Origins of hippie aesthetics

Serious lyrics and music, plus instrumental virtuosity and new technology, made rock begin to take itself seriously—perhaps the start of the hippie aesthetic.

Last time we covered LSD’s spread. An important point: LSD was not only a recreational hallucinogen moving from subculture into the mainstream in 1967–69; it was also used to create a “trip” experience. Many musicians made music to accompany trips and heighten them, or songs that could themselves deliver a trip. Could you trip just by listening to an album, without LSD? We will talk about how rock began to take seriously the challenge of “making music that can give a trip.” That is the origin of a new idea we will cover in Part Two of History of Rock—what I call the Hippie Aesthetic.

What makes up the musical hippie aesthetic? This musical ambition can be traced to the Drifters’ 1959 “There Goes My Baby,” produced by Leiber and Stoller. Orchestral writing there was not only for sweetness; the classical-like string arrangement really stands out. Think of Phil Spector’s ambition—the Wall of Sound seeking maximum sonic impact, a bit like a youth orchestra. Brian Wilson’s studio experiments after he stopped touring with the Beach Boys treated the studio as a canvas for new sounds; his music grew more ambitious. The Beatles grew more serious too; when we covered the British Invasion we traced their path from craftsmen to artists. Bob Dylan and his serious lyrics surfaced in the mid-1960s. From 1966–67 on, musicians asked how to treat music seriously and tried various ways to add weight.

Start with serious lyrics. A trait of the hippie aesthetic and much psychedelic music is serious subject matter—not only youth, love stories, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “She Loves You,” but spiritual themes, society, the horror of war. Dylan, to a degree, paved the way with such lyrics and showed how carefully words could be crafted. That is inseparable from the concept album: as a whole an album should mean more than each song alone; one concept runs through it, and packaging matters. Such albums have serious lyrics around a central idea, and the album’s art joins in—more ambitious than before.

Serious music is another path: leaning toward styles already treated as serious. The two most borrowed forms are classical and jazz. In classical, rock often approaches two kinds: nineteenth-century traditional classical—what classical radio plays today, orchestras, string quartets, carefully made piano works by Brahms, Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Chopin, even twentieth-century Rachmaninoff—strongly tonal music; and avant-garde—tape music, synthesizers, wild innovative work, with Karlheinz Stockhausen typical of the 1960s. In jazz, modal jazz especially shaped rock, plus Miles Davis’s late-1950s Kind of Blue, then John Coltrane and others in that wave. Those classical and jazz worlds already had large serious audiences; importing their elements made rock feel more serious.

People also began to care about virtuosity. We will return to technique in rock—guitar heroes such as Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. Skill on an instrument started to matter. You were no longer just standing there looking sharp, backing the singer. You refined technique on guitar, keyboards, drums, or bass. Classical technique or jazz technique—Itzhak Perlman, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis: who was your virtuoso idol?

Technology was another way to heighten seriousness: advanced recording that could put more tracks into a song and control sound in the studio. As with Brian Wilson earlier, the studio became a creative canvas; by the late 1960s that became a standard. In Part Two we will see how important it became in the 1970s. In late 1968–69 the first synthesizer uses appear, mainly Moog—but early Moogs were huge, needing a whole room, hard to operate, requiring a dedicated operator. The first sampling synthesizer we mentioned was the Mellotron, heard on the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Each key triggered a different recording—orchestra, choir, or flute on a given pitch. Press C, E, and G of orchestral samples together and you get an orchestra playing that chord. Early analog samplers walked into everyone’s music because the sound was brand new. An ambitious player would make something never heard before—experimental, perhaps psychedelic.

Most important, the idea that rock musicians are artists took shape—not just pretty faces on the Ed Sullivan Show, but people who develop and protect an artistic stance and seek standing in the field. Explore new possibilities; push music’s borders. Bring lyrics, music, technique, and technology together; as an artist, take responsibility for your music. That idea grew from the late 1950s; by 1966–69 it was becoming mainstream. Musicians were looking for ways to make music more serious and weightier. To a degree they were chasing the idea of the “trip”—perhaps why music began to sound psychedelic. Before we dig into the music itself, we look at innovations by the Beatles and the Beach Boys, to understand more deeply how music became psychedelic.