Journeying to the center of psychedelic rock, with author Jim DeRogatis

The genre of psychedelic rock began in 1966 with the release of Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys and then Revolver by the Beatles, writes rock critic Jim DeRogatis in 1996’s Kaleidoscope Eyes: Psychedelic Rock from the '60s to the '90s. That said, it took a lot of cultural touchstones outside the world of music to get to that point.

Here are some of the more interesting moments from the early part of the book:

Albert Hoffman discovered LSD in 1943 in his lab in Switzerland. He took a bike ride home, which resulted in a really bad trip before he was calmed down by his physician and began to see unprecedented colors and shapes. In 1953, Aldous Huxley took LSD and wrote The Doors of Perception. Soon stars began to take the drug, including Jack Nicholson and Cary Grant. By 1957, New York City’s underground scene, including Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary, had gotten ahold of LSD and further documenting of the drug's effects happened with Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo‘s Nest and Tom Wolfe‘s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. 

Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys claims to have only taken acid three times, but it coincided with a really bad time in his life, when bandmate and cousin Mike Love was allegedly having an affair with his wife. The acid combined with that trauma scared the living daylights out of him and caused him to go into hiding. The Beatles started taking acid especially around the time of what DeRogatis calls their psychedelic masterpiece, 1966’s Revolver. The Rolling Stones' absorption into the drug was relatively short lived, mainly observable on Between the Buttons and Their Satanic Majesty’s Request. But they went back pretty quickly into a bluesy rock feel that fit more closely with the rest of their catalog.

Legendary writer Lester Bangs notes that great musicianship could often be, counterintuitively, a hindrance to creating great rock n’ roll. In the 1960s, as kids started clearing out their garages to jam with friends, many hadn’t taken LSD, but they started buying the first guitar pedal, a Gibson fuzztone, and playing with other sounds. Many of the best of these bands were far from great musicians and were captured on the Nuggets compilations.

One hilarious story DeRogatis relates from the 1960s is how “Journey to the Center of the Mind” by the Amboy Dukes was one of the one-hit wonder (more or less) megahits. But future gun-toting conservative poster boy Ted Nugent, a member of the band, had no idea it was a reference to drugs and also didn’t know that a huge collection of pipes on their album art had anything to do with drugs. I guess once-illusional, always disillusioned.

Although California bands like the Grateful Dead and The Jefferson Airplane are the kinds perhaps most associated with the term psychedelic rock - and there's a section in the book about them and the other folk rockers transitioning to psychedelic rock - Lou Reed once called them “the most untalented bores that ever came up." Reed's motley Velvet Underground could certainly be placed - at least partly - in the same genre, with their playing throughout the late 60s in Andy Warhol’s trippy ballroom concert evenings.

Also, while those early psych bands were male dominated, DeRogatis argues that psychedelic rockers were much more in touch with their sexuality and femininity, with bands like the Feelies and My Bloody Valentine including female members not because they wanted token woman rockers but because they wanted rockers and that these women could rock. 

Many psych rockers would later go on to become entrepreneurs, farmers, hippies, and environmentalists because they could never go back to a 9-to-5 lifestyle. 

I've also written about one of DeRogatis's other books, Milk It: Collected Musings on the Alternative Music Explosion of the '90s, and he is a co-host of Sound Opinions, my favorite music podcast. Even though I often disagree with his opinions, Kaleidoscope Eyes, like everything he is involved with, helps make a solid case that he is one of the finest living rock critics.