psychedelic rock
To understand the musical form called psychedelic rock, it is important to make the linkage between favored culture and the creative expression it galvanizes. Rock and roll music produced in the 1950s and early 1960s mostly reflected a generation craving to escape from convention but unable to take the final jump. Most well-liked songs featured standard instrumentation and vocal stylings and were designed to fit the radio industry’s tacit 4 mins or less rule.
Even the early hits by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were the subject of the limitations of popular songwriting. Just a couple of front runners ,eg Bob Dylan, managed to provide music which meticulously reflected the changing values of a growing counterculture. In 1964, a couple of bands in the NY underground music scene started to play what they called psychedelic rock. The term hallucinatory was an homage to the hallucinogenic drugs which were just recently entering the public consciousness. Strong drugs like LSD, mescaline, peyote and mushrooms were being mixed with blow and alcohol as a way to disconnect from fact. While under the influence of these substances, musicians and artists felt as if they’d entered a higher sphere of awareness. Psychedelic rock musicians felt free to break out of the pop music mode and perform longer pieces based primarily on free-form jazz and blues models.
Words were no longer needed to make linear sense – they could reflect a changed fact of the drug experience.
Many music historians point to the Bay Area of Northerly California as the birthplace of commercial psychedelic rock. The alternative life-style offered by the hippy culture inspired conventional musicians to try experimenting with both the chemical and musical chances of the hallucinatory movement. Groups like Jefferson aeroplane, the Thankful Dead and the Doors all found a quantity of success thru hallucinatory rock music. Individual artists like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin also became insolubly linked with the hallucinogenic culture. In Great Britain, artists like Donovan and Pink Floyd were also using parts of psychedelia, but it’d be the Beatles who once more outlined a brand of music. Their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonesome Hearts Club Band is one of the best-crafted psychedelic rock albums ever. The psychedelic rock age at last crumpled under its own excesses. Drug overdoses claimed the lives of plenty of its icons – Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison. Other hallucinatory rock groups either slid out of favour with the general public or disbanded their original line-ups. Some bands with roots in hallucinogenic rock ,eg Pink Floyd and Yes, would at last expand into the progressive rock sound of the 1970s. As the drug culture turned more towards hardcore drugs like cocaine and heroin, the idiosyncratic visuals and freeform jams of the hallucinatory rock years became anachronistic.
Some modern bands ,eg Phish and the Flaming Lips, have incorporated lots of the accoutrements of the psychedelic rock phenomenon into their complicated stage shows and intensive tours.