The obscure track Tom Petty called “the first psychedelic folk song”
Today, rock music incorporates an almost unimaginable number of subgenres. Since its early days during the 1950s, rock has split off in countless different directions, infecting the previously separate worlds of country, folk, reggae, and even jazz. Of all the rock subgenres that have come and gone throughout the years, few have had as colossal an impact as psychedelic rock, which defined the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Like rock, it was only a matter of time before psychedelia started creeping into other genres.
Psychedelic rock, as the name implies, is inseparable from the rise of acid and LSD during the 1960s. The mind-expanding drug proved to be an adequate source of artistic inspiration for the hippie generation, rapidly accelerating art and music forward into a vibrant menagerie of innovative sounds and colours. The impact of the movement was huge, influencing everybody from underground heroes like The Velvet Underground to pop superstars The Beatles. It makes sense, therefore, that Floridian songwriter Tom Petty took notice of the scene.
Petty was a little late to the psychedelic party, first establishing himself during the mid-1970s alongside The Heartbreakers, but the spirit of the movement was always with him. For the vast majority of their time together, The Heartbreakers primarily focused on the sounds of mainstream southern rock, but as Petty’s songwriting skills developed, he began to explore a much more comprehensive range of musical influences. These extracurricular listening habits rose to the forefront when Petty started to release solo music during the late 1980s.
On his second solo effort, 1994’s Wildflowers, Petty formulated a particularly bizarre blend of psychedelia and folk rock, which had rarely – if ever – been put together previously. Nevertheless, nestled away on the B side to hit single ‘You Don’t Know How It Feels’ sat ‘Girl on LSD’, perhaps the strangest song Petty ever recorded.
By all accounts, the song came about as something of an accident, after producer Rick Rubin heard Petty messing around with the song and demanded it be recorded. The resulting song is as odd as it is endearing, offering a stark contrast from the polished roots rock of ‘You Don’t Know How It Feels’.
During a 2003 interview, Petty was asked about the obscure B side, revealing its strange origin story. “I think I was just trying to entertain [producer] George Drakoulias,” he told the interviewer, “He frequently came to the Wildflower sessions, and I remember that night I was really singing that to George, just trying to make him laugh, and Rick Rubin said, ‘We’ve really got to put that down.’ And I was like, ‘Are you serious?’ He said, ‘Yeah, come on, come on!’”
The songwriter added, “I think it’s one of the first psychedelic folk songs.”
Admittedly, psychedelia does not fit hand-in-hand with folk music. After all, folk is typically gentle music that has been passed down from generation to generation, offering profound musings on life and existence. Meanwhile, psychedelic music often favours mind-bending instrumentals rather than profound lyricism, switching acoustic guitars and harmonicas for bombastic sound systems and electric guitars.
Prior to ‘Girl on LSD’, there were numerous tracks released that took inspiration both from the world of folk and of psychedelic rock, but none had offered up such a blatant collaboration of the two. Understandably, given that it was a song that Petty never intended to record, its lyrical content is far from being his strongest work, but it remains a firm fan favourite for its unique blend of folk and psychedelia.
