Psychedelic Rock

Psychedelic rock runs 80-130 BPM and expands rock instrumentation with sitar, Mellotron, Hammond organ, flute, and a battery of studio effects: tape reversal, phasing, flanging, and dramatic stereo panning. Lyrics chase hallucination, mysticism, cosmic imagery, childhood memory, and Lewis-Carroll-style wordplay. Songs stretch to 5-10 minutes with extended improvised sections, often built over a single drone or two-chord vamp. Production was where the genre lived: stereo placement that moves left-to-right across a bar, reversed cymbals, and overdriven tape were the period's tools.

The form coalesced in 1965-66 in two cities simultaneously: San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury (Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service) and London (The Beatles' middle period, Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett era, Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience). The Beatles' 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' (June 1967) and the same year's Summer of Love marked the commercial peak. The August 1969 Woodstock festival functioned as the form's mass-cultural summit, after which the energy dispersed into hard rock, prog, and Southern rock in the 1970s.

The instrumental jam is the main event — guitarists roam a single scale for minutes at a time, and the right way to listen is to follow it like a walk rather than wait for a chorus. Tape effects (the backwards guitar on 'Tomorrow Never Knows,' phased drums on 'Itchycoo Park') are placed for shock as much as ornament. A sitar drone underneath a rock band changes the whole harmonic frame to something modal. Stereo movement — panning instruments across the field — was a new toy and the records use it constantly.

The Beatles' 'Tomorrow Never Knows' (1966) is three minutes that compress the entire psychedelic toolkit. For an album, Pink Floyd's 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' (1967) shows the British strain; Jefferson Airplane's 'Surrealistic Pillow' (1967) shows the US West Coast.

The Byrds' 'Eight Miles High' (1966) — a Coltrane-influenced song about LSD — was banned by many US radio stations as a 'drug record'; the band insisted the title referred only to airliner cruising altitude, a denial nobody believed. The Holy Modal Rounders' 1964 use of the word 'psychedelic' in a song is widely cited as the term's first appearance in popular music.