Age of Psychedelia

Š 2015 by Sandra Hsu. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the copyright owners.

First published in the United States of America by Sandra Hsu 37 S Wabash Chicago, IL 60603

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hsu, Sandra.

1960s—The Age of Psychedelia ISBN 1-56496-893-6 Z246.S23.2015 686.2’24 dc21 ISBN 1-56496-893-6 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover and text design Sandra Hsu

CON T EN TS Title Page Contents Introduction Art Music Fashion Film Sources 4

2 4 6 12 24 36 48 58

PSYCHEDELIC [sahy-ki-del-ik] adjective

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1. of or noting a mental state characterized by a profound sense of intensified sensory perception, sometimes accompanied by severe perceptual distortion and hallucinations and by extreme feelings of either euphoria or despair.

2. of, relating to, or noting any of various drugs producing this state, as LSD, mescaline, or psilocybin.

3. resembling, characteristic of, or reproducing images, sounds, or the like, experienced while in such a state.

IN T RODUCTION 1960s—The Age of Psychedelia

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The psychedelic movement began in the mid 1960’s and had an effect, not just on music, but also on many aspects of popular culture. This included style of dress, language and the way people spoke, art, literature and philosophy.

The end of WWII in 1945 brought about a post-war economic boom in the U.S. It also brought about an enormous spike in the birth rate, known as “the baby boom.” Between 1945 and 1957 nearly 76 million babies were born in America. By the middle 1960s, most of these kids were young adults.

As young people questioned America’s materialism and conservative cultural and political norms. During the 1960s a youth movement emerged, seeking to create an egalitarian society free from discrimination. The feminist movement and the Black movement are a direct result of this evolution.

The Birth of a Psychedelic Style At a conference on LSD in 1966 in San Francisco, the label “psychedelic style” was formed to describe not only the flowering of a new style but a broad revolution affecting human consciousness and social interaction. The relationship between drug-induced experiences and their artistic manifestation in psychedelic art, however, is an ambiguous one. A contemporary critic defined psychedelic art as “that art which attempts to recreate, introduce, stimulate, or convey the nature or essence of the psychedelic experience”, making ti the “Surrealism of our technological age”.

It would be wrong, however, to consider psychedelic art purely as a by-product of the drug and media revolution of the 1960s or as an accurate visual record of perceived or imagined phenmena while under the influence. While there are obvious parallels between psychedelic art and the LSD experience, the one way by no means impossible without the other.

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The fact that the drug experience cannot be accurately captured in either words or images is at the heart of the psychedelic impulse, as Tom Wolfe vehemently argued: “The White Smocks liked to put it into words, like hallucination and dissociative phenemena...But don”t you see?—the visual stuff was just the decor with LSD....The whole thing was...the experience...this certain indescribable feeling.”

ART

Image taken from The Miller Blues Band by Victor Moscoso.

Concert poster 1966.

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What distinguishes the work of the 1960s is its target audience: youth. In the United States, the posters created for San Franciso dance concerts, Yayoi Kusama’s happenings, and Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Ineveitable shows responded to youthful interests and activities, which coalesced into a loosely-knit national community formed around a shared interest in psychotropic drugs.

Before 1965, when the first San Francisco music announcements appeared, posters had always been designed to communicate clearly and instantaneously. Textual calrity became the principal convention challanged by the Haight-Ashbury artists, as for example in Wes Wilson’s The Sound (see pg 18).

Representative Works

Leading proponents of the 1960s psychedelic art movement were San Francisco poster artists such as: Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Bonnie MacLean, Stanley Mouse & Alton Kelley, and Wes Wilson; their psychedelic rock concert posters were inspired by Art Nouveau, Victoriana, Dada, and Pop Art. The "Fillmore Poster Series" was among the most notable of the time. Richly saturated colors in glaring contrast, elaborately ornate lettering, strongly symmetrical composition, collage elements, rubber-like distortions, and bizarre iconography are all hallmarks of the San Francisco psychedelic poster art style.

The style flourished from about 1966 to 1972. Their work was immediately influential to vinyl record album cover art, and indeed all of the aforementioned artists also created album covers.

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Album artwork for The Velvet Underground & Nico by Andy Warhol (1967)

Wes Wilson

Image taken from The Sound by Wes Wilson. Concert poster for Jefferson Airplane 1966.

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The poster for The Sound features Wilson’s adaptation of a lettering style created by Viennese Secessionist artist Alfred Roller, rendered almost illegible by Wilson’s contortion of letters and serifs into sinuous streams of text. Text assumed the role of sign: difficult-to-decipher words signalled an experience not directly related to textual information. What exactly was expressed was never specified and yet was widely understood by the targeted community, conversant with the visual distortions caused by LSD and teh liquid light-shows that accompanied music.

The unstencilled text was a beacon showing that something new was happening in poster art, something loosened from the grip of modern advertising. On a more literal reading, it called revellers to abandon restraint and join in the intoxicating experience of the early dance concerts.

Bright colors were a standard feature of psychedelic art, just as they had been for Pop and Op artists. Wes Wilson’s Flames poster for The Association, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Grassroots of 1966 is printed in complementary green and red contrasts with a silver of white edging the letters. A long history of hteory and practice of the optical effects caused by certain color combinations preceded the poster art, appearing in artist Robert Delunay’s turn-of-the-century treatise on color contrasts, and developed fully by Josef Albers, whose experiments are concisely documented in his 1963 book Interaction of Colour.

One of the principal discoveries was that when two colors of equal value, such as red and green, are placed adjacent to each other, and illusion of optical flicker is generated along the edges where they meet. Wilson’s choice of white-accented red and green colors exploited optical flicker to suggest both the sparks and the movement of dancing flames. Optical flicker also effectively corrodes the edges of objects, or text in this case, further distracting from a clear reading.

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Image taken from The Association: Concert of Fillmore Auditorium

by Wes Wilson. Concert poster 1966.

Victor Moscoso

Image taken from Victor Moscoso’s From the Plains of Quicksilver poster for the Avalon Ballroom.

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Victor Moscoso’s From the Plains of Quicksilver poster for the Avalon Ballroom demonstrates some of the color experiments conducted by this former student of Josef Albers. In addition to exploiting the flickering effects of simultaneous contrast, the construction of concentric circles of text joined at the bottom serif and open at the top directs our eye ever outwards.

The illusion materialized when the poster appeared in the concert hall before a revolving color wheel, another standard light-show feature comprising a wheel constructed of three colors that were successively projected onto surfaces as the wheel revolved before a light. Moscoso developed a poster technique maximizing the wheel’s effects, by means of which different forms would successively leap out as the colors changed, creating a simple form of animation. The differently colored bands of text would effectively appear and disappear under the lights, making this a living mandala.

Andy Warhol

The emergence of music venues in San Francisco, New York and beyond that combined live music with light-shows spawned a great number of nightclubs which emulated the complete experience of the multimedia shows at rock concerts. Some of these clubs emerged from artistic experiments to while others were established by tuned-in enterpreneurs, though a clear distinction was sometimes hard to discern.

Always sensitive to developments in other media and popular entertainment, Andy Warhol capitalized on the emerging lightshows, discotheques and intermedia art, taking his interest in film to the next level. He launched his Exploding Plastic Inevtiable show, featuring the Velvet Underground and Nico, in Paril 1966 at the former Polish Club Dom in New York.

The EPI presentation “included the projection of Warhol’s films, various slides and strobe light effects, and Malanga’s famous ‘whip dance’”.

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Concert poster of Andy Warhol and his Exploding Plastic Inevitable with The Velvet Underground

MUSIC

Psychedelic rock is a style of rock music that is inspired or influenced by psychedelic culture and attempts to replicate and enhance the mind-altering experiences of psychedelic drugs. It often uses new recording techniques and effects and sometimes draws on sources such as the ragas and drones of Indian music.

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It was pioneered by musicians including the Beatles, the Byrds, and the Yardbirds, emerging as a genre during the mid-1960s among folk rock and blues rock bands in the United Kingdom and United States, such as Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream, the Doors and Pink Floyd. It reached a peak in between 1967 and 1969 with the Summer of Love and Woodstock Rock Festival, respectively, becoming an international musical movement and associated with a widespread counterculture, before beginning a decline as changing attitudes, the loss of some key individuals and a back-to-basics movement, led surviving performers to move into new musical areas.

Some would argue psychedelia began that evening in August 1964 when Bob Dylan met the Beatles in a Manhattan hotel and got the Fab Four high for the first time in their lives. After this revelatory marijuana experience, the Beatles became steadily more obsessed with texture and the “color of sound” in their recordings. But another August day in a different American city—Los Angeles, 1965—stands as more epochal.

This was the day the Beatles hung out and tripped with the Byrds.

Between them, the Byrds and the Beatles pioneered most of the sonic traits and studio techniques associated with psychedelia.

Simulating LSD’s perceptual distortions and heightened sense impressions, these hallmark psychedelic effects typically involve the smearing of sounds and chromatic intnsification. Effects such as phasing, flangeing and “swirling” blur the edges of specific instruments and create a miasmic effect, a cloud of sound seeming to swarm out of the speakers and enfold the listener.

The Byrds and teh Beatles also trailblazed the use of mantric monotony, writing songs that shunned chord sequences and verse/chorus/middle eight structures in favor of entrancing one-chord repetition, thereby inducing sensations of temporal suspension. Matching the music’s sense of stepping outside time, psychedelia’s vocals abandoned R&B’s hot-blooded urgency in favor of a style of incantation evocative of Gregorian chants or Eastern religions. The Byrds and the Beatles pioneered the importation into pop of ideas from Indian classical music.

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Which brings us back to that landmark August 1965 meeting between the Byrds and the Beatles. Lennon and Harrison hung out with the group’s two singer/guitarists, David Crosby and Roger McGuinn. During the LSD-enhanced encounter, the Byrds hipped the Beatles to the sitar playing of Ravi Shankar.

Lennon and Harrison were entranced by the raga-like cadences that Crosby coaxed out of his twelve-string guitar. Within months, the Beatles had completed their first Eastern-flavored song, “Norwegian Wood”, while the Byrds were immersed in recording “Eight Miles High”. Released as a single in April 1966, the song was the first example of full-blown raga-rock to make the pop charts.

The Byrds The Byrds pioneered folk-rock, combining traditional acoustic music with early Sixties pop. The group’s signature sunny melodies, lush harmonies, and ringing 12-string guitars—as well as their eventual exploration of psychedelic rock—made for some of the decade’s best singles.

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As Roger McGuinn once said of the Byrds, “It was Dylan meets the Beatles.” The Byrds combined the upbeat, melodic pop of the Beatles with the message-oriented lyrics of Bob Dylan into a wholly original amalgam that would be branded folk-rock.

If only for their harmony-rich versions of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” drenched in the 12-string jangle of McGuinn’s Rickenbacker guitar, the Byrds would have earned their place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Yet the group continually broke ground during the Sixties, creating revelatory syntheses of sound that were given such hyphenated names as space-rock (“5D [Fifth Dimension]”), psychedelic-rock (“Eight Miles High”) and country-rock. At a time when rock and roll was exploding in all fronts, the Byrds led the way with an insatiable curiosity about the forms and directions pop music could take. In so doing, they became peers and equals of their mentors, Dylan and the Beatles.

The Beatles The impact of the Beatles has often been noted but cannot be overstated. The “Fab Four” from Liverpool, England, startled the ears and energized the lives of virtually all who heard them.

Their arrival triggered the musical revolution of the Sixties, introducing a modern sound and viewpoint that parted ways with the world of the previous decade. The pleasurable jolt at hearing “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand”— given the doldrums into which rock and roll had fallen in recent years - was comparable to the collective fever induced by Presley’s “That’s All Right” and “Heartbreak Hotel” nearly 10 years earlier.

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The Beatles’ music - with its simultaneous refinement (crisp harmonies, solid musicianship, canny pop instincts) and abandon (energetic singing and playing, much screaming and shaking of mop-topped locks) – ignited the latent energy of youth on both sides of the Atlantic. They helped confer selfidentity upon a youthful, music-based culture that flexed its muscle in myriad ways - not just as music consumers but also as a force for political expression, social commentary and contemporary lifestyles.

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The Beatles’ success can be attributed to a combination of factors, including Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting genius, Harrison’s guitar playing prowess, Starr’s artful simplicity as a drummer, and the solid group harmonies that were a hallmark of their recordings. Personally, they had youthful high spirits, good looks, quick wit and refreshingly down-to-earth dispositions to commend them. George Martin’s production and Brian Epstein’s management were important elements as well.

Although popular music has changed considerably in the decades since the Beatles’ demise, their music continues to reach and inspire new generations of listeners. Half a century after their humble origins in Liverpool, the Beatles remain the most enduring phenomenon in the history of popular music.

Jefferson Airplane Jefferson Airplane is regarded as one of the most successful San Francisco band of the late 60s, despite countless personel and even name changes.

The band’s reputation was enhanced by a strong performance at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. This national success continued with the erratic “After Bathing At Baxters” and the brilliant “Crown Of Creation”.

The Airplane was truly on the front lines of the ‘60s; they were groundbreakers, challenging authority at every turn and, by example, encouraging their fans to do the same. We’re going through a chaotic, worrisome, highly charged period now as well, and the Airplane’s music still says something to people.

It gets them thinking, something that not a lot of pop music does anymore.

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FASHION Psychedelic 1960s fashion showcase “Hippie Chic” featuring 1960s designer clothing.

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1960s fashion was bi-polar in just about every way. The early sixties were more reminiscent of the 1950s — conservative and restrained; certainly more classic in style and design.

The late 1960s were the exact opposite. Bright, swirling colors.

Psychedelic, tie-dye shirts and long hair and beards were commonplace. Woman wore unbelievably short skirts and men wore tunics and capes. The foray into fantasy would not have been believed by people just a decade earlier.

Twiggy modeling Culotte dress and sash by John Bates for Jean Varon, 48gns. Prints by Bernard Neville for Liberty.

Photos by Justin de Villeneuve.

Vogue, May 1969.

Style Icons Twiggy was the world’s first supermodel who took New York by storm in 1967. Thirty five years on and Twiggy is still a force to be reckoned with in the fashion world.

Twiggy worked closely with Mary Quant and her fashion collaborations, seen in dresses and skirts that hit at around six or seven inches above the knees. Incomparably scandalous for the time, the mini quickly made its way onto magazine covers and in nearly every advertising campaign of the latter part of the decade.

Twiggy modeling dress petticoat.

Photographed by Paul Misso in 1969.

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Subculture Trend

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During the 1960s, hippies not only rebelled against the war, promoted peace, love, but also made a huge fashion statement.

They opted for fashions that were natural and comfortable.

Seen in tie-dyes, free-flowing skirts and beads, the hippies’ psychedelic style was as unique as their personalities. They often wore flowers in their hair and painted their face or bodies with peace symbols or other meaningful designs.

The late 60s brought a whole new set of trends. Most were modeled after the hippie movement and were casual and relaxed. Women wanted to feel free and show off their individuality. Some typical hippie clothing items included: Bell-bottomed jeans Tie-dyed shirts Long flowing dresses Gypsy skirts Fringed vests Peasant blouses

Influences Fashion designers revolted against tradition in 1966. The thunder was first heard in England, where a youth rebellion resulted in massive profits for mod designers. Although the flames of fashion rebellion sparked in London in 1965, it spread like wildfire in 1966.

The mod look required mini skirts and pale colored fishnet or lacy textured hosiery, cut-out low heeled “little girl� shoes, mannish jackets, and ties. Accessories included over-theshoulder handbags and gaudy jewelry, which ranged from antique pins (like Bakelite pins) to modern styled geometric earrings.

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A psychedelic 1970 tunic jacket

by Yosha Leeger, who was involved in the Beatles’ shortlived retail shop, the Apple Boutique, before opening The Chariot, and its label “Cosmic Couture,” in Los Angeles with Barry Simon.

Psychedlic Floral BellBottomed Trousers

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Young men also went Mod via low slung, wide belted, skinny, fitted pants, to which they added extra-wide, flashy printed ties that contrasted with the wallpaper floral prints of their shirts. Boots, vests, London caps and narrow Carnaby jackets were also worn by the young men who took part in the rebellion against traditional men’s clothes and conservative ways.

American youth became infatuated with the exotic, off-beat image, using it as a means of differentiating themselves from the adult generation. E.g. miniskirts were adopted to more conservative styles with the length modified to two inches above the knee. The new short-skirt fashion resulted in mixed emotions everywhere.

Women borrowed suit styles from men. They wore straight legged pant suits, often of what was traditionally men’s fabrics, for daywear. Pant suits were an acceptable means of fashion and were worn everywhere.

FILM The history of cinema presents us with a number of attempts to recreate the psychedelic experience, an experience which confronts the cinematic artist with an extraordinary challenge— to capture a deeply physical, emotional, mental and spiritual experience through the limited means of sound and moving picture.

Most of these films made in the 1960s, like “Wild in the Streets” and “The love ins”, were B movies of which tried to capitalize on the hippie phenomenon by turning it into a sensation.

Many of these films were done in the tradition of exploitation cinema, indulge in the use of nudity as a cheap thrill and have a rather voyeuristic character.

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Scene taken from The Trip (1967).

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In May 1966, Life magazine devoted a cover story to the new phenomenon, indicating how widely the new type of entertainment venue had spread. They were termed “total environment”, “mixed-media” or “multimedia” nightclubs. One of the most prominent clubs, Cheetah in New York, was described as “a new-style, non-alcoholic dance hall cum pleasure-dome where— in kaleidoscopic combinations that vary from club to club— flashing lights, movies, slides, closed-circuit TV, colored smoke and deafening rock’n’roll are frantically combined to simulate the feelings one supposedly has after takiing a psychedlic drug, like LSD.

Stills from Vinyl (1965) by Andy Warhol.

Yellow Submarine A music-based film, Yellow Submarine, is a 1968 British animated feature film based on the music of The Beatles.

The film was directed by animation producer George Dunning, and produced. It is also credited with bringing more interest in animation as a serious art form. Time commented that it “turned into a smash hit, delighting adolescents and esthetes alike”.

The animation of Yellow Submarine has sometimes falsely been attributed to the famous psychedelic pop art artist of the era, Peter Max; but the film’s art director was Heinz Edelmann.

Edelmann, along with his contemporary Milton Glaser, pioneered the psychedelic style for which Max would later become famous, but according to Edelmann and producer Al Brodax, as quoted in the book Inside the Yellow Submarine by Hieronimus and Cortner, Max had nothing to do with the production of Yellow Submarine.

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The Trip

Theatrical poster for The Trip (1967).

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Director Roger Corman had just had a big hit with his biker film The Wild Angels (1966) and The Trip was an attempt to further exploit the youth counter-culture market he had stumbled onto. Roger Corman was not the originator of the LSD film but The Trip was the most high profile in the brief fad for LSD films during the late 1960s.

“The Trip” which was based on a script by Jack Nicholson (who is also known for his interest in psychedelics), is a movie dedicated to the description of one long and deeply meaningful trip. Peter Fonda, who plays the protagonist, was known at the time as one of the leading representatives of the burgeoning counterculture in Hollywood, and the film sometimes carries a somewhat naïve yet appealing character of trying to make a point for the psychedelic experience.

Vinyl Using three shots in this 70-minute film instead of Empire‘s one, Warhol creates, in the words of Ed Howard at Only the Cinema, “a strange and intriguing film which, like most of Warhol’s movies, often toes the line between slow and downright boring, a piece of “alienating, attitude-based cinema” that “provides no easy pleasures,” “replacing the conventional narrative drive with a cluttered mise-en-scene of bodies.”

Boasting awkward, stagy blocking, bored on-camera extras, and a hungover Gerard Malanga dancing furiously (and twice in a row) to Martha Reeves’ “Nowhere to Run,” Vinyl is both funny and numbing, and what’s disturbing is that it’s difficult to discern what percentage of either is intentional. But when it works it’s trashily fascinating, and Vinyl‘s script, in particular (by Ronald Tavel), is a mini-masterpiece of pulp poetry.

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Still from Vinyl (1965) by Andy Warhol.

SOURCES Introduction Art Music

Fashion

Film

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Summer of Love—Art of the Psychedelic Era by Christoph Grunenberg http://allaboutthesixties.blogspot.com/2011/01/psychedelic-pop-culture-of-60s-sex.html Summer of Love—Art of the Psychedelic Era by Christoph Grunenberg https://visualartsdepartment.wordpress.com/psychedelic-60s/ Summer of Love—Art of the Psychedelic Era by Christoph Grunenberg https://rockhall.com/inductees/the-beatles/bio/ http://www.rollingstone.com/music/artists/the-beatles https://rockhall.com/inductees/the-byrds/bio/ http://www.rollingstone.com/music/artists/the-byrds http://artery.wbur.org/2013/07/20/hippie-chic-mfa http://fashion-history.lovetoknow.com/fashion-history-eras/psychedelic-fashion http://womens-fashion.lovetoknow.com/1960s_Women_Fashion http://www.retrowaste.com/1960s/fashion-in-the-1960s/ https://emmapeelpants.wordpress.com/category/models/twiggy/ Summer of Love—Art of the Psychedelic Era by Christoph Grunenberg http://psy-amb.blogspot.com/2011/07/top-psychedelic-movies-of-all-time.html http://www.openculture.com/2014/03/andy-warhols-1965-film-vinyl.html http://www.willsheff.com/video-review-andy-warhols-vinyl/