Psychedelic music embraces two main trips: good and bad.
The bad trip has carried more freight. Consider 1967, when the bummer began. The year started with the Doors' "The End." In Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody To Love," accented by Jorma Kaukonen's tortured acid guitar, Grace Slick mourned the death of flowers and joy. In "Purple Haze," Jimi Hendrix plucked the Devil's Triad, cried "Help me!" and couldn't distinguish happiness from misery. Cream's "Disraeli Gears" album launched with the "Strange Brew" that kills what's inside of you, and crawled onward to a "World of Pain." In 1968, Iron Butterfly took a 17-minute excursion through dark melodies, howling guitar distortion and dissonant organ; the crime scene was "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida," a twisted reference to the paradise from which Adam and Eve were exiled thanks to their taste for mind-expanding fruit. 1969 saw the recording of the first Black Sabbath album . . . and, y'know, Altamont. The above music left a rich legacy and still sounds modern. Because the bad trip never ended.
The good trip, on the other hand, often sounds dated, excepting the obvious Fab category. The Beatles deserve honor for creating the first and best good-trip psychedelic song, "Tomorrow Never Knows," which rode Ringo's heartbeat tomtoms, George Harrison's sitar, George Martin's backward tapes and John Lennon's stoned poetry into the startled ears of 1966.
The Beatles also deserve blame -- for inspiring multitudes of day-glo imitators to don 1898 costumes, sing into Rudy Valee megaphones, search studio backrooms for harpsichords, and bounce to happy rhythms on sun-dappled calliope ponies. That's where you get the Small Faces' "Itchykoo Park," the Cowsills' "The Rain, the Park and Other Things," the New Vaudeville Band's "Winchester Cathedral" and similar product. Such commercial psychedelia offered a colorful past as a parallel to the escape promised by LSD. But '60s kids weren't so much in love with an idealized past as they were afraid of the future (the draft, adulthood). They were afraid of themselves.
Unlike pot or heroin, though, acid was the opposite of escape; it drew users far inward to confront their scariest conflicts, and far outward toward a universal perspective. Most good-trip music was about fashion, which is why it wears so badly.
* * *
My ponder-porn about psychedelic music was stimulated by the arrival of "Yesterday's Sunshine Today: New Magical Covers of Nirvana Songs (1967-1969)." Friend Patrick Campbell-Lyons of the original U.K. Nirvana sent it here -- sláinte, Patrick! A limited-edition LP of Nirvana songs covered by artists from many countries, it represents good-trip psychedelic pop at its best.
Nirvana were an unusual case, never reaching U.S. acceptance in the same way that Island labelmates such as Traffic, Free, Jethro Tull, Spooky Tooth, Mott the Hoople or Fairport Convention did. Probably this was because Nirvana continued on the psychedelic path after it stopped being fashionable.
Nirvana's psychedelia reflected some of the established hallmarks: trippy poetry, odd sounds, even harpsichords (co-founder Alex Spyropoulos plays keyboards). Mainly, though, the band had pretty songs, psychedelic in the sense that "Rainbow Chaser," "Pentecost Hotel," "In the Courtyard of the Stars" and many more were about perception -- being in the moment and seeing. Nirvana's nod to the past was not so much escapist as foundationally classical, studded with cellos and Bach-like arpeggios. Patrick's alignment with Salvador Dali extracted the truth that surrealism is not abstraction, it's literally super-realism, expanding upon the possibilities of ordinary objects.
Western culture has lived through periodic revivals of '60s music such as the 1980s Paisley Underground and the 2000s Freak Folk movement. Such revivals have been characterized by great sincerity, the main element that holds "Yesterday's Sunshine" together.
How to explain the pull that united musicians from Greece (current home to both Campbell-Lyons and Spyropoulos), Scotland, Portugal, Holland, Israel, the U.K. and the U.S.? Each artist tunes in perfectly to the Nirvana aesthetic through arrangements, through feel, or via tributes to Lyons' wispy, thoughtful voice, often essayed by women. Sitar? Yes. One can only speculate that the true good-trip vibe resides eternally in our atmosphere, always available to those who seek it.
* * *
I put "Yesterday's Sunshine" on the turntable, propped 3D glasses on my proboscis, and stuck "Sidney's Psychedelic Adventure" (muted) into the DVD player. (No, infinitely varied kaleidoscopic images are NOT cheesy.) Due to the difficulty of acquiring LSD, I applied more conventional mood enhancers. After the good-trip Nirvana, I journeyed on to the bad-trip psychedelia of Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Iron Butterfly, speculating on how flamenco, Arabic music and Bo Diddley beats might alternately ground and catapult the tripping mind. I thought about the flight connotations of the bands' names. I thought about how a bad trip can be unbad, about how skillfully Ron Bushy's Iron drum heads were tuned, and about the sorrowful implications of Paul Kantner singing, "Too many days are left unstoned." And I remembered that I loved all this music long before chemicals.
Damn, it felt good.
* * *
Order "Yesterday's Sunshine Today" here, and watch for an LP box set of Nirvana's '60s albums in early 2021.
HEAD SCULPTURE BY DEBI DOORZ; PHOTO BY FUZZY BAROQUE.
* * *
RICHARD BALDASTY ADDS:
The Stones provide yet another interpretative divide when, in "Why Don't We Sing This Song All Together," they propose (1) open our heads let the pictures come (2) close our eyes and see where we all come from.
We can elect a flood of impressions--pictures surrealistic in the sense you rightly tag extra-realism--or, if we are more austere and Zen-ish, the ultimate One that is No Thing. Do I believe that less is more? Or do I crave bliss of muchness?
George Harrison cannot be bettered for minimalism in "Blue Jay Way," a sleepy night and fog walk in which nothing happens. Nothing! Happens! And in L.A., to boot.
If he ever gets a restful dream, it would be pleasant if it could be the silky lullaby that is the long wordless interlude to It's a Beautiful Day's "White Bird."