Chapter 03 — Rhythms
Psychedelia
60s
Between 1965 and 1969, rock decided reality was negotiable. Psychedelia was born in San Francisco and London almost simultaneously: guitars that sounded like sitars, recording studios used as instruments, and songs that lasted as long as they needed to. The 1967 Summer of Love was its moment of glory, but its true revolution was technical and aesthetic: it taught rock that the studio could be a laboratory. We hold a clear position: psychedelia was popular music's great imaginative leap. Without 'Sgt. Pepper's', without the Doors, without Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd, rock would still be music for dancing. It was here that it also became music for thinking, for traveling and for getting lost.
Key exponents
The Doors
1965–1973
Jim Morrison and company turned rock into shamanic theater: dark poetry over hypnotic organs.
Jefferson Airplane
1965–1972
Grace Slick's voice on 'White Rabbit' defined the sound of San Francisco and the Summer of Love.
Grateful Dead
1965–1995
Thirty years of endless improvisation: the band that turned the concert into a communal ritual.
13th Floor Elevators
1965–1969
The Texas pioneers who coined the term 'psychedelic rock' before anyone else, with Roky Erickson up front.
Keep rewinding
60s
psicodelia
Jim Morrison
The poet and the carrier
He wanted to be a poet and the world made him a rock god. And the story of his father in the Gulf of Tonkin is always told wrong: what lies underneath is stranger and better.
60s
psicodelia
Psychedelia 1967: The Year That Changed Everything
From The Doors in January to Pink Floyd in August, by way of 'Sgt. Pepper's' and Monterey: in twelve months rock won three freedoms it never gave back. It was also the year psychedelia started claiming its casualties.