The Jug Player
The first band to put the words “psychedelic rock” on a business card was not from San Francisco or London. It was from Austin, Texas. In late 1965, guitarist Roky Erickson left his garage band the Spades and fell in with Tommy Hall, a University of Texas philosophy student who wanted to form a band as a vehicle for LSD consciousness. Hall played an amplified ceramic jug. Not in the old jug-band way, blowing tuba-like notes. He held a microphone to the opening and produced a bubbling, alien drone that sounded like a cross between a Minimoog and a cuica drum. By January 1966, the 13th Floor Elevators had printed cards advertising “psychedelic rock,” likely the first documented use of the term. Their debut, The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, came out on the small International Artists label that November. It sold respectably in Texas and almost nowhere else. The band’s reward for being open about their drug use was relentless police attention. Erickson was arrested for possession in 1969 and, to avoid prison, pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. He spent three years in Rusk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, receiving electroshock therapy and Thorazine. Hall drifted into homelessness. The first people to name the genre were also among the first destroyed by it.
Two Coasts, Two Sounds
Something was happening on both coasts in early 1966, and no one was coordinating it. In March, the Byrds released Eight Miles High. Roger McGuinn’s twelve-string Rickenbacker solo owed a direct debt to John Coltrane: on tour the previous November, David Crosby had played Coltrane’s Impressions on the bus constantly, and McGuinn translated the saxophonist’s modal runs into a guitar line. Sally Kempton at The Village Voice reviewed the single and called it “raga rock,” coining a subgenre in a sentence. Across the Atlantic one month later, on April 6, 1966, the Beatles began recording Tomorrow Never Knows at Abbey Road. John Lennon wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountaintop. Engineer Geoff Emerick ran the vocal through a rotating Leslie speaker cabinet, normally used for Hammond organs. Paul McCartney brought in over thirty tape loops he had made at home, splicing tape ends together so each played continuously. Five were selected for the final mix: McCartney’s laughter sped up to sound like seagulls, a sitar phrase played backwards, a Mellotron on its flute setting, an orchestral chord, and a distorted guitar. The result landed on Revolver that August and sounded like nothing that had ever appeared on a pop record.
George Harrison had encountered the sitar in April 1965 on the set of Help!. By June 1966, he was studying under Ravi Shankar. His composition Love You To on Revolver used sitar and tabla as lead instruments, not decoration. Indian music’s drone-based structures, with their emphasis on sustained tonal centers rather than chord progressions, gave psychedelic rock one of its core techniques: the hypnotic refusal to resolve.
The San Francisco Engine
Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests, running from November 1965 through October 1966, were the social laboratory. At the Fillmore Acid Test in January 1966, the Grateful Dead played for two thousand people while a bathtub of LSD-laced punch sat in the corner. LSD was still legal in California until October 6 of that year. The venues that formalized the scene were Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium and Chet Helms’s Avalon Ballroom, both in San Francisco, with liquid light shows projected on the walls: oil and water on overhead projectors, timed (loosely) to the music.
What distinguished San Francisco psychedelia from the British strain was duration. London bands worked within pop song structures. West Coast bands stretched out. The Grateful Dead’s sets ran hours. Jerry Garcia treated songs as launch pads for group improvisation, and the band’s sound engineer, Owsley “Bear” Stanley, built PA systems to match. Stanley was simultaneously one of the largest underground LSD manufacturers in America. His ultimate creation, the Wall of Sound (1974), stood 98 feet wide and 36 feet high: 48 McIntosh amplifiers driving 28,800 watts through 640 speakers, each instrument assigned its own column to eliminate intermodulation distortion. It required four semi-trucks. It lasted seven months before the economics killed it.
The Gear
Two effects pedals defined the psychedelic guitar sound. The fuzz pedal, commercially available from 1962 as the Maestro Fuzz-Tone, clipped the signal into a square wave for harsh, sustained distortion. The wah-wah pedal, introduced in late 1966, was a frequency filter controlled by a foot rocker. Jimi Hendrix used both, plus a third device that existed only because he met the right person. On January 11, 1967, at Nell’s club in Soho, Hendrix met Roger Mayer, an electronics technician who had been designing audio equipment for the Royal Navy. Mayer built him a custom pedal called the Octavia, which doubled every note one octave higher while adding fuzz. You can hear it on the Purple Haze solo, recorded the following month. Hendrix called Mayer “the secret of my sound.”
Syd Barrett, leading Pink Floyd through residencies at London’s UFO Club in 1966 and 1967, took a different approach. He scraped a Zippo lighter and a metal ruler across his guitar strings while the band’s Binson Echorec delay unit turned the noise into cascading repetitions. Pink Floyd’s debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, was recorded at Abbey Road from February to May 1967, sometimes in the studio next door to the Beatles finishing Sgt. Pepper. Barrett’s mental health deteriorated rapidly, likely accelerated by heavy LSD use. He was eased out of the band in early 1968.
The Collapse and the Radiation
The genre’s peak was brief. By 1967, LSD was illegal across the United States and the United Kingdom. In August 1969, the Manson Family murders were linked in the press to Beatles lyrics and hippie culture. That December, Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death by Hells Angels at the Altamont Free Concert. The counterculture was in retreat.
But the musicians kept moving. Pink Floyd shed Barrett and built progressive rock. The Stooges stripped the distortion of its optimism and pointed toward punk. Black Sabbath slowed the fuzz down and made heavy metal. The studio ambitions of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper became the baseline for rock production. And the genre never fully disappeared. Neo-psychedelia surfaced in the late 1970s through bands like the Soft Boys, reappeared in shoegaze, and returned to mainstream visibility when Kevin Parker recorded Tame Impala’s Innerspeaker alone in Perth, Australia, in 2010, running guitars through the same phasers and tape saturation that McCartney had used forty-four years earlier at Abbey Road.
Essential Listening
- The 13th Floor Elevators – The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators (1966)
- The Beatles – Revolver (1966)
- The Byrds – Fifth Dimension (1966)
- Jimi Hendrix Experience – Are You Experienced (1967)
- Pink Floyd – The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967)
- Jefferson Airplane – Surrealistic Pillow (1967)
- The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
- Love – Forever Changes (1967)
- Cream – Disraeli Gears (1967)
- The Doors – The Doors (1967)
- Grateful Dead – Live/Dead (1969)
- Tame Impala – Lonerism (2012)