What Makes Rock Psychedelic?
And will we ever see its likes again?
(Image from Etsy)
The phrase “psychedelic music,” for many of us, conjures something quite specific: late 1960s Western rock, Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, the Doors, the Beatles from Revolver on, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Feedback, distortion, sitars, long jams, surrealism (“I am the walrus”).
Rock music from that era has become so inextricably intertwined with psychedelics that it’s hard to fathom what one would look like without the other. But was psychedelic rock inevitable? And why did this specific subgenre become the emblematic sound of psychedelics, at least in popular Western culture?
To start at the very beginning, we have to consider the fact that psychedelics and music have a long and consistent history that far predates America’s psychedelic explosion in the 1960s. The indigenous cultures that discovered the power of psychedelic plants and developed ceremonial rites surrounding their use understood that music could enhance their effects. Repetition, steady rhythms, and chants became de rigueur, easing participants into and through their states of altered consciousness. South Americans developed icaros, or “magic songs,” specifically written for the ayahuasca experience; these came from both tradition and the intuition of the guides performing them, meant to help smooth the trip, pitching the energy up or down depending on the prevailing mood. Maria Sabina, the Mexican medicine woman who ushered in the psychedelic wave in the West by guiding the likes of John Lennon and Aldous Huxley through mushroom experiences, chanted in her ceremonies, a direct link from indigenous cultures’ traditions to American and British rock music of the ‘60s.
The first band to overtly embrace the “psychedelic rock” label was a group called the 13th Floor Elevators from Austin, Texas, who claimed it with their 1966 debut album The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators. The Grateful Dead, the Doors, Pink Floyd, Parliament-Funkadelic, and Jefferson Airplane perfected and popularized the sound, and established bands like the Beach Boys, the Byrds, and the Beatles (under the influence of both drugs and the great Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar) incorporated it into their own evolutions. And as soon as the Beatles did anything, it became popular culture by definition.
Some of the music’s qualities inherently reflect the psychedelic experience. “To understand what makes music stylistically ‘psychedelic,’” author Michael Hicks explains in his book Sixties Rock, “one should consider three fundamental effects of LSD: dechronicization, depersonalization, and dynamization.” Translation: the stretching and compression of time; the ability to move beyond the self and feel oneness with the universe; and the feeling that static objects are moving or bending or melting. Talented musicians know how to convey their feelings in music, and Hendrix’s use of feedback or the Beatles’ note-bending sitars represent a world thrown off-kilter by perception-altering substances, and it doesn’t take a PhD in musicology to see that. Lengthy guitar solos and meanderingly long songs simply mean more music with fewer breaks, plus long stretches with no lyrics, all of which are welcome if you’re on LSD at the moment. A fair number of the lyrics that do show up in the genre offer blatant (and gently sung) step-by-steps for tripping (“Turn off your mind/Relax and float downstream/It is not dying,” the Beatles helpfully instruct).
But these more obvious psychedelic qualities merged with a strong existing current of guitar-driven, rootsy rock played by the likes of the Rolling Stones, the pre-Age of Aquarius Beatles, the entirety of Laurel Canyon (not that those folks didn’t also dabble in psychedelics and their rock), and the electrified Bob Dylan. The electrification of it all isn’t incidental—it brings us to the qualities of the music that may have been at least as much due to the time as to the substances. As rock transitioned from the acoustic-based folk era, technological flourishes that were now becoming more commonplace—reverb, distortion, reversed playback, use of wah-wah pedals—became associated with psychedelic rock, and just so happened to reflect some of the feelings associated with tripping.
From the vantage point of 2023, and specifically from my perspective as a person who wasn’t alive during the ‘60s psychedelic wave, a lot of psychedelic rock sounds at once impressively experimental and mostly boring, at least compared with modern pop and rock. (The songs are so long! And so instrumental! Though I do really dig Revolver, and especially “Tomorrow Never Knows.”) It does sound groovy, and it’s easy to imagine floating and swaying to it while tripping. There’s a definite match between the sound and the experience, even as it also reflects the specific developments in music in the late ‘60s.
But at the time, this became a dominant strand of popular rock, when rock was pop music. There’s no doubt that this pushed psychedelics—their existence, their vibe, the feeling that they were omnipresent—into the center of mainstream culture. Fifty years later, even as psychedelics are returning to mainstream conversation, it’s hard to fathom them being so zeitgeisty as to not just affect, but to take over, the music we’re all listening to. Being in the music is just short of being in the water, culturally speaking.
And the aesthetic naturally spread from there. Dreamy, surreal, and rainbow-colored album art and concert posters proliferated, shifting culture with them. Art-driven, youth-oriented, patchouli-scented, headshop-dotted communities like San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, New York City’s Greenwich Village, and upstate New York’s Woodstock became the places everyone wanted to be. Author Ken Kesey—whose “acid tests” and group of Merry Pranksters were the subject of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test—became a national celebrity, as did his house band, the Grateful Dead. “We pioneered … the hallmarks of hippie culture: LSD and numerous other psychedelics, body painting, light shows and mixed media presentations, total aestheticism, exotic costumes, strobe lights, freakouts, Eastern mysticism, and the rebirth of hair,” said his friend, Vic Lovell.
As the psychedelic craze waned in the 1970s, music changed accordingly, with rock breaking off into several directions: pop like Fleetwood Mac, innovative and theatrical hard rock like Alice Cooper and Frank Zappa, prog rock like Rush and Styx, and punk rock like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. Psychedelic rock’s move away from the mainstream didn’t kill the genre completely, though. Modern acts like Tame Impala, MGMT, and Tool are among those who describe their work as “psychedelic.” (Apple Music has an entire playlist of Psychedelic Rock Essentials that includes tracks from the ‘60s to now.)
These days, during the current Psychedelic Renaissance, music has taken on a slightly different role. The music played during careful, guided psychedelic experiences—including in lab settings—seems to have become more important than psychedelic-infused rock and pop. (This makes sense, given that the emphasis so far, when psychedelics are still mostly illegal outside labs, has been on meticulous and rigorous scientific exploration, not wild parties that could go wrong and spark a cultural backlash like we had in the ‘70s.) Noise cancelling headphones delivering carefully chosen music are standard in psychedelic studies, but these playlists aren’t dominated by the Grateful Dead or the Beatles’ Revolver. Johns Hopkins University, a leader in psychedelic research, uses a playlist that’s heavy on select European classical music (Brahms, Bach, Vivaldi), which, the researchers told me, allows a larger cross-section of modern Americans to feel comfortable and soothed during the experience. There are also apps like Mindcure and Lucid that use biodata from headbands or wristbands, along with artificial intelligence, to pitch a playlist toward a patient’s changing experience in real time. There are, however, some artists, like Superposition and East Forest, that are making new music specifically aimed at being played during trips, contributing tracks to the apps and even sometimes touring with this very low-key music. Concertgoers lie on yoga mats to take it all in.
Psychedelic rock as we know it will likely always be an unmistakable artifact of the late ‘60s, a product of a specific time and culture and technology. But psychedelics’ effect on today’s pop music is only just beginning, and it’ll be fun to see how they seep into the music of the future.