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'Psychedelic' 

Rock
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Listen To The Beatles
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
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Pink Floyd - The Dark Side Of The Moon

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Coming Soon
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Quite simply, 'Psychedelic Rock'  is the sub genre of Rock wherein, artists influenced 

by the developing drug culture of the late 1960s, attempted to reflect hallucinogenic

experiences within their music. While still persisting today, the main period of 

Psychedelic Rock was largely in the years 1967 - 1970.

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Timothy Leary's Last Trip
Timothy Leary is generally considered the 'God father' of the drug hallucinating, psychedelic rock sub-culture, and in many ways was a founding father of the Hippie movement and Counterculture.

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Inspired or influenced by psychedelic drug culture, Psychedelic Rock (PR) attempted

to replicate and enhance the mind-altering experiences of psychedelic drugs within 

music. At the time it used new recording techniques and effects and also included non-

Western influences and instruments, such as the ragas and drones of Indian music.
Moody Blues - Legend Of A Mind

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
Other bands influencing and being influenced by PR, included the Grateful Dead,

Jefferson Airplane, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream, The Doors and Pink Floyd. 

PR reached a peak in between 1967 and 1969 with the Summer of Love and 

Woodstock Rock Festival, becoming an international musical movement and associated 

with a widespread counter-culture. However it soon went into a decline as attitudes to 

drugs changed, some key artists died or were negatively affected by drugs, and a back-

to-basics movement, led surviving by performers emerged to steer Rock into new 

musical areas.

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




The Beatles & Bob Dylan

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The Beatles & Bob Dylan
Two Famous Originators

Two of the most successful acts in Rock history were also major early instigators of 

PR. The Beatles and Bob Dylan both experimented with and made mention of drug use

and its effects in their music. Bob Dylan released  "Subterranean Homesick Blues" in

1965, and included the line, "Johnny's in the basement, mixing up the medicine", and 

also in his "Mr. Tambourine Man" he stated "Take me on a trip upon your magic 

swirling ship". The Beatles, influenced by Dylan (who also apparently introduced them

to cannabis), soon followed suit with drug references and seemingly drug influenced 

'psychedelic' sounds in their music. Some such early songs included 'Norwegian Wood', 

'Day Tripper', and then many more on Sgt Pepper's and other albums. Some of the

most famous included Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, Magical Mystery Tour And

others, and perhaps the greatest attempt at psychedelic music was 'A Day In The Life''.

Beach Boys - Good Vibrations
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Donovan
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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The Small Faces
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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Traffic - Hole In My Shoe
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Rolling Stones - 2000 Light Years


The PR High Point

Psychedelic Rock reached its high point in the last years of the 1960s. In 1967, The

Beatles led the way with many PR hits, topping it off with the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely 

Hearts Club Band album, largely seen as their definitive psychedelic statement, 

followed up by The magical Mystery Tour. Procul Harum then released, the enigmatic 

but extremely popular 'Whiter Shade of Pale', followed by the Rolling Stones answer to 

them all with 'Their Satanic Majesties Request, and Pink Floyd produced what is 

usually seen as their best psychedelic work 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.' Other 

lesser bands released similarly quality filled PR albums, marking 1967 as perhaps the 

high point of this whole sub-genre.
Procul Harum - A Whiter Shade Of Pale

Pink Floyd - The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn

Demise of Psychedelic Rock (Well Almost)

PR was in steep decline by the end of the 1960s. LSD was criminalised in the US and 

UK in 1966. In 1969, the Manson 'Family' murdered Sharon Tate and others, claiming 

to have been inspired by Beatles' songs such as "Helter Skelter", in turn thus inspiring 

an enormous anti-Hippie backlash. Also in that year the Altamont Free Concert in 

California, headlined by The Rolling Stones, turned into a debacle when the Hells 

Angels acting as security for the concert stabbed a black fan to death. Also many major

Rock Gods of the era, soon became drug casualties to varying extents- including Brian 

Wilson, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac, Jimi Hendrix

and Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd. Their subsequent bands soon shifted focus. Others such

as Cream broke up, Janis Joplin also died followed by Jim Morrison of the Doors. 

Many surviving acts moved away from psychedelia back into more back-to basics 

"roots rock", or traditional-based, whimsical Folk, Progressive Rock and Heavy Rock.
(Older) Cream - Pressed Rat & Warthog
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
Rock and later Heavy Metal. And today it still remains an important, though perhaps

less powerful and morally acceptable influence on Modern Western Rock music.



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