Trip Album

LSD was the catalyst of a very creative moment in music history, and particularly rock history. You can read in Jack Kerouac's On The Road how the Beatniks liked to get stoned and listen to jazz. Pot had a way of making music sound sensational. And it could produce a kind of visionary experience, like watching a technicolor movie.

The Beats passed their torch of counterculture exploration on to the hippies in the '60s. For the hippies, the music of choice was not instrumental jazz but rock. In about 1965 an explosion took place. The British Invasion in rock was becoming purloined with psychedelia. I remember when I first started hearing this stuff I was about 15, and I picked up an album by Bob Dylan called Highway 61 Revisited. This record seemed to have arrived from some other planet.

It was the Beatles, though, that fired the shot heard round the world with a brilliant record that is still a classic: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. History has it that Dylan turned the mop-tops onto acid and the mops began to grow out. So did the music.

What happened here? Did LSD do this?

At the time, LSD was still a legal drug (not for long). It's dangerous properties were still not fully understood. But it was known that it could mimic psychosis. What it did was to sort of cause the synapses in the brain to misfire, creating a wondrous world in the user's brain that could either be like heaven or turn into hell. It also seemed to be a kind of catalyst for creativity.

Dylan opened up a new kind of fantasy-fueled lyric which, when put to rock music, was tailor-made for psychedelic excursions on drugs. Along came fantasy albums of all stripes, and colors, and spots, and flowers that grew so incredibly high. These albums became the prize of hungry hippy kids with the mad munchies.

I don't know if the Beatles actually created the single most amazing psychedelic album with Sgt. Pepper's: the Rolling Stones were not going to be left out of the phenomenon, and, with the help of eclectic pioneer Brian Jones, they produced Their Satanic Majesties Request. This album is still fantastic, and the most bizarre creation the Stones ever made. It was their only contribution to psychedelic rock. They went back to making the best rock they ever devised during the Beggar's Banquet period, saying the genre they tried, in competing with the Beatles, was just not their thing. The Beatles didn't stop the psychedelic stuff until they later split up.

TSMR is still amazing. It is so highly textured, so original, one does not need acid to have one's mind completely dismantled and reassembled (i.e. "blown"). It holds up superbly. It should be among the best rock albums of all time, in my opinion. But I may be slightly addled.