William Echard - Psychedelic Popular Music: A History through Musical Topic Theory

Psychedelic Popular Music

MUSICAL MEANING AND INTERPRETATION

Robert S. Hatten, editor

WILLIAM ECHARD

Psychedelic Popular Music

A History through Musical Topic Theory

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

2017 by William Echard

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.481992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Echard, William, author.

Title: Psychedelic popular music : a history through musical topic theory / William Echard.

Other titles: Musical meaning and interpretation.

Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2017. | Series: Musical meaning and interpretation

Identifiers: LCCN 2016059651 (print) | LCCN 2017000758 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253026453 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253025661 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253026590 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Psychedelic rock musicHistory and criticism.

Classification: LCC ML3534 .E25 2017 (print) | LCC ML3534 (ebook) | DDC 781.64dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016059651

1 2 3 4 522 21 20 19 18 17

Contents

Acknowledgments

Much of the early work on this book was supported by a research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am also grateful for financial support received from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Carleton University. As always, special thanks are due to my family, especially to Lillian, Morgan, Sin, and my parents. Your unwavering patience with the long stretches of work and your interest in the results have been absolutely essential to seeing this project through.

Psychedelic Popular Music

Introduction

An hour later, with ten more miles and the visit to the Worlds Biggest Drug Store safely behind us, we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as being in ones right mind.

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1954

There are a lot of things this book does not get into. For any writer on music, that is a familiar situation, because it is notoriously difficult to fit even a small part of the listening experience into words. A few seconds of listening will uncover countless nuances that were not even hinted at, no matter how thorough the author aims to be. This rift is heightened when music is tied to personal experiences and states of mind and feeling that are ineffable, profoundly atypical, and ultimately inexpressible. This book does not try to analyze the aesthetic and emotional landscape of psychedelic music, let alone psychedelic experience. It is about something else: how psychedelia developed as an interlinked family of styles, a set of conventional codes and typical features. It is in turn about how psychedelia drew upon preexisting styles and codes, capitalizing on their existing meanings and forging new ones. Aldous Huxley talks about the world of daily life, how it frames and reabsorbs the transient psychedelic experience. He presents this mainly as a loss or a missed opportunity. However, in that framing world and in those framing discourses, a whole language of styles and signs grows up, which can be a fascinating area of study on its own.