The Birth of Psychedelic Rock and Its Lingering Impact

I'm a graduate student in the music business program at NYU and this is one of the papers I wrote for a class last semester. For anyone interested in the history of psychedelic rock!

This essay aims to trace a few key events that led to the creation of the environment that the psychedelic rock music of the 1960s was born in, and the lingering impact the era had on the music industry. The psychedelic movement in the 1960s is historically important as some of the most influential bands in the history of music came out of this era and influenced the spread of the hippie movement. This era also saw the birth of rock music festivals in the United States, even though they were, arguably, glorified drug parties.

In 1949, Sandoz Laboratories brought LSD to the United States because they hoped that the investigational drug had clinical applications. By the mid-50s, the drug, considered hazardous, was being used to replicate a state of psychosis in subjects who were often soldiers, prisoners, mental patients, medical center staff or physicians themselves (Novak, 1997). Sidney Cohen, an assistant clinical professor at UCLA, started his experiments with LSD in 1955 after consuming the drug himself. He sponsored doctoral dissertations studying LSD, but was not satisfied with the findings. In line with Humphry Osmond’s views regarding the “lack of subjects skilled in self-observation”, Cohen turned to more articulate subjects for research (Novak, 1997). One of the people Cohen collaborated with was Aldous Huxley. Huxley described his experiences with the drug as transcendental and sought to revamp the perception of the drug from being associated with mental illness to a route to an elevated state of consciousness. Huxley influenced Humphry Osmond with this school of thought, who in 1956 introduced the term ‘Psychedelic’. (Novak, 1997). Come late 1950s, control on the administration of the drug decreased in academic circles as researchers themselves began to host social parties where they would share the drug with friends, starting the recreational use of the drug (Novak, 1997).

Parallel to this world of research, a far more organized and widespread operation was run by the CIA from 1953 to 1964 – MK ULTRA. In an effort to develop more effective interrogation techniques, the CIA tested LSD by administering the drug to unsuspecting American citizens in New York City, San Francisco and other universities and hospitals across the country (Hooper, 2012). In 1959, Ken Kesey volunteered to take part in this program at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. His most celebrated work, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest was influenced by his involvement in the program and he soon began psychedelic experiments of his own. The commercial success of the book allowed him to move to La Honda along with his family and his friends, also known as the Merry Pranksters. This property in La Honda became the site of the first psychedelic parties called the ‘Acid Tests’ (Raiser, Railton, 1998). In the exhibit, The Psychedelic '60s: Literary Tradition and Social Change, Raiser & Railton (1998) describe these parties as “The surrounding woods, with trees painted day-glo colors, dissonant music blasting from hidden speakers, and the very odd invited guests, ­including members of the Hell's Angels, ­made the parties an experience that not all endured without physical and psychological consequences.”
On the other side of the country, Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary (arguably the most famous pro-LSD researcher) began their research on psychoactive drugs in 1960, initially giving various drugs to graduate students and some of their peers. Allen Ginsberg, a Beatnik poet from New York City showed interest in participating, and other artists and intellectuals came on board through his involvement. The Havard community, unhappy with the lack of control in the administration of the drug, let go of Alpert and Leary. After leaving, the two moved to 2500-acre estate in Millbrook, New York where psychedelic parties ensued (Doyle, 2014). With the release of his second book, Sometimes a Great Notion, Kesey was needed in New York. This was the start of the famous cross-country trip on the party bus called ‘Further’. Raiser & Railton (1998) write “The top of the bus was made into a musical stage and when it detoured through some cities, the Pranksters blasted a combination of crude homemade music and running commentary to all the astonished onlookers.” LSD was now on its way to being truly public.

With the nature of the psychedelic party scene and its accessibility to artists across various forms of art, it is no surprise that psychedelic music was born in such parties. The band Grateful Dead first performed under this name at an Acid Test in San Jose in 1965 (Dead.net, 2011). Several members of the band initially performed under the name ‘Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions’ with a primarily folk sound (Metzger, 1999). As the Grateful Dead, their sound evolved into what we know as psychedelic rock. The Grateful Dead owe their success in part to Owsley Stanley. Stanley was a self-taught chemist providing LSD to the Pranksters. Being the Grateful Dead’s sound man, he directly influenced the band’s music and used his money to help them expand their outreach by recording tapes of their performances and pumping in money to create the scene around them (Licata, 2016). The band was able to capitalize on the want for a new sound rooted in the psychedelic experience and set the stage for other bands to experiment in the space. It is, of course, hard to say that there were no other bands with a new sound coming up at the same time, but the Grateful Dead have been generally credited as the pioneers of the scene along with bands like Jefferson Airplane, who also performed at the acid tests.

By the mid 1960s, a number of songs contained references to drugs. Jefferson Airplanes’ ‘A Song for Every Season’ has a reference to the acid tests. The Byrds’ ‘Eight Mile High’ is a drug song. Acid became more freely available and artists gained exposure to it in various other settings. Jimi Hendrix’s first experience with acid was in 1966 in an intimate gathering in New York to which he was invited by Linda Keith (Cross, 2006). The Byrds and the Beatles are known to have influenced each other in social situations involving LSD. In fact, the Beatles were introduced to Pandit Ravi Shankar’s music by the Byrds at an LSD party (Nelson, 2010). The aftermath of their exposure to Indian music and LSD was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club. It is safe to say that the psychedelic or LSD parties provided shared experiences and a space for easy exchange of information. These artists could collaborate and learn from each other in intimate settings with an “elevated state of consciousness” or on the same spiritual plane, aiding the evolution of the genre. Concurrently, the counterculture of 60s was marked by the political movements for peace and equality, the rejection of a rigid framework for morality, and the search of a “subjective spiritual experience” (Oliver, 2014) – all of which made its way into the lyrics of the songs from the era.

In June 1967, over 30 bands/artists came together to perform at the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival. A few mainstream acts like Dionna Warwick performed with psych bands, a mix of two worlds that set the tone for a mixed genre line up in future festivals – something that can be seen today. Testimonies from festival goers can ascertain that music introduced many to what would go on to become the hippie mass movement (Newman, 2014). David Mahler, an attendee said, “There were a lot of people like me going out and having their first hippie rock and roll experience. There was a lot of long hair and girls with flowers in their hair.” (Newman, 2014). But this festival just proved to be a primer. A week after, the Monterey Pop Festival captured audiences and catapulted psychedelic sounds into the mainstream. It helped break legendary artists such as Jimi Hendrix and the Who and introduced world music to America through the likes of Ravi Shankar. The success of the festival proved that the rising counterculture of the 60s had the money and will to spend on the music they liked (Allen, 2017). The potential of this market was very famously fully realized at Woodstock later in 1969, which boasted of an attendance of over 400,000 people.

When you think of the festivals that happened at this time, you immediately think of drugs, freedom and the hippie culture. This was the era where the industry shifted from selling just sound, to selling a cultural identity beyond race or religion. The psychedelic era was easily an era in mainstream music where drugs and music were most evidently intertwined – the music would probably not have existed at all had it not been for the drugs. The enduring impact of this music can felt to this day as it went on to be pre-cursor for other sounds such as the progressive rock of the 70s, that remain popular today.

Works Cited
Novak, S. J. (1997). LSD before Leary: Sidney Cohens Critique of 1950s Psychedelic Drug Research. Isis, 88(1), 87-110. doi:10.1086/383628
Hooper, T. (2012, March 14). Operation Midnight Climax: How the CIA Dosed S.F. Citizens with LSD. SF Weekly.
Riser, G., & Railton, S. (1998). The Psychedelic '60s: Literary Tradition and Social Change. Retrieved from https://explore.lib.virginia.edu/exhibits/show/sixties/credits
Metzger, J. (1999, May). Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. The Music Box, 6(5).
Cross, C. R. (2006, October 09). Jimi's First Experience. Seattle Weekly.
Doyle, J. (2014). Legend of a Mind: Timothy Leary & LSD. http://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/timothy-leary-1960s/
Licata, A. (2016, December 7). Meet Owsley Stanley III, Grateful Dead's Acid Cooker. Rolling Stone.
Newman, J. (2014, June 17). The Untold and Deeply Stoned Story of the First U.S. Rock Festival. Rolling Stone.
Oliver, P. (2015). Hinduism and the 1960s: the rise of a counter-culture. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Grateful Dead. (2011). Retrieved November 04, 2017, from http://www.dead.net/show/december-4-1965
Allen, J. (2017, June 16). 50 Years Ago: The Monterey Pop Festival Changes Music Forever. Retrieved from http://ultimateclassicrock.com/monterey-pop-festival/