Psychedelic Popular Music

A History through Musical Topic Theory

William Echard

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780253026590
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Recognized for its distinctive musical features and its connection to periods of social innovation and ferment, the genre of psychedelia has exerted long-term influence in many areas of cultural production, including music, visual art, graphic design, film, and literature. William Echard explores the historical development of psychedelic music and its various stylistic incarnations as a genre unique for its fusion of rock, soul, funk, folk, and electronic music. Through the theory of musical topics—highly conventional musical figures that signify broad cultural concepts—and musical meaning, Echard traces the stylistic evolution of psychedelia from its inception in the early 1960s, with the Beatles' Rubber Soul and Revolver and the Kinks and Pink Floyd, to the German experimental bands and psychedelic funk of the 1970s, with a special emphasis on Parliament/Funkadelic. He concludes with a look at the 1980s and early 1990s, touching on the free festival scene, rave culture, and neo–jam bands. Set against the cultural backdrop of these decades, Echard's study of psychedelia lays the groundwork and offers lessons for analyzing the topic of popular music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

1 Delineating Psychedelia: Topic Theory and Popular Music Cultures

They would have been fresh in so many ways, those first fourteen seconds. The sonics alone would have stood out: stinging, droning chords with a soaring, catchy hook over the top. The sound of the lead guitar would have drawn special attention, cutting melodic fuzz at a time when that was still a new thing. This was only the second Yardbirds single to venture far from their blues roots and just their fourth overall. Swept along by the guitar hero wave that was just gathering strength, the song would have carried the energy of a new scene. And finally, most remarkably, the lead guitar hook sounded like a sitar. It had even been played on a sitar in an earlier working recording. As a result, “Heart Full of Soul,” released in June 1965, is often said to have marked the arrival of raga rock, a sound that would not only proliferate over the next few years but also be pivotal in shaping the look and sound of 1960s psychedelia. It was followed in July by the gentler, more understated “See My Friends” from the Kinks, and by the end of the year the Beatles had publicly aligned themselves with the new style. The peak was 1966, with landmark releases from the Byrds (“Eight Miles High”), the Beatles (Revolver), and many others. Rock music was, for a time, broadly garlanded with tablas, sitars, and other trappings of India. But the trend was waning. Although some interesting new directions continued to be found, for example, by the Incredible String Band, which blended raga rock with British folk traditions, the momentum was tapering off by the fall of 1967, and a few months after that, raga rock was a thing of the past.

Like any pop fad, raga rock’s signifiers were at first blush clear-cut. The minimum you needed to get on board was a drone (tambura or otherwise), or a few sitar flourishes (actual or imitated), or some tabla-like hand drumming. During the mid-1960s many tracks did little to go beyond these surface details. On the other hand, some artists explored Indian aesthetics and techniques more extensively. That was one kind of depth, perhaps best exemplified by George Harrison’s commitment to become a student of Ravi Shankar. There was also another, focusing on the multimedia scope of the thing, extending beyond musical sound. As a full participant, you might well have been listening while sitting on a Persian carpet, an incense stick smoldering in the corner and morning sunlight filtering through the paisley shawl draped across your window. The individual signs were separate and specific, but they were subsumed in a more amorphous web of resemblances and connections. This was true not only for raga rock itself but for the ways it reached out and linked with other fashions of the time. The kaleidoscope is a nineteenth-century Scottish invention, but it fit right in, next to the rugs and mandalas. The shirt might have been paisley, or it might have been tie-dye, which gets us from India to pretty much anywhere else (tie-dye having roots in Africa, East Asia, and pre-Columbian America, to name a few places). Following the circles of association as they spread outward, we might notice that much of the Orientalist imagery is also to some degree Victorian or Edwardian, blending smoothly into a belle époque British nostalgia. Sometimes the sitars and tamburas rubbed shoulders with the classical avant-garde, as in the tape loops of “Tomorrow Never Knows” by the Beatles. And the whole thing could be piled together with other styles from radically different times and places, like country music and electric blues.

In later chapters we will examine raga rock in detail. For now, I evoke the associations of its style because they offer a vivid example of this book’s core concept: musical topicality. The word “topic” will be used in two related but distinct senses. First, in the narrower sense, “topic” is shorthand for “topical signifier.” The sitar-like quality of the lead guitar in “Heart Full of Soul” is an example, as are the recognizable graphical motifs of any design that immediately evokes the concept of a Persian carpet. These are signifiers insofar as they are like spoken or written words: discrete and portable configurations, clearly recognizable, that evoke fairly standardized meanings. Because of this self-contained property, any given signifier can be deployed in a wide range of contexts and combinations. For example, in “Heart Full of Soul” the sitar-like guitar serves as an Indian topical signifier, but it is layered with an acoustic guitar that is more country and western in its implications. Each of these signifiers appears in other songs in very different combinations. Similarly, a visual signifier of Egypt such as the eye of Horus can easily be combined with images evoking science fiction and outer space.

So sometimes a topic refers to a particular signifier, pinpointing the exact sound or other configuration that carries a particular meaning. But not all signifiers are topical. Why apply the name to these signifiers when used in these ways? This brings us to the second, broader sense of topic: a conceptual area for contemplation and discussion, for elaboration, for exploration. Orientalist conceptions of India form a topic, as do concepts like the martial, or the pastoral, or 1950s rock-and-roll culture. A topic is a field of meaning that is specific enough to be recognizable and coherent but broad enough to wander around in. The important topics in a culture are explored in a wide range of media. For example, you can find Orientalist India not only in music but also in literature, visual art, philosophy, industrial design, and many other places. Each medium in which a topic is explored houses a relatively distinct version of the topic, but they all link together into an overarching topical field. And topics interpenetrate in myriad ways. The Indian topic evoked by raga rock, when seen in the broader context of psychedelia as a whole, intersects with many other topics, such as Victorian British nostalgia, blues culture, pastoralism, and others.

The musical topic is a straightforward concept to introduce, but it becomes continually more complex on reflection. It suggests a range of supporting concepts and terminology, and rather than explain these one at a time over the course of the book, I have opted to put all of them into this first chapter. Readers who would rather not start with theory may skip ahead and come back to it later as needed to help explain subsequent terms.

But for those who like to know where their authors are coming from, this chapter explores my own position on certain controversial points of semiotics and topic theory. One overarching goal of my work, both here and elsewhere, is to explore zones of contact between semiotic theory as it has typically been used in the study of Western art music and the slightly different priorities and applications that have become more common in popular music studies (Echard 2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2008). This is not because of any preexisting agenda on my part but rather because I find use for elements of both and was surprised that so few authors in either area acknowledged one another or made regular use of each other’s work. One reason there has not been more exchange between these theoretical camps is that in some cases they proceed from different assumptions and agendas regarding the ontology of the musical work and the role of social theory in musical interpretation. The divide is far from absolute, and I am far from the only person to situate myself in the middle. But I believe there is still work to be done in making explicit some of the underlying issues and differences of emphasis. Overall, chapter 1 argues that when studying contemporary and emergent topical fields it is desirable to adopt a dialogical and pluralistic view of musical competency. By dialogical I mean a perspective that takes special interest in the way that meanings and interpretive practices emerge from ongoing negotiations of power and identity between different individuals and groups within an interpretive community.

In terms of topic theory this chapter has three purposes: (1) to provide an introduction for those readers who may need it; (2) to define terms and concepts used in later chapters; and (3) to stake out a position in some of the underlying debates in the hope that this may help show how sometimes separate schools of thought in musical interpretation can be brought into a productive relationship. The other major goal, partly theoretical and partly historical, is to say what I mean by psychedelic and, in the course of that, to define a few terms and concepts that will be useful when thinking about how new styles and genres grow out of older ones. One methodological question not touched on in the introduction was how I decided in the first place that certain recordings and artists should be considered psychedelic. By explaining my own delineation of psychedelia in this chapter, I can explain those choices while at the same time providing a broad historical overview. So this chapter begins with a discussion of what I mean by psychedelic, along with the development of a few related theoretical ideas. After that there is a general introduction to topic theory, followed by a discussion of how my own version of topic theory differs from some other versions. Finally, there will be a summary of how these broad theoretical arguments are reflected in the rest of the book.

Delineating Psychedelia: The Multiplicity

A topic such as the pastoral or the psychedelic can be found in film, literature, visual art, and many other areas. Any given topic connotes and participates in a particular cultural field that extends far beyond music. In the case of psychedelia, this is especially evident given its strong expression in visual art and design, not only in a countercultural way but also in mainstream culture of the 1960s and beyond. In this respect, psychedelic style was one element in a midcentury design boom:

As the domestic goods consumer boom developed, product design moved outside the bounds of both traditional good taste and … the determination of form by function.… In such a climate, experimentation in form and exuberance in colour developed in as diverse a range of objects as clothes, furniture, goods packaging, electrical goods, transistor radios and cars.… Perhaps above all it was in the fields of graphic design, glossy display advertising and the photographic image that the pattern of simultaneous overlap and stark antagonism between “straight” and “psychedelic” culture may be most clearly observed. (Laing 2005, 31–32)

This complex situation reflects many of the same tendencies we will need to track in terms of musical psychedelia. The psychedelic style is special, but at the same time it is a product of its times, borrowing a great deal from other styles and practices. The signs of psychedelic style developed in close connection to particular countercultures and ideologies, but they also circulated outside of them. There is no clear-cut moment at which particular signifiers clearly became psychedelic or clearly stopped being psychedelic, but there are various details of translation and transformation that can be tracked. In terms of musical sound, an instructive example is offered by Russell Reising and Jim LeBlanc: “With today’s recording techniques and the widespread, routine use of synthesized sounds, a great deal of twenty-first-century pop music could be construed in some way as psychedelic. This was not the case in 1967, however, in an era when four-track recording techniques and the association of ‘flower power’ and colourful imagery with LSD and other spiritual intoxicants were commonplace” (2008, 107).

The complication here is different—having to do with musical sound and the passage of time—but similar in that the core issue is how signifiers shift in scope. Many other examples could be added, but for now the point is that when seeking to delineate the psychedelic we will need to define our terms in such a way that they narrow the field but still take these sorts of subtleties into account. Even when we narrow our attention to participants in psychedelic countercultures of the 1960s, it is important to remember that experiences, agendas, and understandings varied widely. Although clichés center on countercultural styles of San Francisco and the London Underground, neither of these scenes was monolithic, and there were many other variants of psychedelia besides. For example, there is what Joe Boyd (2006, 115, 117) called the “beer-drinker’s psychedelia” of the Move, rooted in pub rock, and there is also substantial overlap between psychedelic rock and mainstream pop. Even within the emerging canon and dominant clichés we find alternative perspectives. For example, Barry Miles suggests that “in reality the Floyd were neither psychedelic nor underground” (2006, 65).

We also need to consider the wide range of reactions psychedelic experience might engender. Throughout the various eras of psychedelia there were a substantial number of curious thrill seekers and spectators who might be drawn to the novelty of psychedelic styles without having any insider knowledge of psychedelic experience or countercultures. Consider the young Revolver listeners hypothesized by Nick Bromell: “The album appeared at least a year before psychedelics irrupted into American youth culture. The vast majority of young listeners heard Revolver with prepsychedelic innocence, and it sounded bizarre.” For such listeners, the album “was an enigma they would understand only gradually, through many listenings and over many months” (Bromell 2000, 89, 94).

We have gradually been narrowing our focus: from the whole sweep of cultural products, to music in particular, to the unstable mixture of countercultural and broader versions of musical psychedelia. At every step we encounter a multiplicity of perspectives. This complexity does not diminish even if we look at the history of European American engagement with psychoactive drugs in particular.¹ Early European exploration and colonization, from at least the fifteenth century, produced reports and myths of drug use among indigenous populations. These reports form one important source for European American concepts of what would eventually be regarded as psychedelic drugs. But they did so in a context where such practices were cast as completely other to European experiences and values. By contrast, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there began to appear sporadic interest in psychoactive drugs among European artists, writers, occultists, and scientists, who still regarded these drugs as exotic but approached them in an exploratory and appropriating mode. By the late nineteenth century we find the beginning of medical and anthropological study, especially of peyote. Some early workers in this area, for example, Silas Weir Mitchell, mostly confined themselves to description. But in some cases there was outright advocacy of psychoactive drugs as beneficial in certain circumstances; the work of Havelock Ellis is an early case in point. In turn, the first years of the twentieth century saw the beginning of detailed psychological studies of psychoactive drugs, the first production of synthetic versions of the relevant organic compounds (e.g., mescaline in 1919), and eventually entirely new chemicals, most famously LSD, whose psychoactive properties were discovered in 1943. In all of these instances, scientific and otherwise, psychoactive substances were, on the one hand, regarded as important and of interest but, on the other hand, associated with the exotic, psychosis, and a breakdown of norms. The situation was further complicated in the period immediately following World War II, which saw widespread criminalization and mainstream shunning of any form of recreational drug use.

It was in the period from the early 1950s to the early 1960s that psychedelic ideas and practices as such began to emerge. Key moments include 1951–52, Gordon Wasson and Al Hubbard became active in the field; the spring of 1954, Aldous Huxley published The Doors of Perception; 1956, the term “psychedelic” was coined by Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond; May 1957, Gordon Wasson published a widely read article in Life magazine about psychoactive fungi; circa 1959–61, various figures who would become leaders in the 1960s countercultures tried psychedelics for the first time; the summer of 1962, various US governmental agencies began implementing measures against LSD use and research; and roughly 1963, the street-level LSD trade began. In 1963 Timothy Leary founded his first extra-academic psychedelic group and the entourage that would evolve into the Merry Pranksters began to gather around Ken Kesey. The period 1964–65 marked the earliest appearance of popular music groups explicitly devoted to psychedelics, and the Summer of Love in 1967 is generally acknowledged as the peak of the countercultural psychedelic era. So by the middle of the 1960s there had been at least four important and distinct eras in the development of psychedelic attitudes and practices: (1) the era of early European exploration; (2) the colonial and Romantic era, during which various kinds of experimentation began but within a strong framework of exoticism and Orientalism; (3) the early psychedelic era as such, mostly limited to elites who defined their agendas relative to values of institutional science and high culture; and (4) the appearance of popular-culture psychedelia, which corresponded to a breakdown of any remaining mainstream tolerance or endorsement of recreational drug use.

Given such complex roots, it is not surprising that the psychedelic movement of the 1960s was not in any way monolithic. A web of similarities and differences both united and divided psychedelic insiders. As a result, there are many different ways of grouping them and understanding their relationships. One option is to look at the main outcomes hoped for by different advocates of psychedelic drugs: scientific (positive knowledge gained through structured theory and research), humanistic (self-improvement, enlightenment), hedonistic (sensation as an end in itself), and political (social disruption as a tool of change). Simply listing the names of selected key players can also illustrate their diversity: the Diggers, Aldous Huxley, the “lab madness” researchers and clinicians, Timothy Leary, LSD therapists, the Merry Pranksters, Hunter S. Thompson, the White Panthers, and the Yippies. After the 1960s, various spin-off psychedelic movements appeared with a fair degree of regularity, but few attained the same degree of prominence as the earlier ones, with the possible exception of rave culture in the late 1980s.

Are You Experienced? The Question of Drugs

Musicology offers very few definitions of psychedelia, and all of them are constrained in ways that reflect particular research agendas. This is not meant as a criticism, but it does mean that none of the available definitions and discussions will touch on all the points necessary to my own study. The earliest extended musicological study of psychedelia is that of Sheila Whiteley (1992). Her general approach, focused as it was on psychedelic coding and norms of style, is a useful starting point for topic theory, but it will require expansion. Whiteley summarizes her model as follows: “Musically psychedelic coding focuses on alternative meanings and involves a correlation of drug experience and stylistic characteristics” (8). In speaking of alternative meanings, she has in mind both the desire to explore altered states of consciousness and the way in which psychedelia frequently borrowed stylistic components and signs from other sources. The one aspect of Whiteley’s work that will require the most refinement is the direct correlation drawn between psychedelic style and drug experience. Other theorists have offered more nuanced approaches in this area. For example, Arun Saldanha (2007, 6) in his work on Goa trance speaks in the plural of “psychedelics,” a family of practices for self-transformation: “Practices are psychedelic to the extent that they invoke a core as a site for investment and transformation, opposing what elders and the law have to say about it. The psychedelic self isn’t at all purified of the social; rather, it seriously plays around with what the environment has to offer” (15). This resembles Whiteley’s approach insofar as psychedelics are marked by conscious experimentation with alternative meanings. ...