards rock soon after the Byrds, inspired by the Beatles' 1964 film A Hard Day's Night, adopted electric instruments to produce a chart-topping version of Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" in the summer of 1965. On the Yardbirds, Unterberger identifies lead guitarist Jeff Beck as having "laid the blueprint for psychedelic guitar", and says that their "ominous minor key melodies, hyperactive instrumental breaks (called rave-ups), unpredictable tempo changes, and use of Gregorian chants" (Still I'm Sad) helped to define the "manic eclecticism" typical of early psychedelic rock. The band's "Heart Full of Soul" (June 1965), which includes a distorted guitar riff that replicates the sound of a sitar, peaked at number 2 in the UK and number 9 in the US. In Echard's description, the song "carried the energy of a new scene" as the guitar-hero phenomenon emerged in rock, and it heralded the arrival of new Eastern sounds. That same month, Los Angeles, California-based musician Kim Fowley released the single "The Trip". Additionally, the Kinks provided the first example of sustained Indian-style drone in rock when they used open-tuned guitars to mimic the tambura on "See My Friends" (July 1965), which became a top 10 hit in the UK.
thumb|upright=0.85|alt=The English rock band Beatles arriving for concerts in Madrid in July 1965|[[The Beatles on tour, July 1965]]
The Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" from the December 1965 album Rubber Soul marked the first released recording on which a member of a Western rock group played the sitar. The Yardbirds had experimented with the instrument earlier, alongside the tabla, during recording sessions for "Heart Full of Soul" in April 1965, but dissatisfied with the results, guitarist Jeff Beck ultimately opted for a fuzz-driven electric guitar instead. Norwegian Wood sparked a craze for the sitar and other Indian instrumentation – a trend that fueled the growth of raga rock as the India exotic became part of the essence of psychedelic rock. Music historian George Case recognises Rubber Soul as the first of two Beatles albums that "marked the authentic beginning of the psychedelic era", while music critic Robert Christgau similarly wrote that "Psychedelia starts here". San Francisco historian Charles Perry recalled the album being "the soundtrack of the Haight-Ashbury, Berkeley and the whole circuit", as pre-hippie youths suspected that the songs were inspired by drugs.
thumb|left|upright=1.0|[[The Fillmore, San Francisco (pictured in 2010)]]
Although psychedelia was introduced in Los Angeles through the Byrds, according to Shaw, San Francisco emerged as the movement's capital on the West Coast. Several California-based folk acts followed the Byrds into folk rock, bringing their psychedelic influences with them, to produce the "San Francisco Sound". Music historian Simon Philo writes that although some commentators would state that the centre of influence had moved from London to California by 1967, it was British acts like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones that helped inspire and "nourish" the new American music in the mid-1960s, especially in the formative San Francisco scene. The music scene there developed in the city's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in 1965 at basement shows organised by Chet Helms of the Family Dog; and as Jefferson Airplane founder Marty Balin and investors opened The Matrix nightclub that summer and began booking his and other local bands such as the Grateful Dead, the Steve Miller Band and Country Joe & the Fish. Helms and San Francisco Mime Troupe manager Bill Graham in the fall of 1965 organised larger scale multi-media community events/benefits featuring the Airplane, the Diggers and Allen Ginsberg. By early 1966 Graham had secured booking at The Fillmore, and Helms at the Avalon Ballroom, where in-house psychedelic-themed light shows replicated the visual effects of the psychedelic experience. Graham became a major figure in the growth of psychedelic rock, attracting most of the major psychedelic rock bands of the day to The Fillmore.
According to author Kevin McEneaney, the Grateful Dead "invented" acid rock in front of a crowd of concertgoers in San Jose, California on 4 December 1965, the date of the second Acid Test held by novelist Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Their stage performance involved the use of strobe lights to reproduce LSD's "surrealistic fragmenting" or "vivid isolating of caught moments". The Acid Test experiments subsequently launched the entire psychedelic subculture.
1966: Growth and early popularity
Echard writes that in 1966, "the psychedelic implications" advanced by recent rock experiments "became fully explicit and much more widely distributed", and by the end of the year, "most of the key elements of psychedelic topicality had been at least broached." DeRogatis says the start of psychedelic (or acid) rock is "best listed at 1966". Music journalists Pete Prown and Harvey P. Newquist locate the "peak years" of psychedelic rock between 1966 and 1969. Unterberger views it as "the first album by major early folk-rockers to break ... into folk-rock-psychedelia". The former reached number 3 in the UK and number 11 in the US, and continued the Yardbirds' exploration of guitar effects, Eastern-sounding scales, and shifting rhythms. Writer David Simonelli stated the single showcased "a long drone that gave the song a psychedelic feel". By overdubbing guitar parts, Beck layered multiple takes for his solo, which included extensive use of fuzz tone and harmonic feedback. The song's lyrics, which Unterberger describes as "stream-of-consciousness", have been interpreted as pro-environmental or anti-war. On "Eight Miles High", Roger McGuinn's 12-string Rickenbacker guitar provided a psychedelic interpretation of free jazz and Indian raga, channelling Coltrane and Shankar, respectively. The song's lyrics were widely taken to refer to drug use, although the Byrds denied it at the time. "Eight Miles High" peaked at number 14 in the US and reached the top 30 in the UK. In April 1966, British band the Pretty Things released "Come See Me" backed with "£. s. d.", the b-side used the abbreviation for Pounds, Shillings, and Pence as a double entendre for the drug LSD, which led to the song being banned by the BBC for drug references. In June 1966, Frank Zappa's the Mothers of Invention released the album Freak Out! which originally made use of the word "psychedelic" on the track "Help, I'm a Rock (Third Movement: It Can't Happen Here)" though later censored by their label Verve Records.
Donovan's July 1966 single "Sunshine Superman" became one of the first psychedelic rock singles to top the Billboard charts in the US. Influenced by Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, and with lyrics referencing LSD, it contributed to bringing psychedelia to the mainstream. Contributing to psychedelia's emergence into the pop mainstream was the release of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds (May 1966) and the Beatles' Revolver (August 1966). Pet Sounds contained many elements that would be incorporated into psychedelia, with its artful experiments, psychedelic lyrics based on emotional longings and self-doubts, elaborate sound effects and new sounds on both conventional and unconventional instruments. The album track "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" contained the first use of theremin sounds on a rock record. Scholar Philip Auslander says that even though psychedelic music is not normally associated with the Beach Boys, the "odd directions" and experiments in Pet Sounds "put it all on the map. ... basically that sort of opened the door – not for groups to be formed or to start to make music, but certainly to become as visible as say Jefferson Airplane or somebody like that." Subsequently, the Beach Boys' October 1966 single "Good Vibrations" was another early pop song to incorporate psychedelic lyrics and sounds. The single's success prompted an unexpected revival in theremins and increased the awareness of analog synthesizers. As psychedelia gained prominence, Beach Boys-style harmonies would be ingrained into the newer psychedelic pop.
1967–1969: Continued development
Peak era
thumb|left|upright=0.8|alt= The Mantra-Rock poster showing an Indian swami sitting cross-legged in the top half with circular patterns around and with information about the concert in the bottom half|Poster for the [[Mantra-Rock Dance event held at San Francisco's Avalon Ballroom in January 1967. The headline acts included the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company and Moby Grape.]]
In 1967, psychedelic rock received widespread media attention and a larger audience beyond local psychedelic communities. From 1967 to 1968, it was the prevailing sound of rock music, either in the more whimsical British variant, or the harder American West Coast acid rock. Music historian David Simonelli says the genre's commercial peak lasted "a brief year", with San Francisco and London recognised as the two key cultural centres. Compared with the American form, British psychedelic music was often more arty in its experimentation, and it tended to stick within pop song structures. Music journalist Mark Prendergast writes that it was only in US garage-band psychedelia that the often whimsical traits of UK psychedelic music were found. He says that aside from the work of the Byrds, Love and the Doors, there were three categories of US psychedelia: the "acid jams" of the San Francisco bands, who favoured albums over singles; pop psychedelia typified by groups such as the Beach Boys and Buffalo Springfield; and the "wigged-out" music of bands following in the example of the Beatles and the Yardbirds, such as the Electric Prunes, the Nazz, the Chocolate Watchband and the Seeds.
The Doors' self-titled debut album (January 1967) is notable for possessing a darker sound and subject matter than many contemporary psychedelic albums, which would become very influential to the later gothic rock movement. Aided by the No. 1 single, "Light My Fire", the album became very successful, reaching number 2 on the Billboard chart.
In February 1967, the Beatles released the double A-side single "Strawberry Fields Forever" / "Penny Lane", which Ian MacDonald says launched both the "English pop-pastoral mood" typified by bands such as Pink Floyd, Family, Traffic and Fairport Convention, and English psychedelia's LSD-inspired preoccupation with "nostalgia for the innocent vision of a child". The Mellotron parts on "Strawberry Fields Forever" remain the most celebrated example of the instrument on a pop or rock recording. According to Simonelli, the two songs heralded the Beatles' brand of Romanticism as a central tenet of psychedelic rock.
thumb|Poster for [[Jefferson Airplane's song "White Rabbit", which describes the surreal world of Alice in Wonderland]]
Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow (February 1967) was one of the first albums to come out of San Francisco that sold well enough to bring national attention to the city's music scene. The LP tracks "White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love" subsequently became top 10 hits in the US.
The Hollies psychedelic B-side "All the World Is Love" (February 1967) was released as the flipside to the hit single "On a Carousel".
Pink Floyd's "Arnold Layne" (March 1967) and "See Emily Play" (June 1967), both written by Syd Barrett, helped set the pattern for pop-psychedelia in the UK. There, "underground" venues like the UFO Club, Middle Earth Club, The Roundhouse, the Country Club and the Art Lab drew capacity audiences with psychedelic rock and ground-breaking liquid light shows. A major figure in the development of British psychedelia was the American promoter and record producer Joe Boyd, who moved to London in 1966. He co-founded venues including the UFO Club, produced Pink Floyd's "Arnold Layne", and went on to manage folk and folk rock acts including Nick Drake, the Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention.
Psychedelic rock's popularity accelerated following the release of the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (May 1967) and the staging of the Monterey Pop Festival in June. Sgt. Pepper was the first commercially successful work that critics recognised as a landmark aspect of psychedelia, and the Beatles' mass appeal meant that the record was played virtually everywhere. The album was highly influential on bands in the US psychedelic rock scene and its elevation of the LP format benefited the San Francisco bands. Among many changes brought about by its success, artists sought to imitate its psychedelic effects and devoted more time to creating their albums; the counterculture was scrutinised by musicians; and acts adopted its non-conformist sentiments.
thumb|[[Spencer Dryden, Marty Balin, and Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane performing at the Fantasy Fair, early June 1967]]
The 1967 Summer of Love saw a huge number of young people from across America and the world travel to Haight-Ashbury, boosting the area's population from 15,000 to around 100,000. It was prefaced by the Human Be-In event in January and reached its peak at the Monterey Pop Festival in June, the latter helping to make major American stars of Janis Joplin, lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jimi Hendrix, and the Who. Several established British acts joined the psychedelic revolution, including Eric Burdon (previously of the Animals) and the Who, whose The Who Sell Out (December 1967) included the psychedelic-influenced "I Can See for Miles" and "Armenia City in the Sky". Other major British Invasion acts who absorbed psychedelia in 1967 include the Hollies with the album Butterfly, and The Rolling Stones album Their Satanic Majesties Request. The Incredible String Band's The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion (July 1967) developed their folk music into a pastoral form of psychedelia.
Many famous established recording artists from the early rock era also fell under psychedelia and recorded psychedelic-inspired tracks, including Del Shannon's "Color Flashing Hair", Bobby Vee's "I May Be Gone", The Four Seasons' "Watch the Flowers Grow", Roy Orbison's "Southbound Jericho Parkway" and The Everly Brothers' "Mary Jane".left|thumb|[[Jimi Hendrix on stage at Gröna Lund in Stockholm, Sweden in May 1967]]According to author Edward Macan, there ultimately existed three distinct branches of British psychedelic music. The first, dominated by Cream, the Yardbirds and Hendrix, was founded on a heavy, electric adaptation of the blues played by the Rolling Stones, adding elements such as the Who's power chord style and feedback. The second, considerably more complex form drew strongly from jazz sources and was typified by Traffic, Colosseum, If, and Canterbury scene bands such as Soft Machine and Caravan. The third branch, represented by the Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, Procol Harum and the Nice, was influenced by the later music of the Beatles. Several of the post-Sgt. Pepper English psychedelic groups developed the Beatles' classical influences further than either the Beatles or contemporaneous West Coast psychedelic bands. Among such groups, the Pretty Things abandoned their R&B roots to create S.F. Sorrow (December 1968), one of the earliest examples of a rock opera.
International variants
The US and UK were the major centres of psychedelic music, but in the late 1960s scenes developed across the world, including continental Europe, Australasia, Asia and south and Central America. In the later 1960s psychedelic scenes developed in a large number of countries in continental Europe, including the Netherlands with bands like The Outsiders, Denmark, where it was pioneered by Steppeulvene, Yugoslavia, with bands like Kameleoni, Dogovor iz 1804., Pop Mašina and the foundation of the Zodiak Free Arts Lab in Berlin by Hans-Joachim Roedelius, and Conrad Schnitzler, which helped bands like Tangerine Dream and Amon Düül achieve cult status.
A thriving psychedelic music scene in Cambodia, influenced by psychedelic rock and soul broadcast by US forces radio in Vietnam, was pioneered by artists such as Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Serey Sothea. In South Korea, Shin Jung-Hyeon, often considered the godfather of Korean rock, played psychedelic-influenced music for the American soldiers stationed in the country. Following Shin Jung-Hyeon, the band San Ul Lim (Mountain Echo) often combined psychedelic rock with a more folk sound. In Turkey, Anatolian rock artist Erkin Koray blended classic Turkish music and Middle Eastern themes into his psychedelic-driven rock, helping to found the Turkish rock scene with artists such as Cem Karaca, Mogollar, Barış Manço and Erkin Koray. In Brazil, the Tropicalia movement merged Brazilian and African rhythms with psychedelic rock. Musicians who were part of the movement include Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Os Mutantes, Gal Costa, Tom Zé, and the poet/lyricist Torquato Neto, all of whom participated in the 1968 album Tropicália: ou Panis et Circencis, which served as a musical manifesto.
1969–1971: Decline
thumb|right|The stage at the [[Woodstock|Woodstock Festival in 1969]]
By the end of the 1960s, psychedelic rock was in retreat. Psychedelic trends climaxed in the 1969 Woodstock Festival, which saw performances by most of the major psychedelic acts, including Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. LSD had been made illegal in the United Kingdom in September 1966 and in California in October; by 1967, it was outlawed throughout the United States. In 1969, the murders of Sharon Tate and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca by Charles Manson and his cult of followers, claiming to have been inspired by The Beatles' songs such as "Helter Skelter", has been seen as contributing to an anti-hippie backlash. At the end of the same year, the Altamont Free Concert in California, headlined by the Rolling Stones, became notorious for the fatal stabbing of black teenager Meredith Hunter by Hells Angels security guards.
George Clinton's ensembles Funkadelic and Parliament and their various spin-offs took psychedelia and funk to create their own unique style, producing over forty singles, including three in the US top ten, and three platinum albums.
Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Peter Green and Danny Kirwan of Fleetwood Mac, Skip Spence of Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape, and Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd suffered permanent brain damage from the use of hallucinogens, with their departures helping to shift the focus of the respective bands of which they had been leading figures. Some groups, such as the Beatles, the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream, broke up. Hendrix died in London in September 1970, shortly after recording Band of Gypsys (1970), Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose in October 1970 and they were closely followed by Jim Morrison of the Doors, who died in Paris in July 1971. By this point, many surviving acts had moved away from psychedelia into either more back-to-basics "roots rock", traditional-based, pastoral or whimsical folk, the wider experimentation of progressive rock, or riff-based heavy rock.
Record executive Mike Curb was instrumental in having musicians who were promoting drug use dropped from or forced out of MGM Records, where Curb was employed in 1970, replacing them with acts not known for drug use but were known for their conservative appeal, most prominently the Osmonds.<!----
In 1966, even while psychedelic rock was becoming dominant, Bob Dylan spearheaded the back-to-basics roots revival when he went to Nashville to record the album Blonde on Blonde. Dylan's lead was also followed by The Byrds, joined by Gram Parsons to record Sweetheart of the Rodeo (1968), helping to define country rock, which became a particularly popular style in the California music scene of the late 1960s, and was adopted by former folk rock artists including Hearts and Flowers, Poco and New Riders of the Purple Sage. Other acts that followed the back to basics trend in different ways were the Canadian group The Band and the Californian-based Creedence Clearwater Revival.. The Grateful Dead also had major successes with the more reflective and stripped back Workingman's Dead and American Beauty in 1970. The super-group Crosby, Stills and Nash, formed in 1968 from members of The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and The Hollies, were joined by Neil Young for Deja Vu in 1970, which moved away from many of what had become the "clichés" of psychedelic rock and placed an emphasis on political commentary and vocal harmonies.
After the death of their manager Brian Epstein and the unpopular surreal television film Magical Mystery Tour, the Beatles returned to a raw style with The Beatles (1968), Abbey Road (1969) and Let It Be (1970), before their eventual break-up. The back-to-basics trend was also evident in The Rolling Stones' albums starting from Beggar's Banquet (1968) to Exile on Main St. (1972). Fairport Convention released Liege and Lief in 1969, turning away from American-influenced folk rock toward a sound based on traditional British music and founding the subgenre of electric folk, to be followed by bands like Steeleye Span and Fotheringay. The psychedelic-influenced and whimsical strand of British folk continued into the 1970s with acts including Comus, Mellow Candle, Nick Drake, The Incredible String Band, Forest and Trees and with Syd Barrett's two solo albums. --->
Revivals and successors
Psychedelic soul
Following the lead of Hendrix in rock, psychedelia influenced African American musicians, particularly the stars of the Motown label. This psychedelic soul was influenced by the civil rights movement, giving it a darker and more political edge than much psychedelic rock.
Prog, heavy metal, and krautrock
Many of the British musicians and bands that had embraced psychedelia went on to create progressive rock in the 1970s, including Pink Floyd, Soft Machine and members of Yes. The Moody Blues album In Search of the Lost Chord (1968), which is steeped in psychedelia, including prominent use of Indian instruments, is noted as an early predecessor to and influence on the emerging progressive movement. King Crimson's album In the Court of the Crimson King (1969) has been seen as an important link between psychedelia and progressive rock. While bands such as Hawkwind maintained an explicitly psychedelic course into the 1970s, most dropped the psychedelic elements in favour of wider experimentation. The incorporation of jazz into the music of bands like Soft Machine and Can also contributed to the development of the jazz rock of bands like Colosseum. As they moved away from their psychedelic roots and placed increasing emphasis on electronic experimentation, German bands like Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Can, Neu! and Faust developed a distinctive brand of electronic rock, known as kosmische musik, or in the British press as "Kraut rock". The adoption of electronic synthesisers, pioneered by Popol Vuh from 1970, together with the work of figures like Brian Eno (for a time the synth player with Roxy Music), would be a major influence on subsequent electronic rock.
Psychedelic rock, with its distorted guitar sound, extended solos and adventurous compositions, has been seen as an important bridge between blues-oriented rock and later heavy metal. American bands whose loud, repetitive psychedelic rock emerged as early heavy metal included the Amboy Dukes and Steppenwolf. From England, two former guitarists with the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, moved on to form key acts in the genre, The Jeff Beck Group and Led Zeppelin respectively. Other major pioneers of the genre had begun as blues-based psychedelic bands, including Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Judas Priest and UFO. From 1971 David Bowie moved on from his early psychedelic work to develop his Ziggy Stardust persona, incorporating elements of professional make up, mime and performance into his act.
The jam band movement, which began in the late 1980s, was influenced by the Grateful Dead's improvisational and psychedelic musical style. The Vermont band Phish developed a sizable and devoted fan following during the 1990s, and were described as "heirs" to the Grateful Dead after the death of Jerry Garcia in 1995.
Emerging in the 1990s, stoner rock combined elements of psychedelic rock and doom metal. Typically using a slow-to-mid tempo and featuring low-tuned guitars in a bass-heavy sound, with melodic vocals, and 'retro' production, it was pioneered by the Californian bands Kyuss and Sleep. Modern festivals focusing on psychedelic music include Austin Psych Fest in Texas, founded in 2008, Liverpool Psych Fest, and Desert Daze in Southern California.
Neo-psychedelia
There were occasional mainstream acts that dabbled in neo-psychedelia, a style of music which emerged in late 1970s post-punk circles. Although it has mainly been an influence on alternative and indie rock bands, neo-psychedelia sometimes updated the approach of 1960s psychedelic rock. Neo-psychedelia may include forays into psychedelic pop, jangly guitar rock, heavily distorted free-form jams, or recording experiments.
thumb|[[Primal Scream performing live with the cover of their album Screamadelica in the back]]
In the late '80s in the UK the genre of Madchester emerged in the Manchester area, in which artists merged alternative rock with acid house and dance culture as well as other sources, including psychedelic music and 1960s pop. The label was popularised by the British music press in the early 1990s. Erchard talks about it as being part of a "thread of 80s psychedelic rock" and lists as main bands in it the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and Inspiral Carpets. The rave-influenced scene is widely seen as heavily influenced by drugs, especially ecstasy (MDMA), and it is seen by Erchard as central to a wider phenomenon of what he calls a "rock rave crossover" in the late '80s and early '90s UK indie scene, which also included the Screamadelica album by Scottish band Primal Scream.
Later according to Treblezines Jeff Telrich: "Primal Scream made [neo-psychedelia] dancefloor ready. The Flaming Lips and Spiritualized took it to orchestral realms. And Animal Collective—well, they kinda did their own thing."
See also
- List of electric blues musicians
- List of psychedelic rock artists
Notes, references, sources
Notes
References
Bibliography
Further reading
- Joynson, Vernon (2004) Fuzz, Acid and Flowers Revisited: A Comprehensive Guide to American Garage, Psychedelic and Hippie Rock (1964-1975). Borderline .