Psych-rock in the Usa

American Psychedelia – A star-spangled acid dream

We were young, reckless, arrogant, foolish, stubborn. And we were right!
(Abbie Hoffman)

The term "psychedelia" derives from the union of two Greek words – psykhé (soul) and dêlos (clear, evident) – and was coined to mean "expansion of consciousness", that is, making clear and evident what our mind, under normal conditions, would be unable to grasp. The great season of psychedelic rock dawned in the 1960s, a complex and multifaceted historical period shaped by a range of social and political as well as cultural and musical factors. Psychedelic rock could be defined as a small but significant part of that sweeping youth counterculture movement which, born in the United States and influenced by various elements of the Eastern world, went on to spread across much of the Western hemisphere. Psychedelia represents one facet of that generation – perhaps its most revolutionary and most misunderstood – the one that pushed the ideals of pacifism and individual freedom to their extreme consequences. A generation that, driven by a strong sense of community, managed to shake institutions and the more change-averse bourgeoisie to their core, starting, paradoxically, from the docile mantra of peace & love.

On a musical level, the psychedelic experience made it necessary to move beyond the classic 3-4 minute radio format. The reason lies above all in the importance of the live experience and in the – almost utopian – quest to translate the overwhelming emotional and sensory rush of a concert onto a "mere" physical medium. The spread of these albums was of fundamental importance: today we can find psychedelic traces everywhere in the record market. But that's not all: within those sounds we can also find the first seeds of progressive rock, hard rock, cosmic music, glam rock and, why not, even outsider music and the lo-fi strand. But beyond breaking down sonic barriers, psychedelic music also managed to unite an America divided by a war it could barely stomach. Tellingly, almost every American state was involved, each shaping its own take on psychedelia in wildly different ways, yet all sharing a widespread interest in the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total union of the arts.

I was interested in writing, I was interested in film, I was interested in everything.
(Mayo Thompson, Red Crayola)

From the San Francisco of the hyper-dilated trips of the Grateful Dead and the communal spirit of Jefferson Airplane, to the Eastern-tinged sound of Kaleidoscope, to the shadowy anti-militarist folk of Pearls Before Swine, to the Los Angeles of the Doors' lysergic poetry, through the alienated New York of the Velvet Underground, to the psychotic virtuosity of Jimi Hendrix, to the primitivism of Cromagnon, all the way to the Texan avant-garde of Red Crayola. But the range of experiences is so varied and multicoloured that listing them all would be a titanic undertaking. It's worth stressing, though, how the psychedelic journey shared a common drive to break down every kind of barrier: on one hand the voice itself becomes an instrument (Tim Buckley), on the other Eastern culture proves to be one of the key means of broadening one's instrumental horizons (the widespread use of the sitar).
If it all started from the blues (think, for instance, of the case of Janis Joplin), the psychedelic phenomenon moved forward to explode with new ideas and expand aimlessly toward the unknown, absorbing both the experiences of the past (not only blues, but also folk, country, rock'n'roll, jazz) and the pioneering cosmic journeys of Sun Ra as well as the avant-garde of Karlheinz Stockhausen (Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead and Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane attended his courses in California), aspiring to entirely new perceptions that reflect the spirit of their creators. For those wishing to dig deeper, we recommend listening to the legendary "Nuggets" and "Pebbles" compilation series, essential items for any devotee of psych-garage music, capable of effectively conjuring up the entire sonic kaleidoscope of the era.

It seems that recently many pop musicians admit having learned a lot from my work because they are very interested in electronic music and electronic sound. Many of them were my students; in America, some musicians from the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane attended my composition courses in Davis, California, in 1966-67.
(Karlheinz Stockhausen)

The seeds of the American youth counterculture of the 1960s began to take root in the previous decade. It was probably the writers of the Beat Generation who brought into the collective imagination thoughts and ideas that until then had not surfaced in individual consciousness, throwing open the doors to a way of living that broke with imposed rules. If the previous generation had defeated Hitler and believed it had created the best of all possible worlds (democratic, ultra-capitalist, still bound to traditional values of family and religion), the new generation went looking for different paths; if the American youth of the 1950s was convinced they'd find happiness in the classic American Dream (a nice car, a pretty and devoted wife, obedient children, a house with a garden and a dog), the young person of the 1960s began to realise just how illusory that false perception of reality was. The young person of the 1960s came to understand how much the homeland of democracy denied even the most basic rights, including the right to wear one's hair long; as a result, they challenged the false morality of their parents, who had believed that economic prosperity went hand in hand with happiness and freedom. They grasped the difference between feeling free and truly being free, and understood just how frightening real freedom can be.

What's wrong with freedom? Freedom's what it's all about.
Oh yeah, that's right, that's what it's all about, all right... But talking about it and being it – that's two different things. I mean, it's real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. Of course, don't ever tell anybody that they're not free, because then they're gonna get real busy killing and maiming to prove to you that they are. Oh yeah, they'll talk to you and talk to you and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it's gonna scare them.
(Dialogue between Billy – Dennis Hopper – and George Hanson – Jack Nicholson – in the film "Easy Rider")

Moving beyond the past and the consequent metaphorical "murder" of the father and mother (understood as witnesses of an ultra-conservative past to be torn down) became a founding principle of hippie generation thinking. It's no coincidence that Jerry Rubin's book "Do It!: Scenarios of the Revolution" is today a kind of indispensable posthumous manual for understanding the events we're discussing, and it's not just poetic license that leads Jim Morrison, in his masterpiece "The End", to invoke the killing of the father and the "rape" of the mother.

Never trust anyone over thirty.
(Jerry Rubin)

Like the most refined of revolutions, that of the Beat Generation was born within official circles, and more precisely within the academic halls of Columbia University, where the first stirrings took place of a movement ready to expand its boundaries with breathtaking speed – and just as quickly burn itself out. The core ideas of Beat culture are fundamentally the same as those of the generation that gave rise to the hippie movement, that took part in the youth protests against the Vietnam War, and that was the protagonist of the Summer Of Love: the broadening of sensory perception through the use of certain drugs, criticism of a model of society seen as outdated and excessively traditionalist, sexuality lived freely without old moralism (Lenore Kandel's poetry was fundamental in this respect), a communal, supportive spirit that viewed the classic family model as restrictive, aversion to consumerism and capitalism, absolute rejection of war, and an interest in Eastern religion and philosophy. The latter, in particular, was perceived as an alternative worldview to the capitalist model while, at the same time, keeping well clear of Marxist ideology.

We gotta go and never stop going till we get there. Where we going, man? I don't know but we gotta go.
(Jack Kerouac)

The leading authors of the Beat Generation are Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Neal Cassady and Lucien Carr. It is from them that a new cultural renaissance took shape, finding its home in the city of San Francisco, and specifically in the historic Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood, the main gathering place for those young people whom journalist Michael Fallon described as "long-haired, oddly dressed, rock music listeners devoted to psychedelic drugs", coining for them the word "hippie". But literature alone couldn't have been enough to spark such a far-reaching cultural revolution: and indeed, in all likelihood, without two figures like Albert Hofmann and Timothy Leary, the movement would have had a far shorter history.

Instead of wasting all this energy and effort waging war on drugs, why not pay attention to drugs that could put an end to war?
(Albert Hofmann)

In the early 1960s, after experimenting with some new drugs in Mexico, professor Timothy Leary returned to Harvard to conduct experiments with psilocybin, an active compound found in mushrooms whose use was permitted for research purposes. Together with his colleague Richard Alpert, he launched a project aimed at documenting the effects of this substance on human consciousness, administering it to volunteer subjects and recording their experience in real time. At the time of Leary and Alpert's research at Harvard, none of this was illegal: first synthesised in 1938 in Basel, Switzerland, by the chemist Albert Hofmann while searching for a stimulant for blood circulation, LSD had hallucinogenic effects that remained unknown until 1943, when Hofmann accidentally ingested a small amount. Following this discovery, LSD was used in psychiatric settings for another twenty years, and free samples supplied by Sandoz Pharmaceuticals found widespread distribution across the United States. The scandal broke out in 1962, when various members of the prestigious Harvard University began to grow concerned about Leary and Alpert's research methods, as well as their casual and unorthodox attitude in recruiting subjects for their experiments. What was called into question was not just their scientific method but, above all, their promotion of the drug for recreational use. A year later, both were fired and banned from academia, while at the same time achieving consecration as icons of the counterculture. Leary's slogan – "Tune in, Turn On, Drop Out" – would soon evolve into a true mantra for all supporters of psychedelic drugs.

Psychedelic products have three side effects. The first is an increase in long-term memory, the second is a decrease in short-term memory, the third... the third I've forgotten. (Timothy Leary)

Criticism rained in from all over the world. First and foremost was Richard Nixon's, who dubbed Leary "the most dangerous man in America" after his escape from prison. In 1970, Leary had the ill-fated idea of running for governor of California: a political ambition that died at birth when he was arrested for marijuana possession and sentenced to ten years in prison. The former professor nevertheless managed to escape with the help of some militants, only to be sent back to prison in 1973, before being released three years later thanks to a government decree. The rest is history: they could never manage to finish Timothy Leary off, so much so that we'd see him again in the Nineties, even busy creating a series of video games and filming his own death live.

In the years following the lysergic "sermon" of the indestructible Timothy Leary, San Francisco became the homeland of LSD. In those days, the writer Ken Kesey, who had recently published his book "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", went so far as to buy a large farm where he organized the first acid tests. The idea had struck Kesey back in 1960, after his experience as a volunteer subject in a military test run by the CIA (the so-called MKUltra Project, held at the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park, where the effects of certain psychotomimetic drugs were being tested). During that time, Kesey stole some LSD and invited his friends to try it with him. Up to that point everything remained private, but in 1963 the writer began staging special events, starting at his villa surrounded by greenery in La Honda, California. The music of the Grateful Dead was a constant presence, the band having dropped the name Warlocks and debuted under their new name at one of Kesey's parties.
During these happenings, guests paid a dollar to drink Kool-Aid spiked with LSD and spent the night amid music and strobe lights. Regulars on the guest list often included the Hell's Angels and, above all, two beatniks like Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. It was Jack Kerouac's friend himself who became the guiding force behind Kesey's new project, probably inspired by the novel "On The Road". The writer bought a decommissioned school bus to take his experiments on the road. He then set off with thirteen of his friends, nicknamed the "Merry Pranksters", bound for New York. The official purpose of the trip was to promote the writer's second novel, "Sometimes A Great Notion", but the bus's real destination was something else entirely: to go beyond, "Further", as their vehicle had been nicknamed. The Merry Pranksters staged travelling parties all across the country, inviting people to try LSD and "graduate" into what they considered a higher way of thinking. Even their motto became legendary: "You're either on the bus or off the bus". Their journey was recounted by the author Tom Wolfe in his book "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (1968).
The influence of Kesey and Leary was so vast that the unlikely duo of hippie Nicholas Sand and chemist Tim Scully began, around this time, to feverishly work out the purest formula of LSD ever created up to that point.

LSD only became illegal in 1967, and a year earlier Kesey was arrested for marijuana possession; to avoid trouble, he faked his own suicide and fled into hiding in Mexico, before returning shortly after and denying everything that had happened. While Kesey served his sentence, the Pranksters' exploits and the success of Wolfe's book led to a surge of buses in the popular musical imagination: think of the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour and the Who's song "Magic Bus". Conversely, the United States was unable to stop a phenomenon that was expanding rapidly, so much so that the psychedelic movement soon converged definitively on its capital: Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco.

A continuous evolution and the slow end

Out of this cultural substrate came the first albums that would be labelled psychedelic. It was a continuous unfolding of overlapping ideas, a mutual cross-pollination that extended to other arts as well, such as film, painting and photography. The phenomenon spread across the entire United States, then to Europe and the rest of the world. There were essentially three key hubs; two are obvious: San Francisco – the perfect city, for cultural, climatic and geographical reasons, to be the movement's headquarters, so central to its importance that it made the nearby Los Angeles scene almost a satellite of it; the second is New York which – although a world away from San Francisco's hippie culture – represented such a cultural melting pot that it became a global reference point for avant-garde music and new forms of visual art.
From this dichotomy sprang two entirely different ways of understanding psychedelia: the communal, all-embracing kind found in Californian bands from San Francisco and Los Angeles like Jefferson Airplane, Doors, Grateful Dead or Quicksilver Messenger Service (a child of LSD), and the alienated, individualist kind found in New York's Velvet Underground (a child of heroin). The third hub is the most unexpected, springing from conservative Texas, which, in a striking redemption of the periphery, gave birth to Red Crayola – one of the most revolutionary bands in rock history – and even to the first psychedelic LP, "The Psychedelic Sound" by 13th Floor Elevator, who in October 1966 were the first to use the word "psychedelic" in an album title; the Blues Magoos replied in November with "Psychedelic Lollipop".
But if Texas holds this unexpected record, the waters had already been stirring before that. The Warlocks (the future Grateful Dead) began their acid tests in 1965 with endless live performances that became instruction manuals for any musician wanting to be part of the San Francisco scene.

From here it's a continuous succession of events. Also in 1965, the Holy Modal Rounders and then the Fugs began their revolutionary work of deconstruction, inventing acid-folk, just as the Charlatans in Nevada were launching the long tradition of psychedelic posters. In 1966 Frank Zappa made his debut with "Freak Out!" (the second double LP in history after Bob Dylan's "Blonde On Blonde", released just a month earlier), a freak masterpiece nonetheless influenced by the psychedelic scene. The Byrds released "Fifth Dimension" (1966), combining folk, psychedelia and raga. Jefferson Airplane debuted with "Take Off" (1967), Red Crayola with "The Parable Of Arable Land" (1967), the Velvet Underground with "Velvet Underground And Nico" (1967). The Grateful Dead struggled far more to capture – whether on 45 or 33 rpm – the untouchable feeling of their acid tests. They were essentially the first to completely upend the classic radio format. It's clear in their case that the psychedelic experience needed to be lived above all live, so much so that "Anthem Of The Sun" (1968) blends live and studio performances, and their best LP is the phenomenal live album "Live/Dead" (1969). Around this time the first avant-garde influences began to emerge: Red Crayola made heavy use of noise and musique concrète, the Velvet Underground experimented, thanks to John Cale's viola, with the New York minimalism of LaMonte Young, and Jefferson Airplane on "After Bathing At Baxter's" (1967) warped the radio format in their own way, playing with studio effects and overdubs.

1967 is the year that epitomizes the Summer Of Love, kicked off in January with the gathering at Golden Gate Park (the "Human Be-In") and the birth of the Diggers, an anarchist collective devoted to street theatre and the free distribution of food and medical care, among whose ranks the feminist poet Lenore Kandel stood out as a leader. The climax, however, came in June with the grandiose Monterey Festival, attended by over two hundred thousand people, half of whom were between sixteen and twenty-five years old; it almost seemed like this was the first generation of young people ready and united to change the world. The Festival was a resounding success, with Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar ablaze with a can of gasoline, sending the crowd into raptures. After this absolute high point, though, decline set in rapidly. The police, politicians and conservatives began to view with suspicion and concern this new generation trying to free itself from its past in order to imagine a new world. On September 27th a policeman killed a Black youth, sparking a riot that lasted a week. Clashes and raids grew ever more frequent and violent. The media covered the phenomenon frantically, so much so that the most hardline hippies suspected their ideas might be manipulated by journalists and politicians. On October 6th, a performance called "Death of the Hippies" was staged in the streets of San Francisco, a parody of a funeral procession simulating the burial of a counterculture swallowed whole by the market.
It was the start of a slow decline: the communal, pacifist culture became increasingly individualistic and violent, pacifism gave way to rage over the Vietnam War, and part of the movement came to believe that only violence could stop the conflict. LSD too gave ground to new drugs: amphetamines, heroin, cocaine. Out of firm opposition to the Vietnam War came the protest march on the Pentagon on October 21st, where the Fugs performed their own personal exorcism.

In August 1968, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman organized – to coincide with the Democratic Convention in Chicago – the Festival Of Life, centred on opposition to the war: the singer-songwriter Phil Ochs also performed there, mocking the authorities with his proclamation "The War Is Over". Conservative politicians had a field day and, taking advantage of the mourning for the thousands of dead American soldiers, accused the movement of being unpatriotic and asked Americans to choose between the police and the protesters: the majority would side with the institutions, backing the violence of those days.

August 1969 saw the historic Woodstock Festival, which became the swan song of an era. It was an immense celebration, but by then the sense was that the movement's prospects were already spent. The album that best captures the hippie ideals of these years is certainly Jefferson Airplane's "Volunteers" (1969), a perfect example of a peak that already foreshadows the imminent downward arc. The Altamont Festival of December 6th, 1969, with the killing of Meredith Hunter, the young Black man stabbed to death by the Hell's Angels, marked the inglorious end of the hippie era.
If we wanted to find an album that represents the final epitaph, we could certainly find it in the masterpiece by ex-Byrds member David Crosby, who in 1971 made his solo debut with "If I Could Only Remember My Name", an LP that represents the sunset (echoed even in the cover art) of an entire era; it's no coincidence that most of the West Coast musicians took part in its making (Graham Nash, Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, as well as Canadians Joni Mitchell and Neil Young). Psychedelic music, conversely, went on to conquer the world, but its motivations would be very different from those of its glorious origins: the aesthetic remained, but its social content was by then scattered along with the utopia of change.

The end of the movement and the cult films

The end of the "lysergic dream" found in cinema one of its main means of expression. Being such a complex artistic phenomenon, encompassing painting, visual arts, photography and theatre, music alone could never be the sole vehicle for promoting its worldview and sense of difference. Countless films of the era celebrate the importance of the hippie utopia and also represent its swan song, in ways both powerful and visionary. The most famous and significant remains the legendary "Easy Rider" (1969), a perfect depiction of the reasons behind hippie disillusionment. There's a whole spectrum, from more overtly political films like "The Strawberry Statement" (1970), "Medium Cool" (1969) and "Wild in the Streets" (1968), to those more focused on the psychedelic experience like "Riot On Sunset Strip" (1967), "The Trip" (1967), "The Love-Ins" (1967) and "Psych-Out" (1968), right through to the documentary "Woodstock". Among these, worth noting is "Harold And Maude" (1971), with the thoroughly deserved Oscar given to Ruth Gordon for her portrayal of Maude; a film that, read allegorically, is a perfect metaphor for the generational conflict between the young people of the Sixties and the generation of Americans raised in post-World War II prosperity.

The San Francisco scene

The San Francisco scene is the quintessentially hippie one, having been the movement's chosen homeland. The sheer number of bands that, in the second half of the Sixties, were formed or made their name in the Haight-Ashbury district is staggering. The main acts, true legends of psychedelia the world over, are however Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead, so influential that they inspired and gave ideas to a myriad of bands both in San Francisco and beyond.

•  "We Can Be Together". Anthems of freedom and communal spirit

• Jefferson Airplane
• Grateful Dead
• Quicksilver Messenger Service
• Big Brother And The Holding Company
• Kaleidoscope
• Frumious Bandersnatch
• Fifty Foot Hose
• Steve Miller Band
• Steppenwolf
• Charlatans
• Mad River
• Fire & Ice, Ltd
• Oxford Circle
• Kak
• Moby Grape

Jefferson Airplane

We're from San Francisco, where there's fog and God can't see what you're doing.
(Marty Balin)

Jefferson Airplane are, along with the Grateful Dead, the band that symbolizes the San Francisco scene. No one else managed to embody a movement, an idea, an entire generation, so authoritatively and sincerely. Essentially, from "Surrealistic Pillow" (1967) through to "Volunteers" (1969), the history of the Bay Area, of the hippie movement, of the counterculture, became seemingly inseparable from that of Jefferson Airplane; the bond was so strong that when one story ended, so did the other. After 1969, in fact, once the "splendid illusion" was over – a demise we might ideally date to December 6th, 1969, the day of the tragic Altamont Free Concert – the story of Jefferson Airplane ended too; even though, in later years, they would go from airplane to spaceship as Jefferson Starship, they would fly at a much lower altitude.

The music and history of Jefferson Airplane have unique characteristics. Their bond with classic folk-blues-rock roots always remained very strong; far stronger than many of their contemporaries. For instance – in that same year – Red Crayola with "The Parable Of Arable Land" (1967) dismantled the classic song format and all but renounced its blues roots; Frank Zappa – a year earlier, no less – produced with "Freak Out!" (1966) an album so original it seemed to have come out of nowhere, given how hard it is to place alongside anything made before 1966; the Grateful Dead stretched the length of individual songs to extremes. Considering all this, Jefferson Airplane can in no way be regarded as pioneers of experimentation. With them, the song format is almost never renounced or surpassed (except on "After Bathing At Baxter's"), and the "singable" chorus is always present. One might even agree that, thanks precisely to these traits, Jefferson Airplane played a crucial role in ferrying the movement from a narrow elite to a mass youth movement. On one hand, all their songs come across as true generational anthems; both for the lyrics and for Grace Slick's voice – powerful and majestic, thus perfectly suited to the "anthem" format.

On the other hand, they also became true emblems of the movement precisely because of the fierce criticism from various conservative politicians, who eyed their popularity among young people with suspicion – if not outright fear – along with their explicit references to LSD use, and their culturally "legitimizing" an "other" way of understanding life, freedom, war, and the relationship between citizen and state. In their eyes, this made them not an extraordinary example of artistic freedom, but a diabolical tool for corrupting young minds.
These reasons – among others – tied Jefferson Airplane closely to the entire San Francisco movement. This tight bond inevitably means that today they feel less current than bands like the Doors or the Velvet Underground, whose music speaks a language that transcends a single era to stretch through time and aspire to eternity.
If the first album, "Take Off" (1966), still seems too tied to classic folk-blues rock to appear capable of charting new paths, things changed with the masterpiece "Surrealistic Pillow" (1967). The arrival of Great Society's singer, the formidable Grace Slick, and Kaukonen's greater prominence over Balin, made the album the first step toward their coronation as the symbol of an entire generation. Eleven tracks in which it's clear just how far their technical skill outstripped the average of contemporary bands. Grace Slick's arrival opened up new paths and made it possible to create songs that – even without exceeding 3 minutes – achieved a surprising dreamlike power. Such is the case with the superb "White Rabbit", which in barely two minutes builds a crescendo that makes it a unique and bizarre case of psychedelic pop. They also began recording the first generational anthems, for instance the simple song "Somebody To Love", which became one of the most sung songs of the 1967 Summer Of Love. The album continues with the acid blues of "3/5 Of A Mile In 10 Seconds", the hypnotic melodies of "Today", Kaukonen's tribute to master John Fahey in the instrumental "Embryonic Journey", and finally the pounding rhythms of "Plastic Fantastic Lover".

Certain elements almost foreshadow their next album, "After Bathing At Baxter's" (1967), the one that truly saw Jefferson Airplane push past their old boundaries. The cover art – later echoed, in a way, by another San Francisco band, the Sopwith Camel – became the band's emblem: the little psychedelic Jefferson airplane, bursting with colour, flies over a grey, unhappy consumer society, by now turned into a kind of vast landfill of products fervently desired but quickly replaced by others eager to be possessed in turn. A black-and-white world where man has sold his soul. The idea of the little Jefferson airplane soaring above consumer society toward an unknown "elsewhere", forcefully underlining its own proud sense of difference, might seem contradictory given that Jefferson Airplane were the first psychedelic band to debut – as early as 1966 – with an album produced by a major label (RCA). The same major that rubbed its hands together seeing "White Rabbit" and "Somebody To Love" in the singles sales top ten, that enjoyed the unexpected success of "Surrealistic Pillow" and Jefferson Airplane's headline status at the legendary Monterey Festival, the true anthem of a rock scene still (if only briefly) triumphant. It was precisely this contradiction that created the friction between Slick's band and RCA, laying the groundwork for the recording of one of the finest acid-rock-psychedelic albums ever made.
RCA, well aware of the potential sales, treated the musicians like genuine stars; they provided them with an enormous villa in Los Angeles, complete with an attached recording studio and even a Japanese butler. However, the villa was turned into a kind of "departure lounge" for lysergic trips, and when RCA executives first listened to "After Bathing At Baxter's" they were, to put it mildly, disappointed, if not shocked. They found themselves faced with Jefferson Airplane's most experimental album, heavily influenced by free-form and made up of songs merged into one another; a record that, for the first time in the band's history, moved beyond the song format altogether, not written with radio airplay in mind, but divided into five long parts meant to be listened to in full, almost like five brief concept pieces: a genuine nightmare for RCA.
The contradiction of being the champions of an anti-consumerist movement while being produced by a major label ended with a slap in RCA's face and the release of the album marking their definitive artistic maturity. "After Bathing At Baxter's" is indeed astonishing from many angles; for one, it once again shows the musicians' above-average technical skill. It's also the first album, not just by Jefferson Airplane, to show a pronounced influence of Frank Zappa. It's precisely in the first of the five parts – "Streetmasse" – that one can hear moments we might call Zappa-esque. Forget the short songs of "Take Off" and "Surrealistic Pillow". Here we're faced with a long trip that foreshadows space-rock, British psychedelia and the first German cosmic couriers; an absolute masterpiece with no genre and no boundaries.

Jefferson Airplane were by now a generational symbol, and the following year they released "Crown Of Creation" (1968), putting on the cover the image of an atomic bomb explosion, meant on one hand as the arrival of a generation of rebellious youth, and on the other as the emblem of one of the most harrowing fears of those years. The new album is nonetheless a step backward, returning to a formula halfway between "Take Off" and "Surrealistic Pillow". This return to their roots, however, doesn't hide an enviable wealth of technical and creative means and resources. Grace Slick sings a Joyce text on the folk song "Lather", Paul Kantner and Marty Balin are superb on "The House At Pooneil Corners", while "Crown Of Creation" attempts to play the card of the hippie movement's anthem. But the album that can truly be considered the generation's manifesto is the next one, "Volunteers" (1969), recorded after the unrest at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. The ten tracks, torn between the traditional communal spirit and the new revolutionary waves, are all aimed straight at the hearts of those who believed in and lived out hippie ideals; it's as if Jefferson Airplane took the now-lost new generation by the hand to give it back its voice and hope. "We Can Be Together" is the quintessential masterpiece, as is the title track, even more focused on the revolutionary side of things. The story of Jefferson would continue on, but its connection to the story we've been telling here essentially ends at this point, being indissolubly bound up with it.

Grateful Dead

We're like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.
(Jerry Garcia)

The Grateful Dead were probably the greatest band of American psychedelia, godfathers of an expansiveness that comes close to the sound of their contemporaries Pink Floyd combined with Zappa's eclecticism and the blues tradition. The result is something that best represents the era of lysergic acid, a music capable of cosmic, visionary, disorienting hymns that expand the perception. The Palo Alto outfit touched on many styles throughout its long and varied career, from country to reggae, from gospel to bluegrass. The favoured vehicle for an extraordinarily omnivorous musical hunger are long, exhilarating, unpredictable psychedelic jams, a format that the Grateful Dead institutionalized and turned into their most celebrated and recognized trademark. Also because recognizing the band by its lineup would be anything but easy: with more than ten different lineups over the course of their career, some differing even a few months apart, it's almost impossible to track closely who the improvisers on their famous jams actually were.
Of course, that doesn't mean it's difficult to identify a core of the band, a quartet made up of: Jerry Garcia, legendary guitarist of American psychedelia and perhaps the only possible leader of this shape-shifting outfit; Bill Kreutzmann, drummer and percussionist who, together with Phil Lesh on bass, creates the ideal backdrop against which the other instruments move during improvisations; Bob Weir, rhythm guitarist who serves as a partner to the more histrionic, solo-minded Garcia. Around this core, numerous keyboardists came and went (Tom Constanten, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan), along with various other instrumentalists and even a pure vocalist, meaning one not also playing an instrument, such as Donna Jean Godchaux. In the background remains Robert Hunter, the band's lyricist for their entire career.
Formed in 1965 as the Warlocks (the same name once chosen by a prehistoric version of the Velvet Underground!) out of the ashes of another band, the Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, they played small local gigs. They changed their name and performed as the Grateful Dead only in December of that same year, in San Jose. Shortly after, they took up the habit of recording their own concerts, a modus operandi that would eventually build up an enormous discography of live performances, arguably the most significant in all of rock music.
Their self-titled debut album (1967) is nothing more than a taste of what was to come just months later and would upend rock history: "Anthem Of The Sun" (1968). To avoid making a traditional studio album, unsuited to conveying the band's live dimension, the Grateful Dead opted for a highly creative and daring solution: they merged live and studio performances into a work that blurs the traditional distinction between a studio record and a live document. The lineup, officially six strong, includes some undisputed talents. Jerry Garcia in particular already proves himself here to be one of rock's most charismatic guitarists, a ceremony-master guiding visions that, starting from the blues, arrive at a visionary, alienating music with no center of gravity. Mickey Hart's contribution is also crucial: on percussion he unfurls a constantly shifting drumming that helps the lysergic ascent through a use of drums that, while recalling the Velvet Underground, is less violent and more visionary and expansive. The lineup, rounded out by Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan and Bob Weir, sets about playing every instrument they can get their hands on: bells, kazoo, prepared pianos in the tradition of Cage, timpani, gong, glockenspiel, crotales, finger cymbals, harpsichord, vibraslap and many others. "That's It For The Other One", split into 4 parts, immediately shows that this is a different band from the one on the debut: it's a suite that moves between folk-rock, nursery rhyme, noisy assaults and cosmic expansiveness. "Alligator" is the peak of this music, which loses every point of reference until it reaches a state of vivid hypnosis: the Grateful Dead's music here seems to destroy itself, turning into pure vision, with no trace of physicality, heading toward total abstraction: rhythms are erased, becoming shifting and multiform, the guitar is reduced to a moan, and, exploiting organ, blasts, trumpets and more in an expressionistic way, the band moves away from the phenomenal world and lands in the metaphysical one.

"Anthem Of The Sun" in effect invents a concept of cosmic music related to that of the German kosmische pioneers, starting from a often simple canvas of folk, country or blues and arriving at an abstract, spatial sound, a pure psychic ascension toward the vault of the sky. "Aoxomoxoa" (1969) is the ideal formal refinement of what they had invented on the previous record. Here the abstraction of the jam is channeled into a more contained song-form, though no less acid for it. By now the mental journey, which has become a cosmic journey of the mind, is both an escape from everyday reality (Lsd-induced) tinged with subtle melancholy, and a search for a crepuscular solitude that satisfies a fascination with darkness. The Grateful Dead transformed psychedelic music not only in form (the creation of a blues-rock jam, the immersion in darkness and the unknown) but also in intent: from a rainbow of lysergic emotions, their music became a hymn to expression, to creativity, to the concept of "alternativeness" so dear to rock. It's no coincidence that the Grateful Dead led a double artistic life: on record they were meticulous engineers, while live they turned into masters of ceremony who twisted their songs into sprawling, murky versions, ritual dances for the deities of darkness.
Their music thus goes beyond the concept of stasis, of a finished work, becoming open to new readings and interpretations. Their splendid live persona is finally immortalized on a legendary document, "Live/Dead" (1969). In these songs the band sublimates its taste for the dark, the nightmare, the journey into the unknown, amid fascination, awe, wonder and fear: this blend of emotions is so intense that it seems capable of stretching on forever in their compass-less improvisations, which gradually distance themselves from the earthly world to land on a metaphysical plane.
"Dark Star" is one of the greatest masterpieces in rock, a play of shadows and jolts, of spasms and rituals that stretches out for 23 minutes. "Dark Star" deserves to stand alongside the great visionary nightmares of the '60s, like "The End" or "Sister Ray". On such an exceptional live document, where every minute deserves the utmost attention, mention must also go to the extremist tour-de-force of "Feedback", a jumble of whistles and brutal distortions drowning in a psychotic, cosmic noise-making, the kind that Faust would later develop into total music, stripping away even the last traces of blues and rock still surfacing here and there.
After this, nothing would ever be the same. Fans, however, are left with a boundless archive of roughly 2,200 concerts recorded all over the world, well summarized in the series "Dick's Picks" (36 volumes, released between 1993 and 2005), "Road Trips" (17 releases between 2007 and 2011) and "Dave's Picks" (28 volumes between 2012 and 2018, with one planned for 2019).

Quicksilver Messenger Service

I feel like I'm still 17 years old… I know that's not right, for someone my age, and I also know that this reckless lifestyle of mine will soon put me in the grave… But I'm happy this way.
(John Cipollina, shortly before his death in 1989)

One of the legendary bands of the San Francisco scene, among those who more than any other embodied the true rebellious spirit in search of freedom of an entire generation, are certainly Quicksilver Messenger Service. Founded in the mid-Sixties at the behest of Dino Valenti, who however unfortunately ends up in jail on drug charges, the group then coalesces around legendary guitarist John Cipollina, who rises to become a role model for much of the hippie movement, both musically and in terms of lifestyle. Recalling the best years of his career, he said: "I don't think the band ever showed its full potential. We were pretty poor in the studio, but live we were a bomb. Looking back we didn't tour much. We could have developed a lot more if we'd toured more. Basically we wrote our arrangements on stage." Just as Cipollina himself says, Quicksilver Messenger Service were an extraordinary band above all live, a trait they shared with their great rivals, the Grateful Dead. Rivals in that they were very often close in their approach to music and to live performance.
They debuted in 1968 with "Quicksilver Messenger Service", recorded after a string of hugely successful live shows. The debut, however, fails to convey those sensations and pales in comparison to the following "Happy Trails" (1969), one of the peaks of all American psychedelia. It's odd to note that "Happy Trails" came out in 1969, the same year as "Volunteers" by Jefferson Airplane and "Live/Dead" by the Grateful Dead: three peaks representing three different ways of understanding psychedelia. "Happy Trails" is a quintessential album of American frontier culture, starting from its cover art inspired by American painter Frederic Remington, an expert in recreating western landscapes that tackle themes of solitude and individual freedom. Recorded almost entirely live, it opens with the lengthy cover of Bo Diddley's "Who Do You Love", here transformed into an overflowing lysergic suite. The track fills the entire first side and is divided into several parts, some more blues-inclined, others more psychedelic. Cipollina shows an uncommon skill and gift for improvisation (almost jazz-like at times), worthy of the finest guitarists of the era. The interplay between Cipollina's and Duncan's guitars is remarkable.
Once the long journey of the first side ends, we arrive at another Bo Diddley cover, "Mona". The masterpiece, however, remains "Calvary", the most experimental and powerful moment from Cipollina's band. Duncan creates an atmosphere somewhere between western and collective hypnosis that is the ideal setting for Cipollina's guitar forays. An epic, dark monument of American frontier rock, a hymn to freedom recalling the best of the Grateful Dead.
From 1970 Dino Valenti rejoins the lineup, and after a brief solo career reclaims his old creation starting with "Just For Love" (1970).

Big Brother And The Holding Company

Known as one of the biggest bands on the San Francisco scene, Big Brother & The Holding Company formed in 1965 out of the meeting between guitarists Peter Albin and Sam Andrew. Two names that mean little today, since the band is ultimately remembered for having given a musical home to Janis Joplin. With her on vocals, the band first entered a recording studio for their eponymous 1967 album, though real fame arrived with "Cheap Thrills" (1968). The record came out at a moment when the band's popularity, fresh off an electrifying performance at the Monterey Pop Festival, was at the peak of what we'd now call hype. Unsurprisingly, "Cheap Thrills" then climbed the American charts all the way to number one. Originally titled "Sex, Dope And Cheap Thrills" before Columbia's censorship kicked in, the album contains seven explosive tracks, among which, besides the legendary single "Piece Of My Heart", we should mention the equally daring covers of "Summertime" and "Ball And Chain", driven by the powerful voice of Janis Joplin, which contains within its range every shade of soul and psychedelia. It's also impossible not to mention Robert Crumb's cartoonish cover art, originally conceived as the back cover but promoted to the front on Joplin's insistence, after her idea of photographing the whole band naked and sprawled on a bed was turned down.
A few months after the album's release, the singer left the group, soon followed by Sam Andrew into the Kozmic Blues Band, before launching her own blues-rock solo career. Dave Getz and Peter Albin instead joined Country Joe & The Fish until 1970, when they revived Big Brother And The Holding Company with the album "Be A Brother", released in October 1971, coinciding with Janis Joplin's death from an overdose.

Kaleidoscope

The Californian Kaleidoscope are the legendary authors of "A Beacon From Mars" (1968), one of the great classics of San Francisco psychedelia. Made up of top-tier musicians, equally at ease playing blues, country and traditional music, they stand apart from other landmark bands of the era through their evident ethnic and Eastern influences. More than in any of their other works, Kaleidoscope manage to create a perfect blend of sounds (ethnic music, gypsy music, Indian raga, psychedelia) and diverse instruments, such as banjo, mandolin, saz, psaltery, darabouka, tabla (the instrument that Third Ear Band made famous to their contemporaries), a mix unique on the San Francisco scene.
Formed by violinist and keyboardist Fenrus "Maxwell Buda" Epp, guitarist David Lindley, bassist Chris Darrow, singer Solomon Feldthouse (who also plays various Eastern instruments) and drummer John Vidican, they debuted with "Side Trips", an Lp that still operates in more traditional territory (Byrds-like folk with Eastern touches and 3-4 minute songs). Standouts include the exotic "Egyptian Garden" and the lysergic manifesto "Keep Your Mind Open".
But their masterpiece is the following "A Beacon From Mars" (1968). The album is also remembered for its famous cover, which reproduces an old 1901 poster advertising a work by pianist Raymond Taylor. The "Signal From Mars", which in 1901 must have seemed pioneering, becomes in 1968 the "Beacon From Mars". "A Beacon From Mars" is essentially dominated by two masterpieces, two pieces so great they overshadow everything else. The tracks in question are the masterpiece "Taxim" and the title track, two long and daring ethno-psychedelic experiments. The first is a splendid raga-folk contamination, while the second is closer to a Grateful Dead-style lysergic trip. "Taxim" in particular is the finest song Kaleidoscope ever wrote, with a continuous overlapping of sounds and contaminations of Western folk with Eastern music, almost comparable to the sitar experiments that Popol Vuh would offer in later years. The second masterpiece – "A Beacon From Mars" – is a long trip typical of San Francisco psychedelia, somewhere between Grateful Dead and the Doors. It's essentially a reworked blues, stretched out beyond measure as the tropes of psychedelic rock demanded, but with experimental, cacophonous touches. But the album doesn't end there; there's the generational folk of "I Found Out", reworked traditional pieces and the blues explosion of "You Don't Love Me".

Frumious Bandersnatch

In the wake of Quicksilver Messenger Service, Frumious Bandersnatch stand out for their curious name (taken from a story by Lewis Carroll) and for their total indifference to social protest. Their first self-titled Ep (1967) consists of three songs, the standout being "Hearts To Cry", straddling garage and acid-rock, with two guitars hungry to steal the spotlight.
In 1968 they recorded the LP "A Young Man's Song", which would however only see the light of day in 1996. Recorded with a partially reshuffled lineup – including Bobby Winkelman and Jack King, later destined to join the saga of the Steve Miller Band – the record offers a varied repertoire, spanning the band's early, tentative days ("Now That You've Gone") to furious guitar charges that blow past the 10-minute mark ("Can A Bliss").

Fifty Foot Hose

Formed in San Francisco in 1967, Fifty Foot Hose are the Californian group that most heavily cross-pollinated with the avant-garde, with pioneering hints of electronic music (largely unknown on the West Coast shores at the time), the freak-rock of Zappa and Don Vliet, the experimentalism of the Red Crayola, and certainly the avant-garde of their beloved Edgar Varèse. Formed by bassist Louis "Sughero" Marcheschi, guitarist David Blossom and his wife, singer Nancy Blossom, they recorded only one album – the masterful "Cauldron" (1967) – which stands as one of the most authentic and sincere trips of a psychedelia beginning to search for new paths to open up. The colossal psychedelic trip "Fantasy" is certainly their most significant legacy, but the concrete music experiments of the title track are also absolutely anomalous within the landscape of Californian psychedelia, driven by a sincere urge to go beyond the classic conventions of youth music. Even when they approach the standard song-format ("Opus 777") they do so in an unusual way, enriching a simple, romantic beat-pop melody with a series of electronic effects that were wholly original for the time. "The Things That Concern You" is a wild call to the most extreme freak sound, while "If Not This Time" is a classic psychedelic ballad of great quality. Precisely for this reason, the Fifty Foot Hose experience remains one of the most original and significant of the era.

Steve Miller Band

Guitarist Steve Miller, after a long stint in Texas as a bluesman, landed on the Californian scene where, together with guitarist Boz Scaggs, he founded his own band. The title of his first Lp, "Children Of The Future" (1968), is typical of the nascent ideas coming out of San Francisco, of a generation ready for the birth of a "new" man. Miller is extremely skilled at making his blues coexist with beautifully arranged psychedelic pop sounds ("In My First Mind"), blues and even avant-garde touches ("The Beauty Of Time"), playful lysergic keyboards ("Baby's Callin' Me Home"), Hendrix-esque solos ("Steppin' Stone"). It's an album very much of its time, yet also capable of looking beyond it. Miller followed up a few months later with "Sailor" (1968), an Lp with more ambitious touches (the macabre intro of "Song For Our Ancestors" or the dreamlike pop ballad "Dear Mary") which then flow into more conventional blues.

Steppenwolf

The legendary Steppenwolf are one of the harshest, most abrasive bands of the era and of the San Francisco coast. The "steppe wolves" overflow with blues energy in every track, an aggression balanced by a melodic gift that allowed them to record one of those songs that can rightly be called generational anthems.
Their first, self-titled 1967 album contains "Born To Be Wild", which became the emblem of a generation rejecting its origins and fleeing a destiny already written by its fathers and by politicians of every stripe (school-job-house-family), also becoming the soundtrack to the era-defining film "Easy Rider". The harsh lyrics of "The Pusher" (there's a fantastic 20-minute live version released on the 1969 live album "Early Steppenwolf"), almost an "I'm Waiting For The Man" in slowed-down psychedelic blues form, are an exaltation of the effects of marijuana, not of "hard" drugs, seen as gateways to despair and suffering. But the blues charge is also present in the memorable "Sookie Sookie" and "Hoochie Coochie Man".

Charlatans

The Charlatans are a seminal band in the development of the psychedelic scene and are rightly often listed by critics as one of the first groups to play in the San Francisco style. Their output is limited to their self-titled album, which however wouldn't be released until 1969, by which time the band's golden era had already come to an end. Formed back in the summer of 1964 at the initiative of avant-garde musician George Hunter and bassist Richard Olsen, the original core of the Charlatans was rounded out by Mike Wilhelm (lead guitar), Mike Ferguson (keyboards) and Sam Linde (drums), soon replaced by Dan Hicks (drums, vocals). The group was known for its style of dress, a mix between Victorian dandies and western-movie gunslingers. In June 1965, the Charlatans began a long residency at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada, just across the border from northern California. To promote themselves, the band designed a poster that would come to be nicknamed "The Seed", since it's considered the very first psychedelic poster ever made. The artifact's creators are George Hunter and Mike Ferguson, who unknowingly kicked off a visual tradition destined to become, by the end of the decade, a pillar of the San Francisco music scene.
Another reason the Charlatans' stay at the Red Dog Saloon matters is their heavy use of Lsd, which steered their sound toward improvised, feedback-drenched music that would help open the door to acid-rock. Before then, the Charlatans moved along the line between folk and blues, not even shying away from the occasional jug band arrangement. In the summer of 1965 the Charlatans returned home with a new awareness, which brought them to the doorstep of Autumn Records, which however was on the verge of bankruptcy and about to be bought out by Warner Bros. In the end the Charlatans hastily signed with Kama Sutra Records in early 1966, but the odyssey of actually recording proved endless, not helped by the decision to release the debut single "Codine", which ran into a veto from the label due to its none-too-hidden lysergic references.
Following a sudden lineup change and frustration over the failure to distribute some singles, in 1968 Mike Wilhelm and Richard Olsen decided to disband the group, reforming shortly after without, however, inviting Hunter back. With a new keyboardist (Darrell DeVore), the first self-titled album was finally released by Philips in 1969. Too late by then, so much so that the band's sound already seemed dated to listeners of the day: the acid frontiers of a track like "Alabama Bound", conceived back in 1966, prove, three years on, to have already been widely surpassed. Oddly, their best tracks remained unreleased until 1996 ("The Amazing Charlatans"). After the split, Mike Wilhelm became a member of the Flamin' Groovies and Dan Hicks founded the Hot Licks; Richard Olsen instead tried his hand as a producer, while George Hunter made his way in the world of design at Globe Propaganda, with his work appearing on many album covers, including "Happy Trails" by Quicksilver Messenger Service and "Hallelujah" by Canned Heat.

Mad River

The story of Mad River unfolds through that of frontman Lawrence Hammond, founder of the group and author of most of the repertoire found on the two albums they released. It all began in 1965, when Hammond enrolled to study medicine at a well-known university in Ohio. There he became friends with Tom Manning (bass), David Robinson (vocals, harmonica) and Gregory Dewey (drums), and began performing at local venues. Taking the name Mad River Blues Band, they started building a solid following in the community, until the university forced them all to move to Washington to follow a study program.
In 1966 they returned home, and guitarist Rick Bockner joined the lineup, with whom they shortened the name to Mad River. In this configuration they finally arrived in San Francisco in the spring of 1967, sharing stages with many famous bands and even catching the attention of writer Richard Brautigan.
After a self-produced Ep, their self-titled debut album (1968) was released by Capitol, with a rather rushed production, especially considering the album was distributed with the tracks sped up so they'd fit onto the format. Of the seven songs, three go past the 7-minute mark ("Eastern Light", "War Goes On", "Wind Chimes"), while the shorter tracks have titles eloquent enough on their own ("Amphetamine Gazelle", "High All The Time"). Everything runs along the lines of a rather slow acid-rock, inspired by Indian ragas. Much of the music revolves around Hammond's voice (marred by the speeding-up), but the instrumental digressions give rise to fairly adventurous sonic landscapes. Before disbanding, Mad River managed to release "Paradise Bar And Grill" (1969), a decidedly more varied album mixing acid-blues with more conventional atmospheres, but once again success didn't come and the group decided to split. Lawrence Hammond would later return to his folk roots in his solo career.

Fire & Ice, Ltd.

The improvised record by Fire & Ice, Ltd. was born out of a meeting of various musicians at a happening in the summer of 1966 and stands as one of the very first psychedelic albums ever recorded. Driving the impulses are keyboardist Tony Scott and flautist/singer Paris Sheppard, who over half an hour of music lead the listener into a "new and strange adventure of a music that is a manifestation of the mind", as the cover text puts it. "The Happening" is a journey that's perhaps a little dated but certainly evocative, capable of bringing to mind the most esoteric atmospheres of a kraut-rock not yet born ("Summertime") and joyfully carrying them over to the West Coast. A realm dominated by organ and flute, in which the voices are merely apparitions in the service of chaos and anarchy.

Oxford Circle

Oxford Circle make their way into these psychedelic chronicles more thanks to the legend of their live shows than to their scant discography. Just one single released ("Foolish Woman/Mind Destruction" in 1966, with a B-side of pure avant-psych), but it takes only a few notes to understand how electrifying their concerts must have been. Originally from the university town of Davis but consecrated in San Francisco, Oxford Circle formed in the early Sixties as a surf group under the name Hideaways, before changing their moniker and sound with the arrival of the British Invasion. Their theatrical performances and charisma soon brought them to the Avalon, making their live act one of the most followed in the Bay Area. They went on to open for Captain Beefheart and the Grateful Dead, but in early 1967 they stopped performing and went to Los Angeles for a show at the Troubadour and to record a couple of demos with the help of Dr. John. It was here that things fell apart: drummer Paul Whaley joined Dick Peterson to found Blue Cheer, while Gary Lee Yoder and Dehner Patten joined Kak. Only in 1997 would the notorious 1966 recording "Live At The Avalon" finally see the light of day.

Kak

Kak's sole, self-titled 1969 album is a rare collector's item, especially for fans of the more hard rock-leaning strain of psychedelia.
The record opens with a laugh, before the lightning strike of "HCO 97658".
Tracks like "Everything's Changing" and "Electric Sailor", between riffs and choruses, soon make it clear we're in Iron Butterfly territory and thereabouts.
The eight minutes of "Trieulogy", split into three distinct sections, instead shift the needle toward acid-blues thanks to constant rhythmic variations and an overall very surreal, dreamlike feel (emphasized by the use of bongos and maracas).

Moby Grape

The birth of Moby Grape was one of those attempts by record labels to cash in economically on the hippie phenomenon. Formed by five outstanding musicians, including ex-Jefferson Airplane member Alex Spence, they were actually brought together by manager Matthew Katz. This origin story, betraying any genuine link to the values of the counterculture, was not forgiven by audiences, and Moby Grape were booed at the Monterey festival.
What remains are two solid albums, the 1967 self-titled debut and 1968's "Wow/Grape Jam", tied to the most virtuosic strands of psychedelic blues but held back by a lack of any real connection to the cultural movements of the era.
Still, the blues improvisations on "Grape Jam" remain among the genre's hidden gems.

Victims of two notorious cases of plagiarism

• It's a Beautiful Day
• Spirit

It's a real rip-off, Led Zeppelin made a ton of money off us and never even said thank you, nor did they offer us a cut of the earnings. It's a sore point for me.
(Randy California, guitarist of Spirit)

It's a little-known story that deserves to be told more often, if only to remind us how historically and culturally significant the whole American psychedelic scene was — even its less celebrated corners. It's the story of two California bands who fell into obscurity but, through two of their minor songs, laid the groundwork for two of the best-known masterpieces of the hard rock scene that would emerge just a few years later. We're talking about It's A Beautiful Day and their "Bombay Calling", which Deep Purple would transform into the monumental "Child In Time", and about Spirit who — after their arpeggio from "Taurus" was lifted — unwittingly gifted Led Zeppelin, masters at turning an obscure track into a masterpiece, their classic "Stairway To Heaven".
While in the first case Ian Gillan himself admits that the intro to "Child In Time" grew out of Jon Lord's reworking of "Bombay Calling", the case of "Taurus" and "Stairway To Heaven" is still being argued in courtrooms to this day, with Jimmy Page never admitting (as was in fact his habit) to having reworked and transformed a song written by others, which he had heard during the 1968/69 tour while playing alongside Spirit.

What followed was an endless dispute, and it's easy to understand the anger of guitarist Randy California, who died in 1997 without ever managing to get justice: "It's a real rip-off, Led Zeppelin made a ton of money off us and never even said thank you, nor did they offer us a cut of the earnings. It's a sore point for me." Regardless of the word "plagiarism", two points are worth stressing: the songs were certainly drawn from two California bands, but they were reworked and improved to such an extent that they can be considered original in their own right, even if in both cases it would have been more decent to include a clarification in the liner notes (this applies especially to Jimmy Page, who has rightly faced plenty of plagiarism accusations over the years). Another key point is that the story of It's A Beautiful Day and Spirit certainly can't be reduced to these two episodes: their importance goes well beyond these sad tales and is rooted in the most authentic side of the American psychedelic movement.

As for It's A Beautiful Day, there's at least one album worth singling out: their self-titled 1969 debut. Formed in San Francisco in 1968 as a project by the flamboyant violinist and singer David La Flamme, they positioned themselves right from the start as a band straddling psychedelia and a primordial neo-prog, also thanks to their founder's grounding in classical music. Joining him were singer Pattie Santos, strikingly similar both vocally and visually to the legendary Grace Slick, and keyboardist Linda LaFlamme (David's wife).
The album features typically Californian sounds (the hippie ballad "White Bird") enriched by varied touches of folk music, jazz and gypsy sonorities. More dreamlike is the slow blues ballad "Hot Summer Day", where the violin sets the sound apart from every other Californian band of the era. The most important track is undoubtedly the melting pot of ideas that is "Time Is", blending psychedelia, folk, improvisation and Eastern influences worthy of Kaleidoscope.

Spirit came together in Los Angeles thanks to guitarist Randy California. Unlike It's A Beautiful Day, their career lasted longer, with four albums well worth noting, marked by a compositional approach that was different and original compared to classic psychedelic music. The musical background of phenomenal guitarist Randy California and bassist Mark Andes leaned more toward blues, while keyboardist John Locke and the great drummer Ed Cassidy were closer to jazz; the second keyboardist, Jay Ferguson, even came from a background in classical music studies. This mix of backgrounds laid the foundation for a band that inevitably found itself straddling psychedelia and the future progressive rock, even hinting at the glam rock of their fourth album, "Twelve Dreams Of Dr. Sardonicous" (1970).
Their debut "Spirit" (1968) contains the famous "Fresh Garbage", the bizarre arrangements of "Mechanical World", the ill-fated "Taurus" that would become Jimmy Page's victim, and the jam straddling jazz and psychedelia "Elijah".
The follow-up, "The Family That Plays Together" (1969), is even more varied and — right from the title — fully immersed in the Californian lifestyle. It's one of the most elaborate works of the psychedelic scene, rich in jazz, prog, and orchestral arrangements, so varied it puts most of its contemporaries to shame. Tracks like "Drunkard" or "It Shall Be" push them to unmatched heights of imagination and creativity, in a mix of elements where rock is the least present ingredient, apart from the opening track "I've Got A Line On You". "Clear Spirit" (1969) is usually seen as a minor work simply because — unlike its predecessors — it's closer to a more traditional rock sound. Still, the variety of California's sonic solutions (sometimes Hendrix-like, other times stretched out à la Garcia) makes for a worthwhile listen, an album whose only flaw is being sandwiched between three landmark works. "Twelve Dreams Of Dr. Sardonicous" (1970) is another excellent LP, but by then already well into the new decade.

The New York scene

While in San Francisco and Los Angeles a form of psychedelia emerged that used LSD as a means to broaden perceptual experience, to open the "doors" of perception, inspired by ideals of equality, peace and community, in New York things were entirely different. Dark, cold, chaotic, multiracial, futuristic — New York gave rise to a decadent, cynical, alienating strain of psychedelia (Velvet Underground), tinged with ethnic and Eastern sounds (Devil's Anvil), highly innovative and violent (Cromagnon), closer to the avant-garde than to blues (United States Of America), with moments of anguished, poetic anti-militarism (Pearls Before Swine). Rather than producing dreams and LSD-fueled hopes, which was broadly how San Francisco's psychedelia could be described, the New York version fed on heroin nightmares, dark, decadent, cynical, selfish and hopeless atmospheres. Hope isn't even called for, since it isn't needed: the addict described by Velvet Underground doesn't ask for help, doesn't seek salvation, only wants the chance to keep going on his dream/nightmare journey, unhindered by anyone. He doesn't seek togetherness the way Californian hippies did — he is instead a solitary, alienated figure.

• Heroin, it's my wife and it's my life. Decadent psychedelia
  • Velvet Underground
  • United States Of America
  • Cromagnon
  • Devil's Anvil
  • Blues Magoos
  • Pearls Before Swine
  • The Deep
  • Autosalvage
  • Mystic Tide
  • Godz

Velvet Underground

We wore dark glasses onstage because we couldn't stand the sight of the audience.
(John Cale)

The leading band of the New York scene is unquestionably Velvet Underground, with a line-up that needs no introduction: Lou Reed (vocals and guitar), John Cale (viola, bass, piano), Sterling Morrison (guitar, bass) and Maureen "Moe" Tucker (drums). They began playing live in 1965, offering early versions of songs that would go on to become their great classics. After meeting Andy Warhol, they performed in New York museums, first with a show titled "Andy Warhol Up-Tight", then with "Exploding Plastic Inevitable", which became an underground legend. Thanks to Warhol, future gothic muse Nico joined the band.
Their first album ("Velvet Underground And Nico" — 1967), produced by Andy Warhol, is one of the most influential in the history of rock and can be considered an avant-garde record, given the huge influence LaMonte Young's minimalism had on Cale. It's such an important work that it's hard to pin down within a specific genre like psychedelia. The worlds painted by Lou Reed and company depict the dark, hostile neighborhoods of a sprawling, dangerous metropolis; the real protagonists are society's outcasts, the marginalized; the settings aren't California's sunny beaches, but rather the seedy neighborhoods where drugs, heroin above all, are seen as the only escape from reality. The song that best captures all of this is undoubtedly "Heroin".
Nothing seems to link these dark scenarios with the West Coast's fervent vitality. Yet almost every track is essential; from the sadistic depiction of "Venus In Furs", to the obsessive repetition of "I'm Waiting For The Man", to the hypnotic music-box melody of "Sunday Morning", there's little doubt this is a landmark in a wholly different way of understanding the psychedelic trip.
After such an important debut, though barely noticed by contemporaries, 1968 brought the legendary "black album" ("White Light/White Heat"), an even harder and at times indigestible work, which today sounds like a pioneering LP that took a dissonant, cacophonous turn, with harsh, distorted sounds, finding its chief legacy in the long, nightmarish trip of "Sister Ray".

United States Of America

United States Of America were New York's other leading band after Velvet Underground. Formed in 1967 by college classmates Joseph Byrd (electronic music, electric harpsichord, synth), Dorothy Moskowitz (vocals), Gordon Marron (electric violin, ring modulator), Rand Forbes (bass) and Craig Woodson (drums), they were among the most experimental bands to emerge during the American psychedelic season. Their lineup alone reveals the anomaly: the absence of guitar, a virtually indispensable instrument in every band on both the East and West Coasts. Their musical background was equally unusual, closer to jazz and the avant-garde than to rock. In many ways similar to California's Fifty Foot Hose, they created a blend of circus music, musique concrète, Zappa, Doors, Velvet Underground and Jefferson Airplane that still sounds pioneering today. Some critics have even suggested that the seeds of the future post-rock movement can already be found on their sole LP ("USA", 1968). That claim is probably an exaggeration, but tracks like the hypnotic chant of "American Metaphysical Circus", the vaudeville-tinged "I Won't Leave My Wooden Wife For You, Sugar" or the Doors-like rock of "Hard Coming Love" show musicians looking well beyond most of their countrymen.
Among the side projects, it's worth mentioning Joe Byrd's solo album with the Field Hippies. The result is "The American Metaphysical Circus", released in 1969, notable as one of the finest attempts at colliding psychedelic rock with electronic music, art music and the hippie universe.

Cromagnon

One of the most extreme, violent, savage, radical, frightening records, and one totally removed from any commercial logic, is Cromagnon's sole album, "Orgasm" (1968). Listening to it today makes clear just how fervent with freedom and creativity the American scene was. The brainchild of the duo Austin Grasmere and Brian Elliot shows just how far the counterculture managed to push things, the extremes it reached. The historical memory of Cromagnon carries, in a sense, more weight than the record itself. Several aspects stand out: almost the entire album seems built from happenings, undoubtedly descended from musique concrète and gestural music; the morbid content, the blasphemy, the violence, bring into the pop world (or youth culture) the idea of a (Marcusean) rebellion against civilization, with an eye toward primitive man, free to express his authentic "Self", unbowed by industrial civilization, free of moralizing whether political or religious. "Orgasm" is thus an extreme yet typical product of psychedelic counterculture, or of one strand of it; that's confirmed by the fact the album was released on the ESP label.
Lastly, credit must go to Cromagnon for being fiercely unconventional, for capturing one of the key aspects of experimentalism as a search for the new, the drive to move beyond pop and rock'n'roll, beyond music itself as an expressive form "enslaved to the market". Cromagnon stand as an early anthem to the counterculture's most essential contradiction. Among the tracks, "Caledonia" stands out, so pioneering that it can be considered the first black metal experiment in history, fourteen years before Venom and fifteen before Bathory.

The Devil's Anvil

Formed in 1966 in New York's legendary Greenwich Village, The Devil's Anvil show just how broad a social and cultural movement American psychedelia really was, capable of absorbing even the theme of the eternal Arab-Israeli conflict. The band was made up of three Arab multi-instrumentalists — Jerry Satpir, Kareem Issaq, Eliezer Adoram — versed in traditional Arab, Turkish and Greek music. They were joined by two Americans, Felix Pappalardi (ex-Cream, Mountain) and Steve Knight (Mountain), with whom they recorded their sole LP, "Hard Rock From The Middle East" (1967).
A work of great complexity and variety (sung in Turkish, Greek, Arabic, with only one track in English), it stands out for its multiculturalism, ranging from Hendrix-like solos to beat melodies to Arab tradition. It's a way of engaging with the East quite different from the popular imagery of sitars and brooding gurus; instead it's an East open to modernity, in a sincere cultural exchange. The band likely fell into obscurity partly due to the unfortunate coincidence of the Six-Day War (June 1967), which broke out just as the album was released, an event that certainly hampered the commercial promotion of an LP sung in Arabic and performed by Arab musicians. It's paradoxical that while musical experimentation was opening up without limits, the walls built by politics were becoming ever more solid. The story of Devil's Anvil is, on a small scale, comparable to the larger story of the entire psychedelic and countercultural movement, destined for its swan song precisely because of this contradiction. What remains is a powerful idea of respect between cultures exchanging and honoring one another; if you're looking for the forerunners of modern bands like Tinariwen or musicians like Bombino, this is where you should look.

Blues Magoos

Often the line between garage rock and psychedelic music is a rather thin one. That's true of Blues Magoos too, who in 1966 released "Psychedelic Lollipop", getting a jump of a few months on the psychedelic explosion. Remembered for their strobe-lit shows and bizarre stage costumes, the New Yorkers scored immediate success, largely thanks to the single "(We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yet", the standout track on a record that also includes some explosive covers ("Tobacco Road", "I'll Go Crazy") and a subliminal ode to LSD ("Love Seems Doomed").
For trivia lovers, it's worth noting that this "psychedelic" label was being claimed elsewhere that very same year. In 1966, in fact, two other records carried the new label in their titles: in April came "The Psychedelic Moods Of The Deep" by Deep, a record devised and put together in the studio by Rusty Evans, but above all, "The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators" by 13th Floor Elevators was released.
Paradoxically, the most psychedelic Blues Magoos record is their second, "Electric Comic Book" (1967), with lysergic tracks such as "Pipe Dream", "There's A Chance We Can Make It" and "Summer Is The Man". From the third album onward, Blues Magoos' music dropped its "psychedelic lollipops" in favor of a more conventional blues-rock.

Pearls Before Swine

In the most radically anti-militarist corner of the scene, there's certainly the creation of the formidable Tom Rapp, a folksinger of immense talent who entered the world of American psychedelia in a tangential but significant way. Rapp was originally from North Dakota, but moved to New York with his family, where he formed Pearls Before Swine, who from the very start stood out as an anomaly compared to the vast majority of their contemporaries. The instrumentation confirms it: sitar, harp, English horn, vibraphone, banjo, flute — proof of just how original Rapp's ideas were.
They left us two albums of psychedelic folk of great complexity and charm. The first is "One Nation Underground" (1967), whose very title marks an attempt to set itself apart from official political power, seen as inherently violent and corrupting. Hope doesn't lie above but below; the underground is the only shore on which one can hope to recreate the most authentic freedom. Pearls Before Swine's debut shows a mature folk sound that, while starting from giants like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, sets itself apart through fairy-tale, surreal atmospheres, often slow, lysergic rhythms, and an instrumentation so vast and original it borders on the avant-garde. Rapp is one of the poets of the hippie generation, a simple soul yet capable of moving listeners with a surprising blend of simplicity (guitar and voice) and complexity (imaginative, unpredictable arrangements) so eccentric it manages to balance the most disparate musical experiences, from jazz to Eastern music. Anti-militarism runs through the generational folk ballad "Dropout" or the intimate, poetic folk of the moving "Another Time". "Morning Song" leans much further into the lysergic side and carries us into an enchanted world akin to Donovan's, while the eccentric "I Shall Not Care" quickly shifts from frantic beat rhythms to shamanic chants to primitive electronic experiments. This unmissable album closes with the surreal ballad "Surrealist Waltz", a kind of folk for ghosts with an alienated vocal.
Rapp had already proven himself almost a stranger to much of his generation, but he outdid himself with the follow-up, "Balaklava" (1968), inspired by the 1854 battle of the Crimean War, an absolute masterpiece of anti-militarist folk. The mood is funereal, steeped in war and death, worlds away from the optimism of the new generation embodied by Jefferson Airplane. It's Rapp's impressionistic masterpiece, made up of a series of "paintings" straddling the surreal and the dreamlike, depicting landscapes of nature ravaged by the violence of weapons. The peak is the funereal "Ring Thing", with distant bagpipes and bleak, desperate scenery. Everything feels ethereal to the point of dissolving (the 1920s-style voice of "Guardian Angels", the flute and birdsong of "Images Of April", the bizarre orchestral arrangements of "I Saw The World"), enriched by a deliberately low-fidelity recording quality that gives the whole album a retro feel, further charging every track with tension.

The Deep

In the summer of 1966, eccentric bohemian Rusty Evans approached producer Mark Barkan with an outright proposal: to record the first psychedelic album. Evans had just tried LSD and, energized by the experience, had decided to recruit a few friends from Greenwich Village to form a band. That's how The Deep were born, straight out of Evans's lysergic mind, and little is known about their history: we do know, for instance, that to record they drove down from New York to Philadelphia in a beat-up car, and that it was during that very trip that they wrote the second half of their debut LP, "Psychedelic Moods Of The Deep". They can claim the distinction of being the first to release a record with the word "psychedelic" on the cover, but the oddities don't end there. The album was recorded in just four days, with the band living day and night inside the studio, chasing the most bizarre ideas. The producer even asked one musician to bring his girlfriend into the studio so they could record them having sex: the result is the mystical sensuality of "When Rain Is Black", complete with sighs, flutes and xylophones.
Right after the debut's release, Evans signed to Columbia for his new project under the name Freak Scene. That's how "Psychedelic Psoul" (1967) came about, a record with a mood very similar to its predecessor's, though leaning more toward garage-pop. Tracks like "A Million Grains Of Sand" and "My Rainbow Life" bear witness to the Eastern influence that was spreading through the music of those days, though the most original offering remains "The Subway Ride Through Inner Space", with its harsh, alienating rhythms. While the lyrics grapple with the issues of the era, Evans's music was already moving toward its next step, marked by the short-lived experience of Third Bardo, a psych-garage combo who released the single "I'm Five Years Ahead Of My Time" in 1967.

Autosalvage

Autosalvage only managed to release one album before splitting up. In the beginning, they played a handful of shows, even opening for artists like Frank Zappa (who actually suggested the band's name).
Their self-titled debut (1968) was recorded using cutting-edge techniques, leaving the band free to experiment to the fullest. The result is an album that's atypical even by the standards of eccentric American psychedelia, blending musique concrète ("The Great Brain Robbery"), hard-blues noise ("Our Life A We Lived It") and raga-rock grafts ("Ancestral Wants"). Too much for the audience of the time, who greeted them with a couple of mixed reviews and nothing else.

Mystic Tide

From Long Island, the energetic Mystic Tide, led by guitarist and singer Joe Docko, only ever put out a series of 45s and never made an LP. Their sound is clearly garage-rooted but carries various psychedelic elements present even at a very early stage, as far back as 1965. While their first 1965 single is straight-up beat ("I Wouldn't Care"), the following "Stay Away" reveals the first links to the 13th Floor Elevators.
In 1967 they released their best single yet: the A-side features the brutal psych-garage of "Frustration", which earned them some visibility, but it's the B-side that holds a colossal psychedelic trip ("Psychedelic Journey – Part 1") with every right to be called a generational anthem, on a par with the anarchic dances of Amon Duul. Now fully immersed in pure psychedelia, they immediately followed up with another single that essentially cloned the previous one. The A-side offers the garage sound of "Running Through The Night", while the B-side's "Psychedelic Journey – Part 2" is an even more lysergic extension of the previous trip, and together the two parts are without doubt their most important legacy. Their singles were collected in 1994 on the compilation "Solid Sound/Solid Ground".

Godz

Behind the Godz name were graphic designer Jay Dillon, street vendor/bassist Larry Kessler, shop clerk/guitarist Jim McCarthy, and makeshift drummer Paul Thornton. For all of them, their instruments were merely vehicles through which to express everything they couldn't consciously shape in any other way: a naive way of playing not unlike that of the Shaggs, who would debut only a few years later. What they were doing wasn't really psychedelia in the proper sense, but rather outsider music, even if the result can somehow be compared to that of freak acts like the Holy Modal Rounders and the Fugs.
The first Godz album came out in 1966 under the title "Contact High", marked by a free, primitive way of playing, unbound by old structures or imposed rules. "Godz 2" (1967) and "The Third Testament" (1968) followed, a year apart from each other. All three albums fuse an ungainly, proto-punk crudeness with compositional oddities born of an approach far removed from that of self-aware musicians/creators.

The Los Angeles Scene

In Los Angeles, a scene formed that could be described as an offshoot of the more famous San Francisco one. The ideas and aspirations were more or less similar, given the geographical proximity too. However, there was less homogeneity within it, with bands very different from one another: some with much harder sounds (Iron Butterfly, Seeds, Love), others attempting to make psychedelic rock more commercially viable while still maintaining a good level of quality (Electric Prunes, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Chocolate Watchband). The influence of Californian groups like the Byrds, of the blues, and of British rock-blues (Rolling Stones) seems to have been stronger here than elsewhere. But the whole scene undoubtedly lived in the shadow of one essential band, the Doors.

• “Riders On The Storm”, poesie psichedeliche
  • Doors
  • Love
  • Iron Butterfly
  • Chocolate Watchband
  • Electric Prunes
  • Beat Of The Earth / Electronic Hole
  • Strawberry Alarm Clock

Doors

There are things known and things unknown, and in between are the doors.
(Jim Morrison)

Among the names destined for the greatest fortune with audiences is of course that of the Doors. The band's name is a double tribute: to a line from a poem by William Blake and, by osmotic reaction, also to an essay by Aldous Huxley ("The Doors of Perception"). The definitive line-up took shape around the middle of 1965, out of the meeting between leader Jim Morrison and keyboardist Ray Manzarek, both film students at the University of California. Struck by a fragment of the lyrics to "Moonlight Drive" that the young Morrison played for him on Venice Beach, Manzarek decided to form a group with Robby Krieger (guitar) and John Densmore (drums). Their consecration came at the Whiskey-a-go-go, where they were spotted by Jac Holzman's Elektra in 1967. The Doors' self-titled debut arrived at a moment when the counterculture was at its peak. The first thing that strikes you about this album is how Jim Morrison's face bursts out of the cover art, with his bandmates shrunk down and relegated to the background – a strikingly accurate metaphor for how the group would be perceived by history.
Just listen to the opening notes of "Break On Through (To The Other Side)", coiled like a cobra, to understand how the Doors were something entirely new. The absence of a bass was solved with a curious trick: Manzarek used his left hand to play bass lines on a Fender Rhodes piano, while his right hand played the upper registers of the Vox Continental organ keyboard (later replaced by a Gibson G101) on which the Rhodes rested, producing that narcotic edge that made the Doors' sound so instantly recognizable. From the voluptuous "Light My Fire" to the mephistophelian "End Of The Night", the Doors' first album offers a repertoire that seems to belong to some ancestral rite. And, sure enough, the album's finale is the cold blade wielded by Morrison for the final sacrifice: "The End", the Doors in their apotheosis, a vivisection of Greek drama. Recorded in a single take, with no overdubs, built inexorably toward an eschatological conclusion, this is the opus magnum of Morrison's melodrama, of his shamanic gift for speak-singing, creating a suspense that is at once mystical and violent, like the theatre of Antonin Artaud.

"Strange Days" was released in September 1967, repeating the winning formula of the debut. It also brought in a guest bassist, Doug Lubahn, at the time a member of another Elektra act, Clear Light. Once again, the standout element is the strange, circus-like cover image, the work of famed photographer Joel Brodsky. The title track opens the show in a grand experimental atmosphere, illuminated by one of the earliest uses of the Moog synthesizer in rock, played by Jim Morrison with the help of Paul Beaver. There's also room for nostalgic ballads ("You're Lost Little Girl", "Unhappy Girl") and unsettling rock numbers ("Love Me Two Times", "People Are Strange") stamped with the recognizable mark of Manzarek's keyboards. Morrison's passion for experimental poetry also surfaces in "Horse Latitudes", a cryptic collage staring into Jim's troubled waters. For the closing chapter, "When the Music's Over", Jim insisted the track be recorded live in the studio to preserve as much of its emotional charge as possible: a revolutionary song that builds in intensity like the melodramatic "The End" from the previous album, and which likewise ends in a powerful climax.

"Waiting For The Sun" was meant to be their great album, but the project was partly undermined from within: the serenity of the cover photo is actually a snapshot of the calm before the storm. Paul Rothchild faced heavy pressure from Elektra to produce another hit record: the centerpiece of this album was supposed to be Morrison's long theatrical poem, "The Celebration Of The Lizard", but in the end only a fragment of it would be used ("Not To Touch The Earth"). Among the rest we find the waltz of "Wintertime Love", the flamenco of "Spanish Caravan", and the closing bang of "Five To One", a heavy hard rock number with Morrison completely drunk. Much has also been made of the 5:1 ratio: when questioned about it, Jim Morrison never clarified the meaning of the phrase used in the lyrics, saying the line wasn't explicitly political, despite its critical tone toward the hippie movement, which according to Morrison was "basically a petit-bourgeois phenomenon".
Half of the following album, "The Soft Parade" (1969), bears Robbie Krieger's signature, since Jim kept dropping acid: as a result, it took a full 11 months to finish "The Soft Parade". The Doors began earning a reputation as an immoral band, and by the end of 1969 Jim announced he wanted to quit, but Ray convinced him to stay another six months, even though his alter-ego Jimbo was by then dominant. As the decade drew to a close, the Doors played increasingly larger venues: Jim's behaviour reached the peak of provocation at the Miami concert on March 1, 1969, when, after a heated rant, he began stripping off his clothes, picked up a lamb, and invited everyone to climb on stage. He was charged by the authorities and found guilty of indecent exposure in a public place.
That same year the Doors returned to their blues roots with "Morrison Hotel" (1970), but it was with the following "L.A. Woman" (1971) that they gave us the lysergic swan song of "Riders On The Storm". After finishing the recording of "L.A. Woman", Jim and Pamela announced they wanted to move to Paris. For a while things seemed to be going well, then in 1971 death came knocking at Jim Morrison's door.

Love

God told me: let there be love on Earth.
(Arthur Lee)

Among the best West Coast and psychedelic rock bands, Love was the vehicle for the genius of Arthur Lee. Involved in the music world from a young age, by the mid-1960s Lee had already achieved his first small successes as a songwriter and producer in Los Angeles. At 18 he took part in an album by the Lags and wrote "My Diary", a song performed by Rosa Lee Brooks and featuring the riffs of a still little-known guitarist, Jimi Hendrix. With the rise of the folk-rock movement in 1965, he was inspired to fuse the sound of the Byrds with that of the Rolling Stones, finding the perfect recipe for his creation: Love. Under his guidance, the band became hugely popular on the Los Angeles club circuit and were signed by Elektra for their self-titled debut album (1966). Lee became the focal point as a songwriter, though rhythm guitarist Bryan MacLean carved out a substantial share of the songwriting for himself, even stealing the show on the cover of "Hey Joe". The album's other cover is an excellent arrangement of Burt Bacharach's "My Little Red Book", delivered in an almost punk-before-its-time key. The band's uniqueness comes through clearly in the album's many ballads: "A Message To Pretty", "Mushroom Clouds" (which offers a perfect window into Lee's political mindset), and especially "Signed DC", presumably a tribute to Love's first drummer, Don Conka, by then in the grip of addiction. Bryan MacLean's contribution is the elegant "Softly To Me", which reveals a personal writing style that would culminate in what is perhaps Love's best-known song: "Alone Again Or", from "Forever Changes".
Across the seven tracks that make up the follow-up "Da Capo" (1967), the watchword is a psychedelia impossible to pin down, often fuelled by jazz or acid-blues structures (certain sections of the long "Revelation" jam, "Stephanie Knows") or even baroque touches of harpsichord and flute ("She Comes in Colors"). Their most successful single, "7 And 7 Is", is instead still firmly in proto-punk territory, showing just how unique and eclectic the band was, capable of both delicate arrangements and raucous digressions. Their true masterpiece arrived with the third album, "Forever Changes", released in 1967 right in the middle of the Summer of Love, almost as if it were clear that their moment had finally come. And yet, themes of loneliness run through nearly every track, from the dark "A House Is Not A Motel" to the unsettling, Barrett-like lyricism of "The Red Telephone". Arthur Lee was, after all, an outsider: a Black musician (like guitarist John Echols) attuned to the fraught political and cultural climate of the time, working within a predominantly white music scene and clearly exhausted by all that flowery optimism. The musical arrangements, blending folk, classical, R&B and psychedelic rock, almost pave the way for progressive rock, capturing the paranoia of the era like nothing else did in those years. As if it were all part of a single long suite, each track blends into the next thanks to arrangements built to carry the listener along until they lose themselves in a labyrinth of sound.

Recorded live in the studio over more than 60 hours of work, "Forever Changes" stands as one of the peaks of Californian psychedelia, though it would also mark the end of Love's classic line-up. The fourth album, "Four Sail", came out with a reshuffled line-up, a fate shared by their music on the double set "Out Here" (1969) and "False Start" (1970), which progressively steered toward a less psychedelic, more rock-oriented sound. More noteworthy is Lee's solo coda ("Vindicator", 1971), which arrived after the album he recorded alongside Jimi Hendrix that was never released: "False Start", however, does include "The Everlasting First", which gives us a glimpse of what that unreleased duo might have sounded like.
But sometimes love isn't enough: the Love saga would prove to be a genuine curse. Today the only survivor is drummer Michael Stuart, who has since moved on to a new life as a photographer. Arthur Lee passed away in 2006, after spending several years in prison for firearms possession.

Iron Butterfly

In San Diego, in 1966, a quartet formed made up of Doug Ingle, Jack Pinney, Greg Willis and Danny Weis, later joined by Darryl DeLoach. When the band moved to the Los Angeles megalopolis, Jerry Penrod and Bruce Morse took the place of Willis and Pinney. Morse himself then left for family reasons, replaced by Ron Bushy. It was a turbulent couple of years, '66 to '68, which nonetheless led the band to their long-awaited debut, prophetically titled "Heavy" (1968). It's a murky work, offering mostly psych-rock tracks with blues inflections. Two elements stand out: Danny Weis's guitar, especially on "Gentle As It May Seem" and "Look For The Sun"; and Doug Ingle's organ, especially on "Stamped Ideas". But the record is remembered above all for the epic "Iron Butterfly Theme", a guitar distortion that could steal the spotlight from early Black Sabbath, co-starring in a visionary instrumental piece alongside the organ, showcased prominently in the central solo. The earth-shattering finale is one of the most brazen displays of power rock had offered up to that point. The whole line-up, except for Ingle and Bushy, left the band after the recordings, with DeLoach and Weis going on to join Rhinoceros. Erik Brann (sometimes credited as Braunn) came in on guitar and Lee Dorman on bass, supporting the debut tour and later starring in the work for which Iron Butterfly are remembered by history.
The second album, "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" (1968), is in fact one of the earliest examples of heavy-psych, a style combining a hallucinated bent with a taste for hard, jagged sounds dominated by towering guitar riffs. A stylistic shift immediately apparent on "Most Anything You Want", the ideal fusion of psychedelic song and hard rock power. "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" would never have gone down in history, though, were it not for the title track, one of the most definitive psychedelic freak-outs of all time. The legend begins with the strange title, said, according to one curious anecdote, to be a "mind-altered" mangling of the far more understandable "In The Garden Of Eden". Then, after the title, comes the track itself: 17 minutes of instrumental orgy, its pretext a brief musical theme laid out at the start. Within barely 3 minutes the song has turned into a blazing, loosely structured jam, which, pared back to a more essential form around the six-minute mark, gives way to a long, tribal drum solo, then a liturgical organ passage, and finally a violent return of the main guitar theme, closing out in a feverish tribal dance. Alongside Blue Cheer, Steppenwolf and a few others, Iron Butterfly became the fathers of the harder edge of psychedelia with this torrential track. A stripped-down version of the sprawling "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida", without the solos and clocking in at just 2:53, unexpectedly became a hit. The album became the first platinum record in RIAA history, adding three more equivalent awards over the following years: with an astonishing 30 million copies sold, "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" ranks among the all-time bestsellers.
"Ball" (1969) faced no easy task: following up an album so pivotal to rock's historical evolution and so commercially huge. Let's say it right away: they didn't even try to replicate that torrential track. The evocative, gloomy mix of hard rock and psych-rock on "In The Times Of Our Lives" and the similar but sunnier "It Must Be Love", together with the odd-time dance of "Her Favorite Style", mark out the first half of the record, which also flirts, less successfully, with several decidedly less heavy, backward-looking moments. The "Iron Butterfly Theme" finds an heir in "Filled With Fear", while traces of the old jamming spirit only resurface in the closing "Belda-Beast". After the fireworks of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida", though, this comes across as an unusually timid, subdued work.

Chocolate Watchband

Chocolate Watchband were one of the leading garage bands of the Los Angeles scene. Rather than psychedelia, their real interest lay in rough, wild rhythm'n'blues, a garage rock more indebted to the Rolling Stones than to the Doors or the Grateful Dead. They caught the attention of famed producer Ed Cobb thanks to their energetic, vibrant live shows. Eager to ride the wave of the emerging San Francisco psychedelic scene, Cobb pushed to shape the band's choices in a very heavy-handed way. He picked every track on the album, wrote some of them himself (their first single, "Sweet Young Thing"), and arranged them all. He even went so far as to bring in outside musicians not part of the official five-piece, including singer Don Bennet, who replaced Dave Aguilar on some tracks. The impression is that, on certain tracks, only the band's name really belongs to them. This inevitably caused serious friction, especially with guitarist Mark Loomis. The circumstances were far from ideal, yet the end result is surprisingly good.
On the debut "No Way Out" (1967), you can clearly make out the two souls at play, the band's original rhythm & blues identity and the "imposed" psychedelic one, and at times it's hard to be sure whether it's really Chocolate Watchband playing at all. Still, the tracks imposed by Ed Cobb are good, especially the psychedelic "Dark Side Of The Mushroom" and "Expo 2000", which, despite their brevity and lack of real sincerity (products engineered to follow a path laid out by someone else), conjure up some genuinely interesting lysergic scenery. Energy and vitality burst out of the tracks rooted directly in rock'n'roll and rhythm'n'blues, such as "Let's Talk About Girls" (a cover of a Tongues Of Truth song), "In The Midnight Hour", a compelling cover of the beautiful Wilson Pickett tune, "Come On", a successful cover of Chuck Berry (the Rolling Stones also covered it in 1963), and "Gone Passes By", marked by the presence of sitar.
The Chocolate Watchband story leaves a slightly bitter aftertaste, since they were a band with great potential that fizzled out within a few years. Their downfall was failing to gain artistic independence, remaining excessively tied to a producer who – rather than trying to bring out their true character – ruled them with an iron fist. "The Inner Mistique" (1967) followed, notable for the psychedelic "In The Past", and then "One Step Beyond" (1969).

Electric Prunes

Coming from Seattle and made up of James Lowe (vocals), Ken Williams (guitar), Jim Spagnola (rhythm guitar), Mike Weakley (drums) and Mark Tulin (bass), Electric Prunes made a name for themselves in Los Angeles with their self-titled debut album from 1967 and, above all, with the hit "I Had Too Much To Dream" (already released as a single in 1966). The debut contains few genuinely psychedelic elements, leaning instead toward a garage-adjacent energy enriched with pop melodies and some of the earliest electronic effects. The second LP, "Underground", is decidedly superior, with a much stronger lysergic charge. Still tied to the 3-minute song format, "Underground" has a cohesiveness that makes the lack of a truly memorable hit almost irrelevant, since so many of its tracks are small, overlooked pieces of the puzzle in the history of the American psychedelic scene.
Garage rock surfaces in the album's wilder moments ("Long Day's Flight"), but it's tempered by a few lysergic ballads, such as the sprawling "I" and "Wind-Up Toys", or by several Byrds-style tracks ("Big City"). There's also room for more original moments, like the bizarre, almost Zappa-esque "Dr. Do-Good". One might have expected an even more mature follow-up album, but fate had something quite different in store for the Seattle quartet. Their producer, Hassinger, tried to convince the band to record a rock mass sung in Latin, which would become the "Mass In F Minor" (1967). None of the Electric Prunes liked the idea, and the producer, incredibly, replaced them with four Canadian musicians instead (former members of the Collectors). The Mass In F Minor holds the historical distinction of being the first attempt to combine religious music and rock, but when set against later efforts, such as the masterpiece "Hosianna Mantra" by Popol Vuh, it simply can't compare, even though its various psychedelic excursions with Eastern touches are a typical product of the American counterculture of the period and thus worth noting in this overview. "Kyrie Eleison" also has the distinction of appearing in the classic film "Easy Rider".

Beat Of The Earth/ Electronic Hole

A strange case, that of California's Electronic Hole, the brainchild of Phil Pearlman, who after releasing a record of primal jams with Beat Of The Earth in 1967, decided in 1969 to put together another band just for fun, ending up jamming together in their spare time. Little is known about either record. The self-titled Electric Hole album was pressed in just 300 copies, and despite the playful intent, it turns out to be a small gem of the most esoteric underground psychedelia, somewhere between Velvet Underground and Amon Duul II, at times even prefiguring the neo-psychedelia of Spacemen 3. Among the standout tracks are the five parts of "The Golden Hour," where the sitar shines in the second section. In between there's even a savage cover of Frank Zappa ("Trouble Every Day"). Amid a wall of sound built from guitars, Electric Hole swallow the listener into an electrified black hole somewhere between avant-garde, raga, psychedelia and noise rock.
In 1975 Pearlman tried again with Relatively Clean Rivers, an album more tied to bucolic folk landscapes, with which he still failed to find fame: that would arrive unexpectedly only through non-musical events, when his son Adam would fatally tie the family name to Al Qaeda.

Strawberry Alarm Clock

Strawberry Alarm Clock are usually filed under the Los Angeles psychedelic scene, but they actually hailed from Santa Barbara. Formed in 1966 as a mostly covers band, with Lee Freeman (vocals, guitar), Ed King (guitar), Gary Lovetro (bass), Gene Gunnels (drums) and Steve Rabe (lead guitar), they produced an album destined to become one of the classics of American psychedelia (1967's "Incense And Peppermints") and a second LP, 1968's "Wake Up… It's Tomorrow," which stands as an early swan song in terms of ideas, quality, and above all ties to the movement that spawned them (despite two further albums to come). The band's originality lay in managing to blend that lysergic West Coast sound with the new pop textures of Liverpool's Merseybeat and what would go down in history as the British Invasion. The two tracks "The Worlds On Fire" (8 minutes, almost a psychedelic suite) and the classic Byrds-like dreamy ballad "Rainy Day Mushroom Pillow" represent the most significant, most lysergic moments of their career. Elsewhere, garage moments alternate with others closer to British pop. The song "Incense And Peppermint" became their biggest hit, though it's actually a very light, 2-minute psych-pop tune typical of their sound.

The Texas Scene

As much as Texas might be considered a backwater compared to the pulsing hubs of psychedelic rock (San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York), it paradoxically gave birth to the first openly psychedelic album, the debut by 13th Floor Elevators. Texan psychedelia was a particularly extreme movement, unwilling to compromise commercially, at least in its two major acts. The undisputed leaders of the scene are the revolutionary Red Crayola, followed by the pioneering 13th Floor Elevators.

• "War Sucks", the redemption of small-town America
  • Red Crayola
  • 13th Floor Elevators
  • Euphoria
  • Moving Sidewalks
  • Fever Tree
  • Golden Dawn

Red Crayola

We weren't hippies, we weren't interested in that crowd of young people who supposedly were going to conquer the world, we had nothing to do with the counterculture. We wanted to mark the difference between us and everyone else.
(Mayo Thompson)

Texas's Red Crayola were an absolutely unique case within the American psychedelic scene, so unique that one might question whether they can truly be filed under that movement at all.
The Red Crayola project was born and developed squarely within the American youth underground culture of the period. Its brilliant founder Mayo Thompson was more interested in experimentation, free jazz and Frank Zappa than in Californian psychedelia, yet many of his insights can still be traced back to the ideas and cultural movements of '68 (first and foremost the legendary anti-militarist track "War Sucks"). On his influences he has said: "We didn't have many heroes, we liked John Fahey and Country Joe And The Fish. Albert Ayler was a truly influential figure for us. His "Bells," or "The Ascension" by John Coltrane, those were real influences. The Grateful Dead's trips didn't take us anywhere, and Jimi Hendrix-style virtuosity never interested us."
Their debut "The Parable Of Arable Land" is one of those timeless works that seem to have come out of nowhere, so far ahead of its own time, extraordinary works that "see" the future decades in advance (in this case noise experimentation, new wave and the imminent German rock scene). Already finished in 1966, even before the release of "The Psychedelic Sounds Of The 13th Floor Elevators," the LP historically considered the first psychedelic rock album, "The Parable Of Arable Land" is an unprecedented fusion of avant-garde, free-form rock, noise-making, cacophony alternating with moments driven by bass and percussion, light years ahead of contemporary "youth" music. Mayo felt perfectly at ease with hippie ideals, without strictly being one himself, given his reserved, almost sectarian character. He was probably drawn more to the fascination of Stockhausen, Varèse or Cage than to psychedelic music as such; if we must speak of rock, he was certainly more drawn to Frank Zappa or the Velvet Underground. It's from Zappa that he took the idea of the Familiar Ugly (from the Mothers Of Invention), groups of musicians and non-musicians (up to 100 people) tasked with banging, hitting, and making vibrate whatever object they had in their hands. It's the apotheosis of noise and the ideal peak of an idea of renewal that would go down in history as the freak-out. An absolute hymn to freedom overflowing with masterpieces, from the free-form interludes to the anti-militarist "War Sucks," from the bass rhythms of "Hurricane Fighter Plane" to the desolate harmonica of "Transparent Radiation." Everything here is great and unmatched. If this is how psychedelia was born, then it can be said it was born great from the very start.

13th Floor Elevators

Texas's 13th Floor Elevators went down in history less for their musicianship than for being the authors of what can be considered the first psychedelic rock album, and also the first to explicitly put the word "psychedelic" in its title. Their debut album — "The Psychedelic Sounds Of The 13th Floor Elevators" (October 1966) — beat by just a few days "The Psychedelic Moods Of The Deep" by The Deep and "Psychedelic Lollipop" by the Blues Magoos. 13th Floor Elevators anticipated what would go on to become a long lysergic wave sweeping across the States from coast to coast and then the entire world. Direct offspring of the blues, the energetic charge of their garage-band contemporaries, and early concepts of repetition, they managed, thanks to remarkable intuition, to see ahead of everyone else what was already in the air. From the album cover alone, their belonging to the psychedelic movement they were pioneering is unmistakable. Many tracks stay within garage-rock territory, but in other moments — like the unforgettable "Roller Coaster" — the lysergic trip kicks in within seconds. The screaming vocals of singer Roky Erickson, a great enthusiast of occultism and horror and sci-fi literature, is one of the band's defining traits. Another curious element is their invention of the electric jug, a sort of homemade instrument, essentially a jug blown into the mouth, but electrified.
"The Psychedelic Sounds Of The 13th Floor Elevators" was immediately met with a flurry of enthusiastic reviews. Their next work, "Easter Everywhere" (1967), is even more mature and seeks to enrich the raw sounds of their debut with the Eastern philosophies that were influencing so many bands at the time. Unfortunately, Erickson's addictions and encroaching schizophrenia proved to be the death knell for the young band's future career. In the '80s the singer recorded records of admirable schizophrenic psychedelia, populated by zombies, aliens and every other being that had by then taken possession of his body.

Euphoria

From Houston, the largely forgotten Euphoria, led by guitarist Hamilton Webb, released a single album for Capitol, "A Gift From Euphoria" (1969), before vanishing entirely into oblivion after its release. Although the classic psychedelic era was already in its final throes, Euphoria stood out for their eclectic orchestral mixes ("Lisa," "Hollyville Train"), alternating country ballads ("Stone River Hill Song"), chaotic rock'n'roll ("Did You Get The Letter"), folk chants ("Lady Bedford") and distorted psychedelia ("Suicide On The Hillside, Sunday Morning, After Tea"). They arrived at this result thanks to Capitol, which didn't interfere during the recording sessions, but also didn't spend much energy promoting what it probably considered a misstep.

Moving Sidewalks

From Houston, Moving Sidewalks are remembered in the history books more for having been Billy Gibbons's (ZZ Top) first band than for their own brief musical story. The guitarist showed off his skills already on the hit single "99th Floor," whose success led to the release of their first and only album, "Flash" (1968), for Tantara. Steeped in blues-rock and psychotropic hallucinations, the record reaches its peak on the two closing tracks ("Eclipse" and "Reclipse"), which give rise to intriguing experiments in line with the trends of the era.
In 1968 Moving Sidewalks were tapped to open Jimi Hendrix's American tour, also sharing the stage with 13th Floor Elevators and the Doors. Their fortunes, however, faded as quickly as they had begun, once Tom Moore (keyboards) and Don Summers (bass) were drafted into the Navy, while Gibbons went on to find far greater fame and fortune with ZZ Top.

Fever Tree

Texan by origin but very Californian in spirit and in their typically hippie iconography, Fever Tree were a band straddling folk and blues, with orchestral arrangements not unlike Love. Their main LP is their 1968 self-titled debut, which features the standout psychedelic ballad "San Francisco Girl," testament to their ideological, if not geographical, closeness to the concerns of the California scenes (the record was actually cut in Los Angeles).
Elsewhere in their catalog, the presence of horns and classically inflected arrangements effectively set Fever Tree apart from the psychedelic zeitgeist, turning their trajectory into something of a footnote of its own. A record that has perhaps aged a little awkwardly, but one still worth appreciating for its taste and the refinement of its melodies.

Golden Dawn

Released on the International Artists label, "Power Plant" was the only record ever produced by the mind behind Golden Dawn, whose ranks featured vocalist George Kinney, who could boast a past as Roky Erickson's partner in the Fugitives. And just as his former bandmate was taking the "thirteenth floor elevator" toward the cosmos, Kinney founded his own band and recorded the legendary "Power Plant" in 1967, which for unknown reasons only reached record shops the following year. Their "golden dawn" was thus eclipsed by the release, the month before, of "Easter Everywhere," an album it shares more than a few similarities with, and to which critics of the time insisted on comparing it. A shame, because there are plenty of interesting moments on the Golden Dawn record: from the psych-punk of "Evolution" to the harmonica-laced blues of "I'll Be Around," all the way to the acid guitar riffing of "My Time." An album of short, catchy songs, doomed to suffer from a dismal marketing campaign.

• Psychedelic soloists
  • Jimi Hendrix
  • Tim Buckley
  • Alexander Spence
  • Bruce Palmer

Jimi Hendrix

James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix, born Johnny Allen Hendrix, is the most important rock guitarist of all time, the man who elevated the guitar into the defining instrument of the genre. In his hands the guitar became the symbol of a cult, a sacrificial creature, a totem, a phallic symbol, an instrument denoting power, the scepter of rock's great high priests. Essential to hard rock and heavy metal, whose tradition of tireless guitar heroes regards him as an absolute forefather, Hendrix managed to toughen up blues-rock with deafening, savage, jagged, dynamite-charged distortion, expanding the possibilities of the instrument until it could do everything: melody, seismic riffs, and even deafening, abstract noises that were, and this is of particular interest here, psychedelic. It's precisely in psychedelia that Hendrix towers like a giant: some of his experiments distort, warp, mold, slice and transfigure the sound of the guitar until it takes on unprecedented visionary qualities, evoking sidereal depths, cosmic whirlpools, and the terrifying bombing raids over Vietnam. The list of effects he turned into staples of rock is long and substantial: wah-wah, fuzz distortion and imaginative use of feedback are perhaps the three biggest examples. He is the first poet of the psychedelic guitar, and the most influential one. With his premature death in 1970 at 27, the golden age of psychedelia also symbolically came to a close, and indeed, the innovations in guitar playing developed across all of acid music after his passing have been far more modest and hard-won.
There is also a less obvious influence of Hendrix on American psychedelia, one of a cultural and symbolic nature: the incorporation of voodoo rituals into his concerts, the "sacrifice" of the guitar at the end of a show (smashed, even set on fire), an almost romantic drive toward a desperate return to origins — sexual and primal instincts, but also childlike ones — all of these would become guiding threads for bands both contemporary with and following the guitar hero.

After his first recordings in 1964, a brief stint in Little Richard's band, the Isley Brothers, and other outfits, Hendrix formed his own band in 1966, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, until Keith Richards's girlfriend, Linda Keith, spotted him in Greenwich Village.
It's the start of an unstoppable ascent: a band built around him that same year, 1966, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and the chance to blow away Eric Clapton in a London studio ("He walked off [after playing], and my life was never the same again," Slow-hand said in 1989); success in the UK and the enthusiasm of illustrious onlookers such as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Brian Jones, Mick Jagger and Kevin Ayers, who watched him perform at the Bag O'Nails in November 1966 ("All the stars were there, and I heard some pretty telling remarks, you know, things like 'shit', 'Jesus', 'fuck' and other even stronger words," Ayers recalled in his account); the first single, "Hey Joe," in December 1966, and even bigger success with "Purple Haze" and "The Wind Cries Mary"; the burning of his first guitar, to outdo the Who's showmanship; the first legendary album, "Are You Experienced" (1967), a huge success in the UK and US and the sacred text of psychedelic guitar (the title track and "Third Stone From The Sun" alone make the case); the Monterey Pop Festival, with a performance that was historically, and literally, incendiary; a second album, "Axis: Bold As Love" (1967), with new experiments in feedback, the first recorded example of stereo phasing, and new psychedelically-minded compositional inventions; "Electric Ladyland" (1968) and definitive masterpieces such as "Voodoo Child," 15 minutes of uncompromising psychedelia; "Woodstock" and the distorted national anthem as an act of protest (according to Al Aronowitz of the New York Post, "the single greatest moment of the sixties"); his premature death in 1970.
Hendrix's entire brief but blazing career runs alongside and shapes psychedelia, in the United States as much as in Britain. Thanks to him, the guitar could become an instrument of endless possibility, perfect for describing the boldest of lysergic journeys.

Tim Buckley

Timothy Charles "Tim" Buckley III was able to ferry the most uncompromising experimentation into American traditional music, fusing folk, rock and psychedelia according to a lopsided logic, forever straining toward innovative, atypical, daring solutions. His career is, in this sense, a sensational arc of tremendous evolutions, one that makes his discography resemble the path some great musicians take over the span of several decades. Tim Buckley, though, packed that whole journey into the years between 1966 and 1975, when he died of a heroin overdose at just 28, leaving behind his sons Taylor and Jeff, the latter destined for an equally brief musical career and life.
Tim Buckley gave the voice what Jimi Hendrix gave the guitar: he turned it into an instrument of endless possibility. No longer merely a vessel serving the lyrics, but also a tremendous melodic vehicle and an anguished, poetic song, mirror of a tormented soul. There is an abstraction in Tim Buckley's singing, an emancipation from the social and political context that was nonetheless central to his contemporaries; but he was more interested in the infinite space stretching across the two cosmoses, the outer and the inner. In this, Tim Buckley's art is superhuman: it tries to represent everything and its contradictions, the most boundless beauties of the soul and the Universe. In pursuit of this unreachable goal, he experimented with his voice, merging the popular with the avant-garde, in a game of impossible balances.
Master of an exquisite technique, with total control over his own voice, Tim Buckley was also an exceptional composer, one who made profoundly different languages his own, fusing free jazz and gospel, folk and psych-rock, Latin American and Eastern music, skeletal singer-songwriter fare and majestic chamber music.
As with a handful of particularly creative artists, it's hard to slot him into just one category, genre or style. Certainly, the psychedelic quest to represent the visionary and the oneiric runs through Buckley's innovative use of his voice, well represented by the unrepeatable one-two punch of 1970, the albums "Lorca" and "Starsailor." A tragic, moving figure, Buckley embodies the darkest side of the late-'60s dream, a devastating descent into the abyss of loneliness and malaise, offset by hallucinations, dreams and drugs, inevitably followed by pain, disillusionment and, finally, death. In this too, his artistic arc stands as a paradigm of the American dream of the era, one destined to turn into a disappointing nightmare.

Alexander Spence

Having left Moby Grape, after earlier stints with Quicksilver Messenger Service and Jefferson Airplane, guitarist/drummer Alexander Spence — who battled serious psychiatric problems (in 1967, after abusing LSD, he had tried to attack Jefferson Airplane with an axe) — released his sole solo album. Spence's story is a very particular one, in many ways similar to Britain's Syd Barrett. Similar drug abuse, a similarly diagnosed schizophrenia, and a similarly lopsided folk sound on his 1969 LP "Oar." The result of this album, recorded in little more than 24 hours — with Spence playing every instrument himself — borders on the miraculous. Ramshackle blues, country with spacey overtones, psychotic vocals, folk for the last-stage drunk, all in an unrelenting succession of thirteen tracks of disarming originality. Among them stand out "War In Peace," with its extreme psychedelic vocal, the macabre folk of "Broken Heart," the blues of "Little Hands," the feverish singing of "Diana," and the closing "Grey/Afro," a folk masterpiece drowned in rivers of LSD.

Bruce Palmer

Bruce Palmer began his career as part of one of folk-rock's most celebrated legends: Buffalo Springfield. Palmer didn't stay long in the band, partly due to legal trouble over marijuana possession, but he easily secured a deal to record an album for Mgm. A reserved bassist, to the point of often turning his back to the audience during live shows, he reveals a unique personality on his sole solo record.
"The Cycle Is Complete" (1970) arrives at a moment when major labels would practically release anything deemed psychedelic, and Palmer proves adept at seizing the opportunity. He does it, however, his own way, enlisting a number of guest musicians, including no fewer than four members of Kaleidoscope. They didn't all play together, instead working in layers, overdubbing improvised parts onto material already composed in the studio. The result is a remarkably free sound, a precursor to much of what would become world music, not unlike certain experimental German records of the era. Whether the outcome was intentional or purely accidental, we'll never know: Bruce Palmer gave us a masterpiece of psychedelic eclecticism, moving between liturgical vocal manipulations ("Calm Before The Storm") and ethno-free-jazz excursions ("Oxo"), where the rhythm section plays a crucial role, weaving a tribal sonic carpet over which flute and guitar merely fill in the details of a breathtaking landscape.

The birth of acid-folk

Two groups in particular were fundamental to the birth of acid-folk, blending poetry and music with irreverent, anti-harmonic sounds, the perfect backdrop for deeply subversive lyrics. Yet there's no desire in either of them to treat the musical experience as a multi-sensory trip; if anything, the music seems to be only the smallest part of an arcane ritual of exorcism against society's ills. Influenced by Allen Ginsberg and the student movements, this current would draw musical sustenance from the legacy of the Holy Modal Rounders and the Fugs, combined with the more "mystical" strain of Pat Kilroy, laying the groundwork for all that hallucinogenic, esoteric folk, as mystical as it was wild, which would later tie into the notion of music as a psychedelic "experience".

• "Kill For Peace", the insurmountable contradiction that marked the end of the youth movement
  • Holy Modal Rounders
  • Fugs

Holy Modal Rounders

In 1964 in New York begins the saga of a visionary duo, the Holy Modal Rounders, made up of Peter Stampfel (violin, banjo, vocals) and Steve Weber (guitar, vocals), who released on their self-titled album a collection of traditional songs rearranged in a contemporary key, alongside a couple of originals. Among the many reinterpretations, mention must go to their acrid version of "Hesitation Blues", which contains the first use of the word "psychedelic" in popular music ("Got my psychedelic feet/ in my psychedelic shoes"): their iconoclastic take on folk laid the groundwork for the boldest music of the years to come, starting with that of the irreverent Fugs, a project two of the Holy Modal Rounders briefly joined in 1965. Stampfel and Weber would go on recording with their old creation into the Eighties, churning out records worthy of the scruffiest lo-fi indie music of the Nineties (worth noting, in this regard, an album like "Indian War Whoop" from 1969).

Fugs

If you don't want America to play second fiddle/ kill for peace!
("Kill For Peace")

Meanwhile, a year earlier, the Fugs emerged in Manhattan, led by poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, quickly becoming a cornerstone of the American counterculture, helped along by their friendship with the founders of the Youth International Party, the Yippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Sanders and Kupferberg first met at the "Peace Eye" bookstore, once home to a Kosher butcher shop. The band's name comes from a workaround Norman Mailer used in his novel "The Naked and the Dead", where the word had been employed to dodge the inevitable censorship of "fuck". Naturally, the Fugs also proved to be a fiercely satirical band, one that not only openly protested the Vietnam War but also laced its songs with humorous, profane lyrics about taboo subjects like sex and drugs. The fun, though, was never an end in itself: the Fugs were among the most uncompromising activists and environmentalists, sharply critical of authority in general.
Surrounded by a wide array of refugees from the New York folk scene (including Steve Weber and Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders and drummer Ken Weaver), the group embodied the perfect do-it-yourself ethos well before the punk explosion of the late Seventies. The band's often blunt approach to political matters also drew a hostile reaction even from the FBI, which repeatedly cited the Fugs for their "vulgar and repugnant" songs.

The debut, known as "Virgin Fugs" or "First Album" – despite its uninspired title – conceals within it an eccentricity probably never before seen in rock, foreshadowing what would become Frank Zappa's corrosive musical satire and David Peel's proto-punk. The Fugs' debut is scandalously blunt, a noisy uproar of acid laments and war chants, a head-on assault on respectability caught between the poetic echoes of the Beat Generation and the first stirrings of punk music, amid blatant nods to William Blake ("Ah, Sunflower Weary Of Time") and lewd sexual anthems ("Boobs A Lot"). The self-titled 1966 album, recorded with new musicians and featuring liner notes penned by Allen Ginsberg, shows a less raw, more focused style, distilled in the fierce protest ballad "Kill For Peace". Also worth mentioning in the tracklist is "Virgin Forest", one of the earliest collage-tracks in history.
In 1967 the band briefly signed with Atlantic Records, putting together an album that was never released, while their previous label, Esp, salvaged some tapes and assembled a record under the name "Virgin Fugs". That same year, the Fugs conducted a gripping exorcism near the Pentagon, playing off the back of a truck.
Before the Fugs' saga ended with their breakup in 1969, the band recorded four more albums for Reprise Records, including "Tenderness Junction" (1967), "It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest" (1968), "The Belle Of Avenue A" (1969) and the live album "Golden Filth" (1970). In the years between the split and the band's reunion in 1984, the Fugs' founders continued to produce significant solo work, both musical and literary, including Sanders' bestseller devoted to Charles Manson's "Family".

• Psychedelic folk
  • Byrds and David Crosby
  • Country Joe And The Fish
  • Serpent Power
  • West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band

Byrds and David Crosby

The Byrds have gone down in history as the inventors, alongside Bob Dylan, of electric folk. Whether or not that claim holds entirely true, they undoubtedly had an enormous influence on the evolution of folk, charting a path that runs from American folk and country roots and the earliest vocal groups all the way to psychedelic pop and lysergic folk balladry. With a top-tier lineup – featuring musicians of the caliber of David Crosby, Roger McGuinn, Gene Clark, Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke – they show a remarkable knack for crafting instantly catchy melodies (a hallmark of Merseybeat), enriching Bob Dylan's folk with the vocal skills of the Beach Boys, taking an approach quite different from rock'n'roll's transgressive spirit, instead aiming for introspective atmospheres rather than an outburst of existential rage.
Their connection to psychedelia is undeniable, if belated. The first two albums are little more than collections of covers, though they do reveal technical and vocal abilities above average. It's with the third album that they move decisively toward psychedelia. "Fifth Dimension" (1966) is the first album with no Bob Dylan covers, flawless in its clean, refined sound of folk edging step by step into psychedelia, and packed with memorable tracks: the timeless classics "Eight Miles High" (a lysergic masterpiece with raga influences), "Mr. Spaceman", somewhere between pop and blues, the gorgeous psychedelic pop of "Fifth Dimension", the dreamlike journey between the Beatles and the first stirrings of Lsd in "I See You", and the perfect folk ballad "What's Happening?". A flawless album for understanding just how far the psychedelic movement's influence was reaching beyond its traditional borders.
The follow-up, "Younger Than Yesterday" (1967), is a classic in their discography that continues those journeys between folk and Lsd. The songs are nearly all masterpieces: the love ballad "Have You Seen Your Face", the hypnotic, spacey "CTA 102" (inspired by Stockhausen), the hippie anthem "Renaissance Fair". David Crosby rises to become a giant of his generation on the tracks he wrote himself: the dreamy folk of "Everybody's Been Burned", which contrasts the theme of nuclear holocaust with an infinitely sweet vocal, and the raga-tinged, Tim Buckley-like vocals of the extraordinary "Mind Gardens".
With "The Notorious Byrd Brothers" (1968) they offer up more grandiose arrangements with brass and electronics, but the album is above all marked by the falling-out between Crosby and McGuinn. Crosby appears only partially, missing from several tracks, before leaving the band altogether. The album is still genuinely psychedelic, as in the slow ballad "Draft Morning", the explicit drug references of "Artificial Energy", and the proto-space feel of "Space Odyssey". Psychedelic folk still dominates, but there are plenty of new ideas (the electronic oddities of "Dolphin's Smile" and the bonus track "Universal Mind Decoder") that make it an album capable of surprising listeners of the time. Despite their attempts to change direction, the Byrds always manage to move listeners with the voice and guitar of their signature folk-pop sound on "Wasn't Born To Follow".
The Byrds' later story moves along more country-oriented lines, but their arc remains one of the most significant and talented in the entire American scene. After leaving, David Crosby formed the supergroup Crosby Stills & Nash and began a long solo career, releasing the phenomenal "If I Could Only Remember My Name" (1971), which might well stand as the final epitaph of the entire psychedelic era. An unmissable gem of mature psychedelic folk, the album features the participation of many of the key musicians from the San Francisco scene.

Country Joe And The Fish

Country Joe And The Fish, led by virtuoso guitarist Joe McDonald, are an emblematic band of the San Francisco sound. Born out of the university scene in Berkeley, where they'd been playing since 1965 a brand of folk with left-leaning political lyrics and odd moments reminiscent of the Fugs, they debuted in 1967 with "Electric Music For The Mind And The Body", an Lp carrying far heavier doses of psychedelia, especially on the hyper-lysergic instrumental "Section 43". Otherwise, it's an excellent record, featuring a guitarist with technical skill well above his contemporaries, ranging across blues ("Death Sound") and folk by way of waltz ("Porpoise Mouth"), while remaining fully in step with the ideas of the San Francisco movement. Not just technique, then, but plenty of ideas to communicate too. There are also moments of real complexity, thanks in part to David Cohen's keyboards, that almost hint at the earliest stirrings of proto-progressive rock.
The follow-up, "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die" (1967), is even more politically explicit, striking out harder against the champions of the Vietnam War. But beyond the politics there's also a greater wealth of ideas, found in the brief psychedelic ballad "Eastern Jam", the playful ragtime of the title track, the dreamlike folk of "Pat's Song" and "Who Am I", the bizarre spiritual-blues of "Thought Dream", right down to the ethereal guitar work of "Colors For Susan".

Serpent Power

Serpent Power, one of the many shooting stars of the psychedelic era, made a single album before quickly vanishing from the scene. This seven-piece band – which often swelled to as many as ten members live – released their self-titled debut in 1967 on Vanguard, poised between folk and blues, in the wake of Jefferson Airplane ("Open House"), the Doors ("Endless Tunnel") and Country Joe And The Fish ("Sky Baby").
The vocals belong to poet couple Tina and David Meltzer, who split the songwriting duties across a set of crystalline tracks led by guitars and organ.
After the album's disappointing sales, the band broke up, and the couple released the excellent "Poet Song" together in 1969, before fading into obscurity for good.

West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band

Some truly amusing stories arise from patronage in its most unlikely forms. In the case of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, the role of impromptu patron fell to one Bob Markley, adopted son of an oil magnate who had recently moved from Oklahoma to Los Angeles. At a party in the Californian metropolis, the young heir met three eccentric young men (brothers Shaun and Danny Harris and Michael Lloyd) and offered to fund the band, on the sole condition that he get to play tambourine onstage and take part in writing the songs; a deal so favorable that the group could only give it their full, immediate consent. And so the band began playing the clubs and recorded an album that was thoroughly uneven and, in its amateurish way, made up of simple melodies and plenty of covers. In short, nothing that could live up to the openly "experimental" moniker the band had chosen – not that the album's title was particularly inspired either ("Volume 1", 1966). The band didn't give up, though, and got back on track with the help of Kim Fowley (featured on the first album on "Insanity"), soon becoming a fixture at the various happenings taking place around Los Angeles.
In 1966 came a deal with Reprise, through which they immediately released "Part One" (1967). From the opening track "Shifting Sands" onward, shaped by a decidedly hypnotic rhythm, it's clear the band entered the studio in a different frame of mind. The record also features numerous covers – most eccentrically Frank Zappa's "Help Me I'm A Rock" and Van Dyke Parks' "High Coin" – alongside original tracks, such as the romantic psychedelia of "I Won't Hurt You" and the Byrds-like melodies of "If You Want This Love". Still oriented toward the song format, the album nonetheless stands out for a handful of more schizophrenic, experimental digressions, closer to Zappa and Beefheart.
In 1967 came "Volume 2 (Breaking Through)", where the sitar magically appears on the track "Buddha". With "Volume 3: A Child's Guide To Good & Evil", the themes turn to war ("Eighteen Is Over The Hill", "Until The Poorest Of People Have Money To Spend", "A Child Of A Few Hours Is Burning To Death"), with black-and-white cover art that aptly foreshadows the obsessive music within.
The group then recorded "Where's My Daddy" in 1969, a fine record but decidedly more rock-oriented. Also in 1969 came an album credited to "Markley, A Group", which in reality was nothing but the fifth WCPAEB record. The group's story ends here. Among the more interesting side projects worth noting are Michael Lloyd's October Country, who recorded their self-titled album in 1968; that same year, Lloyd also took part in the brief power-pop saga of the Smoke.

The Boston scene

In the capital of Massachusetts unfolds the brief and rather ill-fated experiment of the "Bosstown Sound", a movement representing Mgm and its supervisor Alan Lorber's attempt to artificially recreate the San Francisco scene in Boston. The results were, at times, questionable: far be it from us to attempt a definitive overview, which would prove sprawling and none too rewarding; what follows instead is a look at the bands we consider most compelling and representative.
For a fuller listen, we point you to the compilation "Bosstown Sound, 1968: The Music & The Time" (Big Beat, 1996).

• Lab-made psychedelia
  • Beacon Street Union
  • Ultimate Spinach
  • Freeborne

Beacon Street Union

In 1966 Beacon Street Union formed under keyboardist Robert Rhodes, who recruited some college friends and a few childhood pals. The quintet cut its teeth around Boston, playing raw rock with strong hard-blues leanings. It was in New York, however, that they made their leap in quality, thanks to a meeting with independent producer Wes Farrell, who pushed them into a recording studio. Unbeknownst to the band, a contract with Mgm suddenly materialized, and with it they released their debut Lp "The Eyes Of The Beacon Street Union" in 1968. The label's interference was heavy-handed, driven by a strong urge to record a late-psychedelic album in "Boston style." The promotional campaign was correspondingly massive, so much so that the record easily caught the press's attention, though it didn't fully convince, especially given the quality gap between the two sides of the vinyl (the second half sounds decidedly more compelling than the first, which drifts along with a faded, watered-down psychedelia).
In June of that same year, Beacon Street Union found themselves back in New York working on their second album. Farrell pushed hard for a concept album, but the material written so far was thin, forcing the band to write quickly during the recording sessions. Beacon Street Union's intention was to capture on record the energy of their live shows, yet the result was once again overturned by the orchestral interference imposed by the production. On "The Clown Died In Marvin Gardens" (1968) the band's only real rock impulse comes from a rather out-of-place cover of "Blue Suede Shoes," while "May I Light Your Cigarette" hints at a more experimental side that ultimately remained only a possibility. Among the more original moments is also the closing "Please Don't Go," a strange prototype of acid rock'n'roll. Wanting to distance themselves from the past, in 1969 the quintet changed identity and reinvented themselves as Eagle. With a partially renewed line-up came a more rock and direct sound too, stripped of the studio orchestrations of the previous albums.

Ultimate Spinach

Another band with a culinary name also made a name for itself in Boston, finding more success thanks to a highly charismatic multi-instrumentalist frontman in Ian Bruce-Douglas, joined by Barbara Hudson (vocals), Geoff Winthrop (guitar), Richard Nese (bass) and Keith Lahtenein (drums). Around the same time as Beacon Street Union's debut, in January 1968 Ultimate Spinach's self-titled first album also came out. A record that is "food for the mind," according to Ian Douglas, whose voice echoes seductively from the very first notes of "Ego Trip" and fills every inch of the liner notes with his visions. From the outset, the high dose of psychedelia and Lsd running through the lyrics is obvious, at times even overdone, as in the case of "Ballad Of The Hip Death Goddess," which almost manages to visualize and anticipate certain future trends in goth music. There's also a wide range of guitar effects and a sound that's generally more compelling and less naive than that of their hometown peers. A record that has been rightly reassessed over the years, having long been undervalued because of the context it was born into.
On the second album, "Behold And See" (1968), both the production and the band's mood shift – reportedly turning rather listless – during the recordings, though the final result is more cohesive sonically. The driving force of the first Lp is missing, but among the interesting moments worth mentioning are the harmonica-laced country-folk of "Fifth Horseman Of The Apocalypse" and the narcotic ballad "Wild Flowers." The 1969 third album effectively closes out the brief story of the Bosstown Sound. Replacing the band's leader is Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, who would go on to fame with Steely Dan. Psychedelic Boston, on the other hand, would never enjoy the same fortune.

Freeborne

Finally, we can't avoid mentioning Freeborne. Not signed by Mgm, but still very much aligned with the Bosstown style, they stand out for their lone gem "Peak Impressions" (1968), released on the Monitor label. The band's five very young members took their name from the film "Born Free," and indeed, their music couldn't have been freer. Despite being under twenty, it's remarkable that they managed to produce a highly orchestral brand of psychedelia – violin, trumpets, flutes, keyboards – even if at times perhaps overdriven by excessive youthful enthusiasm. If the odd time signatures of "Land Of Diana" already foreshadow some elements of future progressive rock, the suite "Peak Impressions And Thoughts" seems to spring straight from the mind of the Barrett-era Pink Floyd.

Among the other enjoyable acts of the Bosstown Sound, for the sake of completeness we should also mention Orpheus, Flat Earth Society, Ford Theatre and Chameleon Church, but the best of it – in our humble opinion – is all right here.

• Cosmic experiments: electronic psychedelia
  • Silver Apples
  • Mesmerizing Eye
  • Spoils Of War
  • Zodiac
  • Lothar And The Hand People

In this short chapter we've decided to make room for five bands that stood out for creating an atypical strain of psychedelic music heavily steeped in electronics, cross-pollinated with art music and avant-garde circles.

Silver Apples

The story of Silver Apples begins in mid-1960s New York; at first they're a quintet (Overland Stage Electric Band), but leader Simeon Coxe's growing fascination with electronic sounds scares off all the other members except drummer Dan Taylor. In 1967 the two survivors decide to carry on alone, changing their name to Silver Apples (taken from a poem by William Butler Yeats), with the aim of creating an "organic mechanism" capable of producing music made up of nothing but percussion and electronics, played by whatever means available. Stripped down to just drums and oscillators, the original psychedelic rock evolves into something entirely different. Simeon himself builds a strange contraption bearing his own name, made up of nine audio oscillators and eighty-four control knobs, played with every part of the body (according to the liner notes, "the rhythm and lead oscillators are played with the hands, elbows and knees, while the bass oscillators are played with the feet"). An undeniably eccentric idea, one that earns the duo plenty of attention at a Central Park concert also attended by the Fugs and Frank Zappa; the performance lands them a deal with Kapp Records, with whom they record their self-titled debut album.
Silver Apples' brand of psychedelia has no real counterpart on the American continent, ending up, paradoxically, closer to certain future kraut-rock acts descended from Stockhausen's teachings. Were it not for the rudimentary recording, "Oscillations" could easily pass for a late-1970s song. Without hesitation, Simeon chants what could be considered his personal mantra: "Oscillations, oscillations, electronic evocations." Nothing could be more avant-garde: within the album's first two minutes, it's already clear exactly where Silver Apples are headed. Having laid out their intentions so clearly, the duo goes on to define the paranoid bliss of "Seagreen Serenades" and the electronic-lounge pulse of "Lovefingers," before moving forward by exhuming tape effects from all manner of sources, including classical music and TV commercials, as on "Program."
"Silver Apples" is such a pioneering album that the duo would only attempt something like it again with "Contact" (1969), before vanishing from the scene altogether and resurfacing on record with the posthumous album "The Garden" in 1998, the same year that also marked Simeon's return to recording; he would definitively reunite with Taylor two years later, until the latter's untimely death in 2005.

Mesmerizing Eye

One of the more curious psychedelic relics – one that actually only earns that label in its title – is "Psychedelia, A Musical Lightshow" by Mesmerizing Eye, dated 1967. A decidedly niche album, marked by sound effects that run through the tracks, disfiguring them almost to the point of irritating the listener, dragging them into a world with no points of reference. Poised between the era's most experimental impulses and musique concrète (think Friendsound's "Joyride" or the later work of Dreamies' "Auralgraphic Entertainment"), the record is undoubtedly an interesting document of an unusual fusion between art music and psychedelic rock.

Spoils Of War

Among the earliest examples of a rock band making heavy use of electronics within rock are also the little-known Spoils Of War, who deserve a place in the pantheon of pioneers but have unfortunately been consigned to obscurity since their very beginning. Even the band's name, chosen by composer Jim Cuomo, derives from a musical instrument invented by Harry Partch that also incorporated the use of spent artillery shells (hence too the sci-fi cover art of their one and only album). From the very first seconds of "Spoils Of War" (1969) it's clear the listening experience will be a varied one, containing elements of psychedelia, experimental rock, electronics and even a few debts to musique concrète (most notably on the absurd "E-Thing"). Formed at the University of Illinois while studying composers like Pierre Henry, these young rockers show a touch of the academicism of their education: the result is an erudite, eclectic strain of psychedelia, a case more unique than rare in the history of the genre.

Zodiac

Reading the title of the Zodiac album, "Cosmic Sounds," you might think this monograph had accidentally slipped in a kraut-rock record. Then, looking at its date of composition – 1967 – you might even suspect a chronological typo. And yet, the date and place are both correct: Zodiac, produced by Moog guru Mort Garson, managed to conceive a record that was probably the music furthest removed from anything else available in record shops back in 1967. The cosmic sounds mentioned in the title are no exaggeration: from the very first seconds, the album reveals itself as a tapestry of sonic jams and alien spoken-word passages (the voice belongs to singer Cyrus Faryar), which the listener is instructed to take in carefully by "listening in the dark," as the writing on the back cover puts it.
The idea for the record came from Jac Holzman, head of Elektra, who proposed a zodiac-themed concept album split into twelve tracks. The list of musicians involved is extensive, as is the number of instruments used and often overdubbed (besides the synth, there are traces of more unconventional instruments like harpsichord and sitar). An obscure gem of psychedelia, and absolutely worth rediscovering.

Lothar And The Hand People

Lothar And The Hand People, originally from Denver but active in New York from 1966, deserve to be counted among the first electronic-psychedelia groups for their use of synthesizer and theremin, alongside other instruments unconventional for the era. The line-up boasted no fewer than three keyboardists (Kim King, Paul Conly, John Emelin): the result on the first album, "Presenting..." (1968), is a strange hybrid of proto-electronics and psych-folk. Among the more curious tracks is "It Comes On Anyhow," which the Chemical Brothers would later sample on "It Does Not Matter," along with the acid trip of "This May Be Goodbye" and "Machines," already hinting at the experimental madness of Devo.
The real turning point comes with the second album, "Space Hymn" (Capitol, 1969), where the band takes a step forward in crafting a decidedly futuristic hymn to space.

Heavy-psych: the most granite-hard psychedelia

If there were such a thing as musical arithmetic, then heavy-psych (also called hard-psych) would simply be the result of an equation: the famous Jimi Hendrix Experience plus the English band Cream, led by Eric Clapton; the guitar virtuosity of the world's most celebrated guitar hero combined with an armor-plated blues soul, perfect for reworking the classics into a new, incendiary version without ever abandoning its blues-rock roots. In the late Sixties, in fact, a new way of playing psychedelia took shape, built around a few key elements: simple, powerful guitar riffs; deafening volumes drenched in feedback and distortion; a tendency toward virtuosic, spectacular improvisation. Alongside the thrilling lysergic frenzy of more traditional psychedelic rock came a darker shade too, hedonistic and destructive.
The first to earn the heavy-psych label are Vanilla Fudge, already moving in that direction in 1967 with the single "You Keep Me Hanging On/Take Me For A Little While," whose A-side is a landmark, a towering example of rock grandiloquence. Close behind come Blue Cheer, with the single "Sun Cycle/Albert's Shuffle," another milestone A-side for this deafening brand of psychedelia.
It's a moment of sensational growth for the style, already widespread by 1968: while Vanilla Fudge's debut dates back to 1967, Blue Cheer arrive with their own debut in this golden year, delivering what remains perhaps the masterpiece of the genre, or at the very least its most influential work, "Vincebus Eruptum." But there are also the already-mentioned Steppenwolf and Iron Butterfly, with two manifesto-tracks such as "Born To Be Wild" and "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida." From 1969 to 1972, what had been a small flame flares up into a full blaze: a whole constellation of new acts contributes to heavy-psych, often without belonging to any particular local scene, simply channeling the electricity that was in the air. Some are semi-unknown or cult acts, others are bands well known to music lovers, like Grand Funk. We've chosen to prioritize the acts that most influenced those who came after, or whose output was particularly extensive, given the sheer abundance of bands with only a single album to their name. Exceptions to these rules are covered in the final paragraph, among other formations unjustly "forgotten."

• The school of the “hard ones”
  • Blue Cheer
  • Vanilla Fudge
  • Grand Funk Railroad
  • Captain Beyond
  • Mountain
  • Sir Lord Baltimore
  • Josefus
  • Dust

Blue Cheer

Among the great names of the San Francisco scene are Blue Cheer, pioneers of heavy metal and giants of hard-psych. The ideas that would go on to shape stoner rock and stoner metal in the 80s and 90s can be traced back to them. According to some historians, their incendiary, dynamite-laden and heavily distorted version of "Summertime Blues", Eddie Cochran's 1958 classic, might well be the first heavy-metal song ever recorded. Famed Cream guitarist Cream  Eric Clapton and Rush singer Rush Geddy Lee both agree in considering them the founding fathers of the genre, while Jim Morrison called them "the heaviest band I've ever seen." They took their curious name from a type of LSD produced by Owsley Stanley, sound engineer close to the Grateful Dead and high priest of psychedelia.
They were formed in 1967 out of an idea by Dickie Peterson, bassist and singer, joined by Leigh Stephens on guitar and Paul Whaley on drums. This is the lineup that recorded the legendary debut, "Vincebus Eruptum" (1968), with its pseudo-Latin title and extreme sound, which pushes blues-rock toward the boundaries of heavy metal. Hailed by Billboard as "the epitome of psychedelic rock," this album contains not only "Summertime Blues" but also an adventurous "Doctor Please" and a generic, unrelenting orgy of decibels, feedback and deafening distortion running through every track (3 mangled covers and 3 originals).
Stephens douses every arrangement with his fuzz, like incandescent lava, while Whaley pounds the skins with a vengeance, as if some deafening ritual were underway. The comparison, though frequent, with Jimi Hendrix risks being misleading: Stephens bets everything on the power of feedback and amplifiers permanently cranked to the max, leaving virtuosity by the wayside. These 32 minutes still sound, even fifty years on, like one of the most devastating chaotic adventures in all of American psychedelia.

The second album, "Outsideinside" (1968), released just 7 months later, is the ideal completion of the foundations of heavy-psych. Slightly tamer in volume, it's an equally influential album that smooths out the edges only to focus more on songcraft. The splendid "Feathers From Your Tree" could be the style's manifesto and clearly highlights the closeness to the most spectacular and muscular side of prog-rock, an aspect often overlooked. The deranged "Just A Little Bit" is a monster of distortion, frightening in its earth-shaking physical impact, and pairs well with the equally devastating "Come And Get It". 
A lineup without Stephens, replaced by the great guitarist Randy Holden, and expanded to a quartet with keyboards, then recorded "New! Improved!" (1969), whose most heavy-psych moments come precisely from Holden himself. Overall, though, the overwhelming drive of the earlier records has been lost.
"Blue Cheer" (also 1969), with Holden replaced by Bruce Stephens, is the album that abandons psychedelia, with a bland folk-rock and hard rock sound, hardly creative at all. They reconsidered with "The Original Human Being" (1970), where they even used a sitar and a synthesizer to produce their first and only raga, "Babaji". It's one last flicker before the decline. One final album followed, the folk-oriented "Oh! Pleasant Hope" (1971), after which the band split up until 1984, when they briefly reunited to release "The Beast Is Back" (1984), featuring several re-recorded versions of old classics. Holden, meanwhile, found his psychedelic masterpiece in a 1970 solo album, "Population II", which manages to make even Blue Cheer's deafening volumes sound tame.

Vanilla Fudge

The career of Vanilla Fudge – Mark Stein (organ and vocals), Tim Bogert (bass and vocals), Vince Martell (guitar/vocals) and Carmine Appice (drums) – is curiously tied to pompous, psychedelic and deafening arrangements of contemporary classics. Named as they were because Atlantic Records simply wouldn't sign a band called Pigeons, Vanilla Fudge – taking their name from a barmaid the band chatted up during a concert in April 1967 – found success with a wildly reworked version of "You Keep Me Hangin' On", a song already a hit for the Supremes. Perhaps only accidentally ironic, this version sounds like an explosive parody of the girl group's hit, thrilling in its contrast between catchy melodies and deafening guitar distortion. Heavily defining the track is the organ, which lends it a grandeur that would later become dear to Deep Purple.
The debut "Vanilla Fudge" (1967) contains only covers, played at half the speed and double the original volume, rearranged to make room for the organ. None of the tracks can even remotely rival their first hit. Since the trick of the mangled cover remains their main creative device, on the second album "The Beat Goes On" (1968) they extend it to classical music, following a collage logic somewhere between psychedelia and prog-rock. Amid the many quotes and reworkings, a flame of explosive psychedelic hard rock still burns. Original compositions finally arrive with "Renaissance" (1969): the grandiose lysergic adventure of "The Sky Cried/When I Was A Boy", a prog-rock version of Jimi Hendrix; "Paradise", genuinely close to the future King Crimson and therefore a significant track for all romantic prog-rock; "Faceless People", an electric ballad that flows into a distorted, medieval-tinged dance; "Season Of The Witch", an atmospheric, highly imaginative and markedly theatrical track that explodes in its finale.
The band nonetheless seems unable to build on its own creative flair, so on "Near The Beginning" (1969) they change tack again, moving from hallucinated, romantic prog-rock to the jam of the very long "Break Song", 23 minutes of deafening blasts, whistles, feedback, solos, digressions and instrumental duels between the musicians. An exercise that's exhausting at times, but in keeping with a pyrotechnic spirit that would find many followers in the hard rock and heavy-metal to come (how can one not think of the future marathon live shows of Dream Theater?). On "Rock & Roll" (1969) we find their masterpiece, "I Need Love", a double-speed boogie so overwhelming it makes Blue Cheer sound timid. It's a swan song, since afterward they broke up, only returning to the studio in 1984 and then again in the 2000s.

Grand Funk Railroad

In 1969, guitarist Mark Farner and drummer Don Brewer teamed up with bassist Mel Schacher to form one of the most successful bands to come out of Michigan. For their name they chose a pun on the Grand Trunk Western Railroad. Their debut album, "On Time" (1969), presents them as a hard rock and hard-blues band close to the style of Cream, but with significant psychedelic openings ("Anybody's Answer", "Heartbreaker", "Can't Be Too Long"), earning them a place among the founders of heavy-psych.
The second album, "Grand Funk" (1969), also known as "The Red Album" because of its cover, is their greatest contribution to American psychedelia. Armor-plated boogie numbers like "Got This Thing On The Move" and "Mr. Limousine Driver" revive the spirit of Cream and carry Jimi Hendrix's showmanship, while the extended tracks "In Need", "Paranoid" and the deafening "Inside Looking Out" overflow with decibels, feedback and distortion, acid-drenched stretches and machine-gun rhythms.
The peak of this period is perhaps "Closer To Home" (1970), a long hallucinated ritual seasoned with outrageous volumes that shows off all the band's instrumental showmanship and spectacle right from the opener "Sin's A Good Man's Brother". Other psych-rock gems like "Mean Mistreater" and "Get It Together" alternate, though, with hard-prog jewels ("Closer To Home") and more typically hard rock episodes.
The 1970 "Live Album" ideally closes out their golden period, after which their career drifted toward less psychedelic and more hard rock and blues territory. They were one of the most successful groups of 1969-1971: they scored gold with "On Time", platinum with "Grand Funk", double platinum with "Closer To Home", and platinum again for each of their 1971 albums, "Survival" and "E Pluribus Funk". The aforementioned "Live Album" earned an incredible double platinum, a rare feat for a live document.
Long scorned by critics, who point to their crowd-pleasing style – best showcased in legendary, stadium-sized concerts – the band saw a slow commercial decline from the second half of the 70s onward, but kept releasing studio albums up to "What's Funk" (1983) and live releases up to 2002 ("Live: The 1971 Tour").

Captain Beyond

Barely known but one of the greatest heavy-psych bands of all time: that's the short version of the Captain Beyond story. They were essentially a supergroup, with Rod Evans (ex-Deep Purple) on vocals, Bobby Caldwell (ex-Johnny Winter) on drums, Larry "Rhino" Reinhardt (ex-Iron Butterfly) on guitar and Lee Dorman (ex-Iron Butterfly) on bass. Curiously influenced by Latin American music and jazz, yet held together by strong psychedelic streaks and a hard rock soul, their debut is only an album of songs in appearance. Three long improvisations dominate the record, interesting for the way they fuse various melodies and ideas into long sonic flows, ranging from the masterful "Dancing Madly Backwards" to the pure acid delirium of "Myopic Void", a textbook crescendo that builds and accelerates. The more psych-folk jam of "Thousand Days Of Yesterdays" nonetheless includes the explosive assault of "Frozen Over". The closing "I Can't Feel Nothin'", in 5 parts, alternates hard rock lashes with pure lysergic visions. What's left outside the jams are a charging guitar assault like "Mesmerization Eclipse" and a schizophrenic proto-stoner-rock number like "Raging River Of Fear", hardly filler material. Between prog-rock, hard-rock and psych-rock, Captain Beyond's debut gives an excellent idea of how the notion of lysergic music would evolve after the 70s.
The second album, "Sufficiently Breathless" (1973), played by a sextet, completely changes the rules of the game: much more Santana than Black Sabbath, much more dinner-party jazz for the romantic bourgeoisie than exuberant countercultural psychedelia. There are many pronounced prog-rock influences, and several passages that lean acoustic. In the end this too is an evolution of American psychedelia, even if not exactly the most creative one: "Voyages Of Past Travellers", however, is a textbook bad trip.

Due to internal tensions, the band broke up, briefly reforming for Rod Evans' farewell tour from music. As a partial reconsideration of the direction they'd taken, along came "Dawn Explosion" (1977), with a reshuffled five-piece lineup. It's an elaborate hard-and-heavy album, with psychedelia reduced to a mere decorative detail ("Space Interlude" and "Space Reprise"). They broke up again in 1978, only to reconsider exactly twenty years later. Not even Larry Reinhardt's death in 2012 stopped Caldwell from reforming the band in 2013.

Mountain

Forgotten by almost everyone, Mountain were actually a fundamental heavy-psych band. Credit goes above all to Leslie West, a hugely talented guitarist who fuses Eric Clapton's hard-blues riffs with the psychedelic flair of Jimi Hendrix. Previously active in the Vagrants, West brought in Felix Pappalardi, former Cream collaborator and producer, in his quest for long-sought success. He started out with a project under his own name and an album titled "Mountain" (1969), where he imitates his idols and sings with the roar of a seasoned white soulman. West then decided to form a band, taking inspiration from his first album. After a forgotten appearance at Woodstock (the band appears neither in the docu-film nor on the soundtrack compilation) and a lineup change, Mountain's debut album finally arrived, fittingly titled "Climbing!" (1970). The quartet featured West and Pappalardi on guitar and bass respectively, both also trading off on vocals, while newcomer Corky Laing handled drums and percussion and Steve Knight split his time between organ and mellotron. The album is a landmark classic of heavy-psych. It contains the overwhelming "Mississippi Queen", worthy of Black Sabbath fused with Cream and a great guitar showcase for West. Matching its power are "Never In My Life", enough to make Led Zeppelin pale by comparison, and "Sittin' On A Rainbow", full-blown proto-stoner-metal, with a hallucinated use of distorted bass. The record is also marked by a creative approach to psychedelia, through ballads drenched in distortion ("Theme For An Imaginary Western" and "For Yasgur's Farm", close to the poetry of Neil Young), an acid hard-blues-rock ("Silver Paper") and an instrumental psych-folk piece ("To My Friend") that anticipates a disorienting sung folk number ("The Laird", deep in a trip). The blend of soul feeling and rock power is held together by electric howls and multiplying voices, in a hallucinatory piling-up of elements, teetering on the edge of chaos. There are, then, plenty of reasons to consider "Climbing!" a forgotten gem.

Barely 10 months later, in November 1971, came "Flowers Of Evil", with a textbook hard-blues title track and a few psych-rock shades in "One Last Cold Kiss" and in the coda of "Pride And Passion". The second half of the album is above all a wordy personal showcase for West, whose "Dream Sequence" takes up 25 minutes for a fairly conventional hard rock jam.
Perhaps aware of an unstoppable decline, the band broke up. The mediocre live document "Mountain Live: The Road Goes Ever On" (1972) doesn't do justice to their brief but brilliant career, something "The Best Of Mountain" (1973) manages instead. With a new lineup, the band reformed around West and Pappalardi for "Avalanche" (1974), pure hard rock, including a curious slowed-down cover of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction". They split again in 1974, with Pappalardi's departure, but in 1981 West tried again with a new line-up, just long enough to release the mediocre "Go For Your Life" (1985) and dedicate a concert to the late Pappalardi, killed by his wife in 1983.
After another 9 years of silence, West returned in 1992, repeatedly reshuffling the revived band's musicians, finally releasing "Man's World" in 1996, which also embraces heavier metal sounds. In 2007 they released a Bob Dylan covers album, "Masters Of War": nothing was left of the original, curious blend of hard rock, heavy-metal and psych-rock of days gone by.

Sir Lord Baltimore

Among the great forgotten bands of the psychedelia closest to hard rock and heavy-metal are Sir Lord Baltimore from Brooklyn, who with hindsight were also among the first to approach the hallucinated power of stoner-rock. In the eternal debate over the first use of the term "heavy-metal," they too get mentioned, referring to a 1971 review in Creem magazine. Too bad the same reviewer had used the same label six months earlier for Humble Pie. Their debut "Kingdom Come" (1970) is one of the most thrilling albums of the period, even though unjustly overlooked by rock historiography. Alongside singer-drummer Garner, guitarist Louis Dambra stands out, capable of setting every track ablaze with a profusion of Hendrix-like riffs, piling on distortion and decibels with sheer nerve. The opening title track alone would be enough to call this a milestone of heavy-psych: 6 minutes that make even the most aggressive Iron Butterfly sound timid, sounding like a journey at least five years into the future in terms of thrilling sonic power. Everything was recorded at outrageous volumes, often at breakneck speed too, as is the case with "I Got A Woman" and the possessed "Hell Hound", with shrieks worthy of the new wave of British heavy metal still to come. "Helium Head (I Got A Love)" and "Ain't Got Hung On You" even come close to speed-metal. The breakneck rock'n'roll of "Pumped Up", together with the guitar-excess orgy of "Lady Of Fire" and the heavy sound of "Master Heartache", help make this debut essential listening, without a single dip in quality. The songs on the record, written and arranged with the help of Mike Appel – who would later become Bruce Springsteen's manager – are illuminated by the production of Eddie Kramer, who had already worked with Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and Curtis Mayfield. It's precisely the heavy use of multi-tracking, especially for the guitar, that gives the arrangements a typically psychedelic spatiality, building a remarkably three-dimensional sound that seems to belong to a later era. A miracle not repeated on "Sir Lord Baltimore" (1971), still less on "Sir Lord Baltimore III Raw" (2006), works that nonetheless don't diminish the value of their excellent debut.

Josefus

From Houston, Texas, comes one of the forgotten bands that helped bring heavy-metal into being, on its psychedelic side. At a time when the great Southern state still had no "hard & heavy" scene, Josefus were spokesmen for a style that sounds like an interpolation between the English hard rock school (Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath chief among them) and the American tradition, with a tangible hallucinated edge. The work that best sums up their legacy is "Dead Man" (1970): 5 songs, one short scorching heavy-metal track and one long jam. Geared toward "slow and heavy" on tracks like "Country Boy" and close to Jimi Hendrix on the lively "Proposition", the band finds its creative peak in the closing title track: psychedelic guitar swirls flank a blues gait and introduce acid guitars, opening up space for the vocals; the instruments take center stage again shortly after, working through long guitar solos up to a rock'n'roll acceleration that inevitably leads back to the final reprise. With this jam they wrote an American version, extended and freer, of "War Pigs", the opening track of Black Sabbath's "Paranoid", which would be released just a few months later. The second album, "Josefus" (1970), sticks to 10 songs, without replicating the extended track. "I'm Gettin' On" is one of the mightiest heavy-metal tracks of the period, worthy of the most distorted MC5.

Dust

Richie Wise, Kenny Aaronson and Marc Bell formed Dust in 1969, debuting in 1971 with their self-titled album in the wake of Blue Cheer. The hard-blues charge of "Stone Woman", the slow, heavy pace of "Chasin' Ladies" and the driving "Love Me Hard" clearly speak the language of top-tier proto-metal. Of more interest to those inclined toward psychedelic listening, though, are a pair of tracks that come near the end of the record: the long, tormented and exotic desert vision of "From A Dry Camel", a track that anticipates the hard-psych forays of many 90s stoner-metal bands, and the sinuous, dreamlike "Often Shadows Felt", built entirely around a guitar filtered as if from the depths of the galaxy in slithering hisses.
Everything pointed to a stunning second album, but instead "Hard" (1972) offers, at best, an elaborate hard rock, while elsewhere it retreats toward a softer rock, complete with string arrangements and romantic ballads. There's just enough room for a new acid hard-blues worthy of Blue Cheer, "Suicide", and one last dreamlike hard-psych journey, "Learning To Die". After that, the band broke up due to lack of success and Wise's wish to take up producing: he's the man credited in that role on the first two Kiss albums. Marc Bell would even end up in the Ramones, replacing Thomas Erdelyi, while Aaronson would go on to play with artists of the caliber of Bob Dylan, Joe Cocker, Blue Öyster Cult and New York Dolls. 

• The other scenes, forgotten psychedelia
  • Ant Trip Ceremony
  • Neighb’rhood Childr’n
  • Amboy Dukes
  • Electric Flag
  • HP Lovecraft
  • Morly Grey
  • Notes From The Underground
  • C.A. Quintet
  • Road
  • Morgen
  • Mariani
  • Fraction

Ant Trip Ceremony

One of the least known bands of the scene, even to its contemporaries, hails from Utah. Ant Trip Ceremony released just one album in 1968 ("24 Hours"), pressed in only 300 copies, which is really more of an archaeological artifact of a semi-amateurish attempt to sketch out an idea of youthful freedom and expression.
Amid the usual acid-rock and yet another cover of "Hey Joe," though, two tracks stand out: the instrumental psychedelic trip of "Elaborations," worthy of a bigger-league band, and the hallucinated blues of "Four In The Morning," enriched with flute and vaguely proto-progressive touches.

Neighb'rhood Childr'n

Coming from Oregon, Neighb'rhood Childr'n recorded their only, self-titled LP in 1968 in San Francisco, right in the midst of the explosion of youth protest. With two guitarists (Rick Bolz and Ron Rashford), a drummer (W.A. Farrens), a singer (Dyan Hoffman) and no bassist, they offered a simple psychedelic sound but with fairly clear ideas. Standouts include the lysergic "Feeling Zero" and "Chocolate Angel," the obvious Jefferson Airplane influences on "Changes Brought To Me," accompanied by a string of oddities including a shrieking cover of Judy Garland's "Over The Rainbow."

Amboy Dukes

Little psychedelia but plenty of energy from the Chicago band of nimble-fingered guitarist Ted Nugent. The Amboy Dukes went down in history above all for the aggressive technique behind the classic "Baby Please Don't Go" from their self-titled debut (1967), the aching blues of "Mississippi Murderer," and the guitar outbursts on "Surrender To Your Kings" from the album "Journey To The Center Of The Mind" (1968) – almost unheard of for the time – whose title track was even covered by the Ramones.
By the time of their third album, "Migration" (1969), the line separating them from hard rock had grown very thin, particularly on "Prodigal Man," which marks a turn toward the odd-time dreams of progressive rock, but the overall impression, more or less throughout, is that the 60s are singing their swan song. Ted "Terrible" Nugent would find greater fame in his solo career.

Electric Flag

Anomalous and only marginal to the psychedelic scene, Electric Flag was born in 1967 out of the mind of blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield – ex-Butterfield Blues Band – after meeting, in San Francisco, organist Barry Goldberg, drummer Buddy Miles and singer Nick Gravenites. What sets the band apart is the addition of a large horn section, making them an unusual hybrid of jazz and psychedelia, a bizarre and evocative jazz-pop that was born in 1967 with the soundtrack to Roger Corman's film "The Trip" and continued in 1968 with "A Long Time Comin'," fine experiments in reworked blues with an eye toward the complex structures of jazz.

HP Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft formed in Chicago and, despite taking their name from the famed American writer, have little to do with the sickly atmospheres of his novels. They recorded only two albums, both firmly rooted in folk-rock with growing doses of acid elements. Their self-titled 1967 debut is pure Byrds-style folk, though without matching the technical and melodic skill of that band. It's redeemed by the excellent lysergic ballad "White Ship" and a few classic two-voice folk numbers, such as "Wayfaring Stranger", which closely recalls Jefferson Airplane. The following "H. P. Lovecraft II" (1968) is decidedly more mature and complex, veering toward more hypnotic atmospheres and virtuosity bordering on proto-prog. Among its highlights is the experimental track "Electrollentando", poised between avant-garde, Indian raga and a vocal delivery vaguely reminiscent of Tim Buckley, the offspring of that blending of Western and Eastern culture typical of the hippie world. "Mobius Trip" is a sort of psychedelic lullaby, while the album's masterpiece is "At The Mountain Of Madness", so complex and mature that it sits somewhere between acid-rock and progressive.

Morly Grey

Formed in 1969, Ohio's Morly Grey are an almost ghostly presence: just one album to their name, sometimes wrongly dated 1968 or 1969, even though it wasn't officially released until 1972. Even the title is a source of confusion, with “The Only Truth”, the correct title, often mixed up with “The First Supper”. In the '80s and '90s this mysterious object became a sought-after item among collectors thanks to its troubled distribution history.
The record is, in fact, also an interesting example of hard rock in dialogue with freer psychedelia, edging into abstract jam territory. Driven by Tim Roller's roaring, cutting guitar, Morly Grey sit somewhere between the most dreamlike psychedelia of the sixties and the hard rock blasts of the following decade. The “brief Peace Officer” that opens the record introduces a band of skilled musicians, though the real masterpiece arrives with “The Only Truth”, 17 minutes that can rival Iron Butterfly's “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” for grandeur and imagination, a genuine psychedelic journey worthy of the genre's classics.

Notes From The Underground

Berkeley's Notes From The Underground owe their name to Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel, “Notes from Underground”. Led by singer and multi-instrumentalist Fred Sokolow, they were among the first psychedelic bands of the Bay Area to debut with an EP, before being signed and shelved by Vanguard. Responsible for a single self-titled album, in the wake of Country Joe & The Fish, they offer a curious combination of acid-folk touches (“Where I’m At”) and jug band elements (“Follow Me Down”, “I Wish I Was A Punk”). A rather unusual pairing that the public met with lukewarm interest, forcing the label to send the band back underground.

C.A. Quintet

Minneapolis's C.A. Quintet made just one album, in 1968, titled “A Trip Thru Hell”. Looking at the cover, you'd think you were facing the soundtrack to a horror B-movie, and the music inside doesn't stray far from that first impression, all bloodcurdling screams, frightening lyrics and an overall sound that — we're quite sure — will have plenty of listeners sleeping with the lights on.
The diabolical mind behind the quintet is Ken Erwin, who conducts this black mass amid Farfisa organs, guitars and trumpets. The album's standout moment comes in the first part of the title track, an abstruse and menacing psychedelic jam that slowly morphs into a headlong ride toward the underworld. Unease reigns, and the atmosphere is so oppressive that it even seems to foreshadow certain tendencies of future heavy metal. The lyrics do the rest, evoking, despite their perverse wickedness, some of psychedelia's classic themes, as in “Bury Me In A Marijuana Field”.

Road

Veteran bassist Noel Redding, formerly of the legendary The Jimi Hendrix Experience, together with guitarist Rod Richards, formerly of Rare Earth, formed Road with drummer Leslie Sampson, a trio that was both acid-drenched and deafening. Authors of a single self-titled album in 1972, Road are marked by their excessive use of wah-wah and fuzz, an over-the-top amount of reverb and echo, and a strong leaning toward hard rock. The powerful "I'm Trying" and the lengthy "Man Dressed In Red", "Friends" and above all the acid jam "Road" (nearly 10 minutes, a lysergic take on Black Sabbath) drive a record that sounds like the most credible apocryphal addition to The Jimi Hendrix Experience's catalogue. Riffs carved in stone, overflowing distortion and structures bordering on progressive make this hidden gem an essential addition for anyone who has already explored American psychedelia's more celebrated, best-known works.

Morgen

Practically forgotten, Morgen — made up of Steve Morgen, Bobby Rizzo, Murray Schiffrin, Mike Ratti and Barry Stock — formed in New York in 1968. Little else is known about them, having always remained on the margins of rock historiography, but they were made memorable by a legendary, none-too-imaginatively-titled debut, "Morgen" (1969). The opener "Welcome To The Void" is a possessed piece of psych-rock with a cursed aura, while "Of Dreams", steeped in evocative dreaminess, boasts gorgeous full-fuzz guitars. The heavier side of the band emerges on "Beggin' Your Pardon (Miss Joan)", while the more spectacular side leads to the long drum solo of "Eternity In Between", closer to jazz than rock in spirit. Despite being nearly unknown, this astonishing debut never stops surprising: "Purple" opens in cacophonous chaos, then builds a faint vocal melody over a restless uptempo of lysergic blues-rock; "She's The Nitetime" takes off in its finale, weaving melodies together in an almost circus-like style. Finally, the sprawling "Love", running nearly 11 minutes, propelled by a limping, hypnotic bassline doubled by the drums and then fused with voice and guitar to stage an obsessive ritual that takes a distinctly tribal turn, worthy of the most pounding Velvet Underground. It ends in pure hallucination, amid otherworldly echoes and a galactic glissando. Forgotten by (almost) everyone, Morgen were a shooting star in the sky of American psychedelia, as elusive as they were dazzling.

Mariani

Drummer Vince Mariani founded the eponymous band in 1969 in Austin, Texas. Although Vince is a virtuoso on his instrument, Mariani will mainly be remembered as the first band of Eric Johnson, who later played in Electromagnets, in G3, as a solo artist and, above all, as a guitarist for artists such as Christopher Cross and Carole King. Responsible for a single album, “Perpetuum Mobile” (1970), said to have originally been pressed in just 100 copies, Mariani can be counted among the cult acts of the American psych-rock scene.
Dominated by dizzying virtuosity on drums and electric guitar, the record is a blend of Cream, Blue Cheer and Jimi Hendrix. The album has been released and reissued in various versions, at least 9 according to the Discogs database. The original US edition features 4 songs, a two-part suite titled “Mendor-Breaker” and a spacey closer, “Pulsar”. Marked by tremendous intensity, with barely a moment's pause or release, “Perpetuum Mobile” is pyrotechnic to the point of excess, with its hard rock volumes and heavy psych-rock effects. A hidden gem of heavy-psych, “Perpetuum Mobile” is a must for anyone who loves lysergic music played at the highest possible volume.

Fraction

In Los Angeles, one of the cult bands is Fraction, whose sole album “Moon Blood” (1971) contains more than a few echoes of Jim Morrison and the Doors, particularly on “Sac-Divided”, which closely resembles “Love Street”. The main difference is the overabundance of fuzz on the guitars, which gives the sound an intensity unheard of in the legendary band behind “The End.” The standout track is “Eye Of The Hurricane”, which runs close to 9 minutes, weaving in the gloomy guitar blows of Black Sabbath and closing with a nod to Deep Purple's “Child In Time”.
The other extended track, while massively hallucinogenic in its sinuous reverbs, lingers just a little too long in imitation of the Doors to deserve much attention.

Bibliografia principale:

Matteo Guarnaccia, Il grande libro della psichedelia (Hoepli, 2017)
Luca Pollini, Hippie la rivoluzione mancata (Bevivino, 2008)
Manfredi Scanagatta, E l’America creò gli hippie (Mimesis, 2013)
Cesare Rizzi, Augusto Oslei, Psichedelia (Giunti, 2007)
Cesare Rizzi, Enciclopedia del rock psichedelico (Arcana, 1986)
Riccardo Bertoncelli, Pop Story (Arcana, 1973)
Riccardo Bertoncelli, La musica pop (Arcana, 1978)
Stefano Bianchi, The Red Crayola (Tuttle, 2018)
Mauro Arturo Iannaccone, Rivoluzione psichedelica (Sugarco, 2008)
Piero Scaruffi, Una storia del rock (2007)
Timothy Leary, The High Priest. The most important and revolutionary book on Lsd (ShaKe, 2006)
Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Feltrinelli, 1970)
Jerry Rubin, Quinto: uccidi il padre e la madre (Mimesis, 2009)
Aurelio Pasini, The Doors Testi commentati (Arcana, 2008)
Ezio Guaitamacchi, Peace & love. La rivoluzione psichedelica: suoni, visioni, ricordi e intuizioni nella California degli anni Sessanta (Editori Riuniti, 2004)
Harry Shapiro, Estasi Rock, le droghe e la musica popolare (EDT, 1993)

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26/02/2026