Overheard at a Flaming Lips show in 1994:
Fan No. 1: “This show makes me want to start taking acid.”
Fan No. 2: “Why? This show precludes taking acid.”
Wayne Coyne, the Lips’ singer and songwriter, laughs when he is told the anecdote. Since forming in the mid-’80s, the Oklahoma City quartet have been told by admirers and critics alike how much they seem influenced by psychedelia, acid rock or drugs.
“When I think of psychedelic music I immediately go for the worst image possible,” Coyne says. “Which is people in tie-dyed shirts and headbands making beaded necklaces while listening to the Jefferson Airplane. It has bad connotations for me: taking drugs to make music to take drugs by.”
But Coyne acknowledges that the music created by the original psychedelic bands has its uses: “It was the idea that you could explore all roads to making a piece of music, the idea that there were a billion different ways to make a song.”
And, at any given moment on a Flaming Lips record, such as the recent “Clouds Taste Metallic” and the 1993 masterpiece, “Transmissions From the Satellite Heart” (both on Warner Brothers) a billion things seem to be happening at once. The guitars of effects-maestro Ronald Jones sound like merry-go-rounds, helicopters or wind chimes, while Coyne’s wan voice tries to articulate the inarticulate wonders of “Kim’s Watermelon Gun” and “The Abandoned Hospital Ship.” These records–dense, layered, mirthful and meticulously detailed–offer nothing less than a new way of hearing the world.
Psychedelic rock served a similar purpose when it emerged in the ’60s, and changed the course of rock in an essential way: Albums began to be seen as integrated works rather than collections of unrelated songs, and were recorded and listened to as journeys. In 1968, the sales of albums exceeded that of singles for the first time, and the album came to be seen as an art form.
Yet psychedelia still has not lived down its more quaint, nostalgic connections with the ’60s, when it represented more than just a style of music but a cultural movement associated with the Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey’s LSD “acid tests” in the Haight-Ashbury hippie district of San Francisco. And it remains inextricably linked with numerous drug victims of that era, notably the brilliant but deeply troubled Syd Barrett, who founded Pink Floyd and created one of the first psychedelic classics, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” in 1967.
The music’s drug connections were further emblazoned in countless pop singles, which urged listeners to “feed your head”: the Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High,” which was banned from commercial radio for being a bit too forthright about acid’s hallucinatory properties.
The music’s associations with drugs, particularly LSD, were not casual; its makers consciously tried to re-create the effects of a drug trip, with shifting tempos, long improvisational passages and weird sound effects. At the height of the first wave of psychedelia, the Summer of Love in 1967, the Beatles’ released their most celebrated, and most psychedelic album, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” which was riddled with alleged drug songs, including “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” wrongly tagged by some critics as a euphemism for LSD (its author, John Lennon, later said the title was inspired by his then 4-year-old son Julian’s description of a painting the boy did in school).
Becoming an influence
While these cultural associations made psychedelia almost laughable by the time of the punk era, in the late ’70s, the music it inspired continued to nourish adventurous bands such as England’s Echo and the Bunnymen, Arizona’s Meat Puppets and California’s Dream Syndicate. And in the ’90s, as rock groups investigate the more promising pockets of the past with increasing determination, many are finding fresh inspiration in psychedelia’s open-ended, anything-goes philosophy. Besides the Lips, among the most forward-thinking of these groups are trance-rockers Spiritualized and ambient-techno pioneers the Orb, both from Britain, and New Jersey hip-hop duo P.M. Dawn.
“We take psychedelia on board, definitely,” says Jason Pierce, guitarist and producer of Spiritualized. “But we’ve broadened it. We listen to all music, from 17th Century string quartets to (eclectic California rock band) Acetone. To me, Stravinsky was pre-acid psychedelic music.”
Spiritualized avoid hippie nostalgia by consuming influences the way Pink Floyd’s Barrett once gobbled pharmaceuticals. The sound is less about formal innovation than it is reinvention: How to splice and recombine the past into ever more alluring hybrids.
On the group’s 1995 release, “Pure Phase” (Dedicated), rinky-dink organ chords dissolve into oscillating sci-fi swirls, a blues harmonica wails in a void, a warehouse of clocks chimes and whirs, an avalanche of guitars overtakes a disembodied gospel choir, a string quartet plucks and swoons, and horns bleat in melancholy distress. No matter how dense the mix–and there are separate mixes of instruments in each stereo channel–it is done in support of some of the lushest melodies this side of the early Beach Boys, to whom “Lay Back in the Sun” pays homage.
On a more predictable note, the album also speaks the language of Kesey’s acid tests. On “Medication,” Pierce offers this prescription: “Every day I wake up/And I take my medication/And I spend the rest of the day/Waiting for it to wear off.” But when Pierce, who has acknowledged using heroin, sings about “dope,” he also may be referring to the narcotic effect of his own music.
Music, not drugs
In any case, the drug connections in the new psychedelia are usually less overt than they were in the ’60s. Whereas psychedelic rock was deeply connected with drugs as a way of life in the earlier era, the connection is downplayed now, even by musicians who, like Pierce, have acknowledged using hard drugs. Instead, the music itself is the point: a broad canvas on which all manner of musical colors, rather than brain cells, are scrambled.
“A lot of people don’t buy music, they buy lifestyle music,” Pierce says. “If for some people drugs is a cool lifestyle, they buy drug lifestyle music. That has nothing to do with why I do it. I see this as a form of soul music.”
“Pure Phase” is a total immersion in sound, a sonic bath that pours over the listener. On the closing “Feel Like Goin’ Home,” Pierce chants, “Feel . . . feel . . . feel . . . feel” with all the sensual conviction of a dozing cat stretching in the sun.
It is a blissful mantra that echoes one of the Orb’s bits of taped dialogue, culled from movies, radio and random conversations, that lend shape to their sprawling electronic compositions:
“Any pain?” a disembodied voice inquires.
“No,” another answers.
“Any pain?”
“No.”
“Hallelujah.”
The Orb is the otherworldly brain child of Alex Paterson, a former roadie for the British art-metal band Killing Joke, who has become one of the guiding lights in Europe’s rave scene. Raves, or psychedelic dance parties, began to flourish in England during the late ’80s, and Paterson provided a soundtrack with his futuristic electronic collages.
The music bows toward the first wave of British psychedelic bands–the cover of the Orb’s “Live 93” double-CD depicts a bewildered lamb floating in between factory smokestacks, a tongue-in-cheek visual reference to Pink Floyd’s 1977 “Animals” album. Virtually shorn of vocals, the Orb’s early albums suggest the weightless, free-floating ambience of a space voyage, never more so than in the epic, 40-minute single “Blue Room.” This is dance music for the “comfortably numb,” to borrow another bit of Floydian imagery.
On the 1995 album, “Orbus Terrarum” (Island), the Orb voyages inward for a Tolkien-like exploration of Earth’s–and the mind’s–hidden corridors. The music takes on an earthier ambiance, as well, with a more emphatic sense of rhythm than earlier Orb releases. But though the terrain has shifted, the music remains expansive, fluid, unpredictable.
Music as an escape
A similar sense of inner journey permeates the three P.M. Dawn albums. On the recent “Jesus Wept” (Gee Street), P.M. Dawn auteur Prince B greets the listener: “Is everybody in? Is everybody in? There is something greater than what we see on the surface. . .”
The music is rooted in hip-hop’s electronic domain, with rhythm loops underpinning vocals that are half-sung, half-rapped. But with its lush melodies and reverb-drenched arrangements, “Jesus Wept” also taps into a long line of sophisticated neo-psychedelic pop records.
Prince B’s search for a higher consciousness is also a psychedelic conceit, as he veers from waking nightmares full of self-doubt to dream-like meditations that suggest out-of-body experiences. He also articulates one of the guiding principles of psychedelia, a key to its abiding allure: “Lately . . . I’ve been trying to erase me,” Prince B sings on “Apathy . . . Superstar!”
The world created by P.M. Dawn, the Flaming Lips, Spiritualized and the Orb is one in which the music transcends the temporal, the everyday, the self. It is music not merely designed to engage, but with which to escape to, a world unto itself.
Or as the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne explains: “To me, making music the way we do is one of the few magical areas left in life. The worst thing that could happen is for the band to predict what it’s going to do. I long for that obliviousness, that feeling of `I like it like a cheeseburger.’ It’s something you can feel but not necessarily explain.”
