Milestones In Rock ‘n’ Roll History: The Psychedelic Influence

Published on: 6 Mar, 2019
Updated on: 6 Mar, 2019

In his latest feature on Milestones in Rock’n’Roll history, Dave Reading looks at the immense influence that psychedelic substances had on our culture and on the development of music.

In 1965, the year I left school, God became available in pill form. An easily obtainable drug sold on the streets for a few pounds could bring you instant spiritual awareness. Or so we were told.

George Harrison pictured in the Beatles’ promotional firm for their song Strawberry Fields Forever.

Beatle George Harrison told Rolling Stone magazine: “I had such an overwhelming feeling of well-being that there was a God, and I could see him in every blade of grass. It was like gaining hundreds of years of experience in 12 hours.” The drug he’d taken was LSD – lysergic acid diethylamide.

Throughout history mind-expanding plant derivatives have been used for religious rituals in various cultures. In ancient India the Hindus used soma, derived from a hallucinogenic mushroom; the Aztecs used teotlaqualli, a paste made from a hallucinogenic flower; Mexican Indians used peyote for sacred rituals. Now there was the chemical known as LSD offering Westerners the promise of a journey to secret realms of consciousness.

It was the newspapers, of course, that first broke the story to the general public. Not without good reason they described LSD as “the heaven and hell drug”. Even if you were a regular user, you didn’t know whether you were about to experience ecstasy or horror. Someone was reported to have jumped off a skyscraper, thinking he could fly. Others suffered psychotic attacks. But then there were those who claimed to have undergone profound religious experiences.

Cover of the Beatles’ Revolver LP.

Hallucinogenic drugs were just one part of larger scenario that amounted to nothing less than a cultural revolution and it was the Beatles who led the way. In August 1966 they released their seventh UK studio album, Revolver.

Some people – particularly those in older generations – were mystified by the direction their music was taking. In particular, the final track seemed to show they had lost the plot.

Everyone had admired them for being able to knock out a good tune but all of a sudden they’d gone weird. You could hum along to Yesterday and Eight Days A Week, from earlier albums, but anyone humming along to Tomorrow Never Knows would sound like a fly trapped in a jam jar.

At first no one knew the song was LSD-inspired. But Beatles biographers have made it clear that although you saw the words Lennon-McCartney on the writing credits the song was primarily John Lennon’s composition. And Lennon was at the beginning of his LSD phase and keen to share what he’d seen. Later he acknowledged he’d written a lot of his mid-1960s music while under its influence.

The following year the Beatles came up with more in the same vein: Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds surreally told us about plasticine porters with looking glass ties; I Am The Walrus presented us with yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye; and the most inspired track of all, Strawberry Fields Forever, gave us sounds that had never before been heard on a record.

Even the music press were taken by surprise. In his History of the NME, Pat Long reports that the paper’s young writers struggled with the more adventurous end of the music it was committed to covering.

Sadly out of touch, the paper had not yet managed to understand its subject or its readers. Reviewing Revolver, the paper complained that Tomorrow Never Knows “tells you to ‘turn off your mind, relax and float downstream’. But how can you relax with the electronic outerspace noises, often sounding like seagulls?”

For anyone with a closed mind, it was difficult to appreciate why the Beatles’ later period was a cultural step forward and not a descent into madness. The Beatles and others were taking the journey from pop music to avant garde art and enabling listeners to appreciate that pop could be much more than boy-meets-girl with a guitar soundtrack.

This journey did not come without a price. In his brilliantly-researched book Revolution in the Head, which examines the Beatles’ music in fine detail, Ian MacDonald wrote that John Lennon took LSD every day, living in one long chemically-altered state, with his senses grossly overloaded. He was a mental wreck and it was a miracle that he recovered. Many others didn’t.

The Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever.

It has been argued that Strawberry Fields Forever is a landmark in 20th-century music. Rolling Stone magazine wrote: “They (the Beatles) were the first group to mess with the aural perspective of their recordings and have it be more than just a gimmick.

“Engineers like Geoff Emerick invented techniques that we now take for granted, in response to the group’s imagination. Before the Beatles, you had guys in lab coats doing recording experiments, but you didn’t have rockers deliberately putting things out of balance, like a quiet vocal in front of a loud track on Strawberry Fields Forever. You can’t exaggerate the licence that this gave to everyone from Motown to Jimi Hendrix.”