The five earliest psychedelic songs
Turn on, tune in, drop out. That was the lasting message from the psychedelic scene of the 1960s. While most of the memorable music from the time was born on the West Coast of America, having been conceived of or inspired by the invaders from the British Isles, the psychedelic experimenting that swept through and inspired so much of the major musical movement of the second half of the 1960s can actually be traced back a little further into the ’50s.
The Beat Generation wrote about their experiences with drugs like marijuana and Benzedrine, but the mainstream press, along with psychologists and authors, were more focused on a new drug in development: LSD. With this new drug came a new world of possibilities, experiences, and problems. A consciousness-expanding, colour-enhancing, trip-inducing narcotic needed a new language to match. In 1956, the term “psychedelic” was used for the first time by psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in a letter to LSD experimenter and author Aldous Huxley, as they discussed the effects of hallucinogens in the context of psychedelic psychotherapy.
Almost ten years on, and the use of LSD had proliferated outside of its various therapeutic uses and out into the worlds of musicians, authors, artists and filmmakers alike. The word was no longer confined to letters between intellectuals but tagged onto every new art piece that seemed a little outside of the ordinary. Naturally, having had their minds warped and woken up to possibilities, having had their doors of perception opened to ways of thinking that they could only have dreamed of before, the artists of the era began expanding their musical horizons along with their mental ones.
Just like the California masses had their pick of drugs and dealers, they had no shortage of choices when it came to who to listen to. Want huge lashings of warped, wonderful guitar attacks? Try Jimi Hendrix. Looking to stay as far out as possible, for as long as you can? Tune in to the Grateful Dead. Want to scramble your mind with a mess of words and images? Don’t forget Donovan. And don’t overlook the groups who got in early—those already experimenting before the rest caught up. The psychedelic trip might have exploded in the late ‘60s, but the journey started long before, for those who had already turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.
What are the five earliest psychedelic songs?
Milt Herth – ‘Stompin At The Savoy’ (1936)
If you close your eyes, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were listening to a lost rehearsal tape from Ray Manzarek of The Doors, or Gregg Rolie from Santana, but this recording predates them by fully 30 years. Backed by just the faintest hint of an upright bass, Milt Herth let loose at the Hammond Organ on the swing standard ‘Stompin at the Savoy’.
A lot of the big bands who would play this song would run rings around the tripping hippies who took over the scene in the ’60s for both musical ability and inventiveness, but Benny Goodman’s performance of this song is a tame walk in the park compared to Herth’s savage stomp. Racing through the song and around the keys at a breakneck pace, Herth explores every note, every tone, and every tempo that he can conceive of within the tune, turns it on, tunes it in, and trips it way out.
Link Wray – ‘Rumble’ (1958)
There’s a massive crossover between the sounds of the surf rock boom in the 1950s and the psychedelia that came later in the 1960s. Understandably so, as both were so heavily rooted in the West Coast scene, and specifically in California.
Link Wray’s ‘Rumble’ sits somewhere between the two. This is a song you don’t need to be on any kind of unnatural high to freak out to. And it really did freak out the establishment at the time, becoming the first and only instrumental song to be banned from the radio on the grounds that it is too suggestive. Though it may feel primitive to some now, it’s still as powerful as it ever was, and the shimmering effects on Wray’s guitar were an indicator of what was to come in the next decade.
Joe Meek – ‘I Hear a New World’ (1960)
With the echo, the distortion, the invocation of space, the introspective conscience-expanding lyrics, experiments with percussion, orchestral instruments and vocal harmonies and the blending of Eastern influences with the more accepted Western musical structures coupled with new and inventive studio techniques like sampling, overdubbing and reverb, Joe Meek’s album I Hear a New World may just be the defining artefact of the psychedelic movement.
Only, it predates the generally agreed starting point of psychedelic rock by a good five years. “I hear a new world calling me”, various voices sing throughout the track. “So strange and so real, haunting me.” It’s hard to hear the album now without thinking that Meek really did hear what was coming from the new world.
The Tornados – ‘Telstar’ (1962)
Another song written by Joe Meek, this one went all the way to the top of the charts on both sides of the pond. If Meek heard the sound of a new world calling him two years before, this was that sound and everybody in the world seemed to hear it.
The song still sounds ahead of its time now, over 60 years since it was first released, as it races frantically along a sped-up surf beat and takes off into outer space. Of course, the most memorable thing about the whole piece is the clavioline synthesiser lead, played by frequent Joe Meek collaborator Geoff Goddard, which elevates everything about the song and has ensured its place in the collectively expanded consciousness of everyone who has ever heard it.
The Dave Clark Five – ‘Any Way You Want It’ (1964)
Without the experimental studio effects, this song would sound like just another British invasion Mersey-beat inspired number. You’d expect to hear the kind of thing on every radio station and variety show in 1964. And it would have been one of the better ones, for sure, but it is exactly those experimental studio effects that have assured its place in history.
With a lyric clearly lifted from the 1956 Aaron Schroeder and Cliff Owens song ‘Any Way You Want Me’, made most famous by Elvis Presley, ‘Any Way You Want It’ is a joyous and raucous rocker that is warped by the employment of an Echoplex reverb unit, which drenched the groups vocal harmonies in delays and distortions. With its combination of jubilant vocal harmony, youthful and carefree abandon, rock and roll beat and heavy use of such studio techniques, the song sounds exactly like what it is: the end of an old scene and the birth of a brand new one.
