Moody Blues - Legend Of A Mind
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PR was pioneered by musicians including The Beatles, The Byrds, and The Yardbirds. It largely emerged as a Rock genre during the mid-1960s among Folk Rock and Blues bands in the United Kingdom and United States. |
Top 10 Psychedelic Songs
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PR & Its Drugs
Main Drugs: Cannabis, Benzedrine and Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) – or 'Acid'. 'Acid' began to be used in the UK and the US in the 1950s. It was a hallucinogen, and often used for mental illness as an experimental treatment. To quote Wikipedia: 'In the early 1960s the use of LSD and other hallucinogens was advocated by proponents of the new "consciousness expansion", such as Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley and Arthur Koestler. Their writings profoundly influenced the thinking of the new generation of youth.' There had long been a culture of drug use among Jazz and Blues musicians, and, in the early 1960s, use of drugs (including cannabis, peyote, mescaline and LSD) grew among folk and rock musicians, who also started to include drug references in their songs. |
Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit
The Beatles - I Am The Walrus
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Beach Boys - Good Vibrations
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As psychedelia emerged
into a mainstream, commercial force, it increasingly influenced pop music, which incorporated hippie fashions, and the sounds of sitars, fuzz guitars, and tape effects. The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" broke such new PR ground by incorporating psychedelic lyrics and sounds. Donovan soon followed in PR such hits, as "Sunshine Superman" and "Mellow Yellow" (1966) among others. |
Beatles - Magical Mystery Tour
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Other British PR bands soon followed such as
Cream, Jimmy Hendrix, Traffic, The Who, The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Small Faces, and many more as steadily the Psychedelic influence became the core of the counterculture. Soon most of the major British bands became influenced by this sub-drug hallucinogenic culture. The Yardbirds in particular, increasingly moved into psychedelic territory, adding up-tempo improvised "rave ups", Gregorian chant and world music (in particular Indian) influences to their songs. They were soon followed by bands such as Procol Harum, The Moody Blues and The Nice. The PR Drug Culture Scene in the US
The popular PR drug culture among musos and their fans really took off in the US in the mid 1960s, much of it in San Francisco centered around LSD and its ‘associated psychedelic effects. Wikipedia writes: ‘From 1964, the Merry Pranksters, a loose group that developed around novelist Ken Kesey, sponsored the Acid Tests, a series of events based around the taking of LSD accompanied by light shows, film projection and discordant, improvised music known as the psychedelic symphony. The Pranksters helped popularize LSD use through their road trips across America in a psychedelically- decorated school bus, which involved distributing the drug and meeting with major figures of the beat movement, and through publications about their activities such as Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool- Aid Acid.’ Many other bands became influential in the hallucenogentic, PR scene in the US including the Byrds. The San Francisco sound soon developed which mixed Folk Rock with psychedelic influences. The Grateful Dead were prominent, as were Country Joe and the Fish, The Great Society, Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Charlatans, Moby Grape, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Jefferson Airplane. Also add Blue Cheer, Count Five, Iron Butterfly, Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention, and of course The Doors. The Beach Boys topped it off with their ‘Pet Sounds’ album which in many ways heralded the psychedelia movement in America, with its artful experiments, psychedelic lyrics based on emotional longings and self-doubts, elaborate sound effects and new sounds on both conventional and unconventional instruments.' |
Cream - Strange Brew
Jimmy Hendrix - Purple Haze
Small Faces - Itchycoo Park
The Doors - Light My Fire
Blue Cheer - Peace of Mind
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Procul Harum - A Whiter Shade Of Pale
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Pink Floyd - The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn
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(Older) Cream - Pressed Rat & Warthog
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Psychedelic
Rock, with its distorted guitar sound, extended solos and adventurous compositions, has been seen as an important bridge between blues-oriented |
(Newer) Gnarls Barkley - Crazy
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