Psychedelic, Baby

"The time will come when you see we're all one / And life flows on within you and without you" — George Harrison, lyrics from "Within You Without You"

Let’s get weird.

Rock took a turn for the psychedelic in the mid-1960s, driven by a shifting culture (with growing drug use) and technological advancements like stereo recording — read more about stereo in last week’s post.

The Squares vs. the Counterculture Movement

Music and culture are like the chicken and egg, which comes first and why one might cross the road are mysteries for philosophers to ponder. And I’m no philosopher.

As the post-war period grew on, cracks in government controls like censorship and propaganda began to form, and people’s actual opinions started to matter more. Freedom grew. And as it always does, honesty makes a lot of people uncomfortable. The mid-60s was an age of pirate FM radio (people taking to the airwaves illegally), zines, free poetry, free love, and social change.

Law enforcement, as an arm of the state, would function as this movement’s foil, an antagonistic and anachronistic machine to rebel against. A struggle between past and future. Freedom and uniformity. Chaos and stability.

History might not repeat, but it often rhymes.

Open Your Mind, Man

The mind-altering experience of psychedelic drugs like LSD, mixed with modern recording techniques like sound-on-sound recording and stereo effects, inspired artists, engineers, and producers to create sounds alien to the natural world.

They paired this with beatnik-inspired, surrealist lyrics, and as the long-play record continued to be rolled out, these artists played extended jam sessions, complete with jazzy note choices and unconventional effects. Rock was again mixing and borrowing from the world around it, inspired by jazz, folk, culture, technology, and experimental classical/electronic music.

The hippie movement of San Francisco grew up alongside this music, inspiring and inspired by the fruits of its labor.

Some Cool Cats

1966 was a big year.

The Yardbirds, previously discussed as a Rock God Guitarist incubator, dropped “Shapes of Things,” an anti-war, Eastern-inspired song, featuring Jeff Beck on lead guitar. Notice how this is a break from the other British Invasion music, with a more martial snare drum part, strange lyrics, and drone notes nodding to a Carnatic past:

Starting at 1:47, check out the fuzzed out guitar tone for the solo, which combined with the melodic use of guitar feedback, inspired Jimi Hendrix and Paul McCartney.

Also in 1966, The Beatles dropped one of my all-time favorites, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the first use of a technique called tape loops in a pop song:

The innovation of recording engineer Geoff Emerick (who has a great book) and producer George Martin (who also wrote a book I haven’t read yet lol) combined with the energy, songwriting chops, and reach of The Beatles for this single from the seminal record, Revolver. They used random libraries of tape lying around Abbey Road Studios, splicing and manipulating audio to inspire the drug-fueled audience to trip even harder when they put the record on.

The Beatles and Co. were inspired by early electronic music, like that of the German Karlheinz Stockhausen, who was working on early synthesizers, acoustic-synthetic combinations, and all sorts of weird, awesome psychedelic stuff.

Fun (creepy) fact: George Harrison’s eyes on the album cover aren’t an illustration. Those are his actual (photographed) eyes. That’s why he looks so weird in the bottom-right corner. Psychedelic or a bad trip?

A San Francisco Sound, You Dig?

The home of the hippies during the Summer of Love, Haight-Ashbury, 1967:

It was the place to be. The center of the scene. A home for the counterculture.

George Harrison even visited. But he didn’t like it very much…

Photographer, model, and writer Patti Boyd (who was also George’s wife and subject of the hit song “Something”) recounted their experience:

The area is named after the intersection of two streets, Haight and Ashbury, and as we approached, the driver said he wouldn’t drive down the street itself, he’d park among the side-streets. It seemed a little odd but we didn’t argue. We got out of the car, the acid kicked in and everything was just whoah, psychedelic and very… I mean, it was just completely fine. We went into a shop and noticed that all these people were following us. They had recognised George as we walked past them in the street, then turned to follow us. One minute there were five, then ten, twenty, thirty and forty people behind us. I could hear them saying, ‘The Beatles are here, the Beatles are in town!’

We were expecting Haight-Ashbury to be special, a creative and artistic place, filled with Beautiful People, but it was horrible – full of ghastly drop-outs, bums and spotty youths, all out of their brains. Everybody looked stoned – even mothers and babies – and they were so close behind us they were treading on the backs of our heels. It got to the point where we couldn’t stop for fear of being trampled. Then somebody said, ‘Let’s go to Hippie Hill,’ and we crossed the grass, our retinue facing us, as if we were on stage. They looked as us expectantly – as if George was some kind of Messiah.

We were so high, and then the inevitable happened: a guitar emerged from the crowd and I could see it being passed to the front by outstretched arms. I thought, Oh, God, poor George, this is a nightmare. Finally the guitar was handed to him. I had the feeling that they’d listened to the Beatles’ records, analysed them, learnt what they’d thought they should learn, and taken every drug they’d thought the Beatles were singing about. Now they wanted to know where to go next. And George was there, obviously, to give them the answer. Pressure.

George was so cool. He said, ‘This is G, this is E, this is D,’ and showed them a few chords, then handed back the guitar and said, ‘Sorry, man, we’ve got to go now.’ He didn’t sing – he couldn’t have: he was flying. We all were. I was surprised he could even do that.

Anyway, we got up and walked back towards our limo, at which point I heard a little voice say, ‘Hey, George, do you want some STP?’

George turned around and said, ‘No, thanks, I’m cool, man.’

Then the bloke turned round and said to the others, ‘George Harrison turned me down.’

And they went, ‘No!’

And then the crowd became faintly hostile. We sensed it because when you’re that high you’re very aware of vibes, and we were walking faster and faster, and they were following.

When we saw the limo, we ran across the road and jumped in, and they ran after us and started to rock the car, and the windows were full of these faces, flattened against the glass, looking at us.

Flying High: Jefferson Airplane

Formed in San Fran, their debut record (1966) was more of the folk variety, but their breakout came with their 1967 release, Surrealistic Pillow.

Here’s my favorite, the Alice in Wonderland inspired, “White Rabbit:”

As of this writing, the top comment is “When you’ve experienced certain things, every lyric in this song makes sense.”

Notice the similarities in the snare drum part between this and The Yardbirds, “Shapes of Things?” Isn’t it interesting how sub-genres form, how certain rhythms provide different backbones, and how the more Eastern guitar note choices (at first popularized by Dick Dale) have become ubiquitous?

Here’s another example by the Stones. Notice how the influence of Indian Classical music just keeps growing?

The Deadheads

The Grateful Dead were known for their marathon jam sessions, with concerts at times extending overnight. My dad once fell asleep during a Dead concert, woke up hours later, and thought they were still playing the same song.

Their blend of rock, folk, bluegrass, and blues became a favorite of drifters and truckers, counterculturites, hippies, and poets. Their fan base is known as "Deadheads."

Open the Doors of Perception, Daddy-O

I used to live in Venice Beach where there’s a massive mural of Jim Morrison, frontman and singer of The Doors, looking down at the boardwalk. It’s his town.

Jim met Ray Manzarek while they were film students at UCLA, and rounded out the lineup with jazzy drummer John Densmore and bluesy guitarist Robby Krieger. They soon became the house band at the Whisky a Go Go, a club on the Los Angeles Sunset Strip, honed their sound, and signed with Elektra Records.

Their first hit, Light My Fire, took their odd psychedelic, carnival-tinged music and thrust their Venice Beach sound onto the national stage in 1967.

Here’s a song from their iconic performance at the Hollywood Bowl. Sorry, it’s long, but that’s The Doors!

Jim fancied himself a shaman, the Lizard King, a rock star meant to inspire dread, awe, and confusion. The trance-like state of their looping organ, jazz drum, and blues guitar would throw the audience and performers into long, improvised sections. Jim would be inspired by this energy and push the boundaries of what a frontperson could do, eventually leading to his arrest for indecent exposure in Miami in 1969.

Nowhere can this strange blend of psychedelia and ecstatic vision-questing be heard quite like in their Oedpial track, The End. If you have another 15 minutes to spare…

This wasn’t peace and love. This was tension. Strife. Change.

It was a genre reckoning with an imperfect world and society, inwardly and outwardly destructive, raw, and dangerous. It was the rock that would lead us to the 70s. Beyond the jailhouse rock, beyond the beach and the kaleidoscope, and into raw emotion and overwhelming pathos. The era of Rock Stars.

Discover the inner mechanics of bending dimensions on this pod:

Next, it’s time to introduce my favorite guitarist of all time, Jimi Hendrix. So please subscribe, share the Substack with the homies, and I’ll see you next week!

Thanks for reading, Internet Friend,

Scoob