LSD, music, and “tripping”

Psychedelic music grew out of the use of the hallucinogen LSD. That use was certainly hedonistic, but it was also tied, to a degree, to the countercultural social currents of the time.

We have now reached Chapter 7—the last chapter of Part One of History of Rock. We will discuss the psychedelic period, generally covering 1966 through 1969, the very end of the 1960s. In the book I call it “peaks and experiments.” Recall how we got here. We covered the British Invasion: after the Beatles visited the U.S. in February 1964, British music took off. We also covered America’s reply: in the summer of 1965 the Byrds and Bob Dylan pushed back against the Invasion and helped folk rock and related styles rise. Then we looked at Motown and Stax rising in the same years, and at the Black popular-music scene of that stretch. From 1966 on, alongside those styles, a psychedelic rock scene gradually takes shape.

Before the chapter proper, a few related ideas. First, mainstream versus subculture. Music scholars like subcultures because they show active scenes outside the mainstream. In this chapter we will talk about San Francisco’s psychedelic subculture and a similar circle in London. For the first year or two, psychedelic music was almost entirely underground; to know what was going on, you had to be there. It sometimes made the press, but it was not mainstream. Mainstream artists work in national or international public view; artists developing in the shadows—those tied to the psychedelic movement and its music—belong to subculture. We will draw a line between mainstream and subcultural artists, talk about San Francisco and London, and to some extent Los Angeles.

Second, the swelling of musical ambition, and what I call the hippie aesthetic. That idea takes shape in the late 1950s and the 1960s. For some musicians, ambition about what music should do grew day by day. Music became a more important path of artistic expression and creation—not a disposable product like paper tissues or paper cups. They made bolder plans for their music and tried to turn it into real art. We already touched this when we discussed the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and Dylan in earlier chapters.

Those are the framing ideas. We will also ask: how can music itself become “psychedelic”? Drugs can hallucinate—but how can music? Distinguish music heard while on drugs from music that itself feels psychedelic.

Those themes run through the chapter. We begin with the rise of LSD. You cannot talk psychedelia without drugs. I am not endorsing or encouraging use—absolutely not. We discuss it as historians, objectively. Many drugs circulated then, but LSD drew the most attention because its effects seemed to fit countercultural ideas and aesthetics (at least as its advocates saw them). Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD in 1943 while exploring migraine treatments. He did not take it deliberately; he absorbed it through skin contact. He may not have realized it—and even if he had, how bad could it be? Perhaps it would cure his migraine, which was the goal. Scientists handle many compounds; most go nowhere, so he may not have been wary. As the saying goes, who can tell truth from rumor. Much is doubtful and exaggerated, but at the end of that day an assistant noticed his odd behavior. Both cycled home; for safety the assistant followed. On the way home LSD clearly took hold. Hofmann later recalled moving very slowly, the horizon floating, everything vivid with color, as if in slow motion. The assistant described him as frantic on the bicycle. That was the first LSD trip. Hofmann wrote up the discovery and thought the drug might be useful. The CIA got involved, hoping it was a truth serum for Soviet spies. Psychiatrists wondered whether low doses might treat alcoholism. For a time only intelligence and medicine knew of it, because it was recorded as a scientific find.

We will spend a little on Timothy Leary, one of the scientists who understood LSD’s nature. In fact until October 1966 LSD was fully legal—people did not treat it as a threat. It was a medical drug. It was first banned in California, then elsewhere in the U.S. One reason: people who knew LSD’s recreational use—upper-class circles of doctors, dentists, and lawyers or businessmen in the same set—sometimes took it like an after-dinner coffee. They took the drug and “tripped.” In a closed space, it did not feel especially dangerous. The Beatles—at least John Lennon and George Harrison—were among the first major-band casualties. In early 1965 John and George and their wives dined with a British dentist they knew. He slipped LSD into the coffee; everyone started to trip. At first, before it hit, the dentist kept asking “How do you feel? How?” which spooked them—they thought he had designs. They left; in the car LSD suddenly kicked in, and the rest of the night was a full trip. The Beatles may have liked LSD; they took it again later. But their path to it was still those upper-class parties. We said they met LSD in early 1965; Paul McCartney was last to join. Before the 1967 Summer of Love we did not hear much about LSD in the news; such events mostly stayed quiet.

Why take LSD? We know the effects—but what values did it stand for? One is plainly pleasure; many users only want to numb out and have fun. Yet LSD was also treated as a countercultural tool. It joined a higher idea: that LSD helps break walls built by obeying social rules and even lies. So taking LSD helps you become yourself again, recover authenticity that modern social rules may have denied you since childhood. It becomes a path to wisdom and higher ideas. That fits late-1960s hippie counterculture: invent a culture that will not repeat the elders’ mistakes. Parents, teachers, government, and church all lie; to find truth, LSD might be the remedy that resets the mind and lets you see. LSD use also produced the idea of “the trip,” because the experience often felt like a journey. “Journey” was common countercultural language, so a “heavy trip” might be a real LSD trip or simply a very bad physical experience. I may mention some famous people’s trips. That is the concept of the trip.

Music enters the trip in two ways. It can intensify an LSD trip—seasoning for the drug experience. Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters roughly worked that way; we will meet them next. But music can also be a trip on its own, without LSD or other drugs. For that, music must become more conceptual, bolder, more serious—and longer, so it can carry you deep into the trip. Interestingly, among hippies who used spiritual music as a trip, a preference for absolute music returned—an attitude once common in nineteenth-century European art-music circles. People once spoke of Beethoven’s symphonies in the same tone.

Next section we focus on how music grew serious and ambitious—if music itself triggers a “trip,” or at least intensifies one, how does music change to do that? That is next.