(1) THE DAWN OF PSYCHEDELIA

“The Dawn of Psychedelia”  tries to trace and explain the origins of psychedelic pop music and quite correctly points towards the early sixties, the fifties and occasionally even further back in time  – to the Beats, new jazz forms (e.g. Sun Ra), experimental composers like Varèse, the introduction of new substances like marihuana, LSD  or mescaline (Aldous Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception” about his mescaline habit appeared in 1954), art forms that broke all the rules (Pollock, Dalí) and Indian music.

By the end of 1966, the global success of of rock’n’roll, yeah-yeah, beat and white R&B was fading. First of all, pop musicians increasingly recorded self-written material or turned to songwriters who created a body of work outside the official song-writing business . Think Bob Dylan, Randy Newman, and Tim Hardin, but also Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, Eddie Phillips & Bob Garner of The Creation...
Second: as they  developed their creativity, these young composers searched for new sounds and found these in their very own past (folk music), in other genres (free jazz) or even in an entirely different culture – the Indian sitar being the prime example. Songwriters with an ear for production -  like Brian Wilson - needn’t even travel in time or space, but used the new technology to create unheard-of-sounds in the studio.

Psychedelic pop music then showed the following features:

• exotic (sitar), new (melotron), but equally traditional instruments like the flute;
• music interspersed with spoken word, voices, street noise and all sorts of weird sounds;
• electronic effects, from the wah-wah pedal to feedback, fuzz and distortion; 
• complex patterns, chord changes, improvisation, solos and repetition (jazz being the main source here);
• the incorporation of other art forms on stage (action painting, dancing, light shows) and the extensive use of modern graphics for LP sleeves;
• lyrics about esoteric, psychological and spiritual themes, often sung in a high, shrill voice and sometimes used for effect only.

“The Dawn of Psychedelia” consists of music and spoken word. There’s a lot of jazz here, some Varèse and tons of sitar. The spoken word tracks cover anything from an interview snippet with Dalí to a recipe for ‘Hashish Fudge’. The merit of this release is to clearly show that psychedelic pop didn’t come out of the blue, but the downside is that many tracks can easily be replaced by some other piece of music or spoken word.

© Eddy Bonte
As published on Radio 68’s website www.radio68.be as background information for my show ‘Free Speech’ of 8th & 9th August 2016. Reference: ‘The Dawn of Psychedelia’, 2cd, Cherry Red, 2015.
(redactie 27Oct2016)