Lenny Kaye readily acknowledges that he “didn’t know what he was doing” when he was tapped to compile the famed Nuggets compilation for Elektra Records during the early ’70s. “I had no sense of destiny or anything,” the Patti Smith Group electric guitarist tells us via Zoom from his home in eastern Pennsylvania. “And if I had thought, ‘This is going to be discussed a half century later,’ I would’ve screwed it up, simple as that.”

Ignorance, then, was bliss for Kaye and for an untold number of listeners who hold the album — full title Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965–1968 — sacrosanct and essential, influencing generations and musical movements to come.

The two-LP set’s 27 tracks offer both a snapshot of an era and a treasure trove of unknown, obscure or under-celebrated songs — even the ones that charted when first released — by rock bands that fit the same description. “Psychedelic” was a broad term, of course; garage rock was also a generalized description for the music, and Kaye even applied “punk” in his scholarly liner notes years before it came into common practice.

“The ’60s was a quite amazingly exploratory time for the genre we call rock ’n’ roll,” Kaye explains. “Things happened so quickly that the music grew up almost as an adolescent will, sprouting from, say, ’63 through the beginning of the ’70s. The rapid-fire experimental energy was overwhelming. It’s almost like the Italian Renaissance; you have these great, larger-than-life figures.

“I believe Nuggets addresses that sense of sudden expansion of limits. It was very exciting. It was a great moment to experience … and I had the opportunity, thanks to Jac [Holzman, Elektra Records founder] to be the first in line of gathering these.”

New York native Kaye had already made a name for himself in the New York music scene as a musician (sometimes under the name Link Cromwell), writing for a variety of music publications and working at the Village Oldies record store. He was well-known enough for Esquire magazine to name him “the token rock critic” on its list of the Heavy 100 in the music business in 1970, which led Holzman to hire Kaye as an independent talent scout for Elektra.

“Jac Holzman liked rock critics, ’cause he had an intelligent label and writers enjoyed writing about [Elektra acts] Love and the Doors and Tim Buckley and all of that,” Kaye recalls.

He “didn’t get much traction” in that capacity, however, as he championed the Stooges for a third album, as well as the Sidewinders from Boston and an early incarnation of Blue Öyster Cult. Meanwhile, Holzman had broached the idea of “an album he called Nuggets which would find these kinds of rogue tracks that were overlooked — ironic because he probably could’ve signed all of these bands right off the get-go at the time.”

Kaye figured the idea was dead after he “was asked to leave” the company, “but about five or six months later their legal department called me up and said, ‘We have the rights to such and so many songs. What do we do with them?’ And I thought, ‘Oh, this is still happening? That’s crazy …’

“So we just kept going, and the rest is history.”

Holzman had a few suggestions of his own but mostly gave Kaye free rein in the process. “I just wrote up a list of songs that I liked that were slightly off the point, I guess,” he recalls. “It was mostly my favorite records. Jac told me to dig a little deeper, so some of the songs are not the ones you would expect. I didn’t put ‘Gloria,’ the national anthem of garage rock, on there; I chose another one from the Shadows of Knight catalog [‘Oh Yeah’].

“And many of them are not garage rock at all; they’re just fun songs. The Third Rail [‘Run, Run, Run’], a novelty song by some Brill Building songwriters. The Strangeloves [‘Night Time’], hardly a garage band, though they pretended to be one. Sagittarius [‘My World Fell Down’], which is a full-blown orchestration of West Coast Pop.”

Nuggets does feature some well-known bands (Leslie West’s Vagrants, the Blues Project, the Amboy Dukes, the Blues Magoos) and actual hits, such as the Standells’ “Dirty Water,” the Seeds’ “Pushin’ Too Hard,” the Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night),” Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction” and Nazz’s “Open My Eyes.” What they shared was a spirit and attitude that went against the grain of where rock was at the time — increasingly slick production, virtuosic prog and bombastic heavy metal.

“There was a total sense of mission,” Kaye says of his intent for Nuggets. “Me and other rock critics at the time were longing for a sense, a return. The time was right for re-evaluation, for bringing things back to perspective to the personal, to the available of someone who wanted to pick up an instrument and start from scratch. The time just called for it.

“Music is all about cycles, so if things get out of hand in one way, you know that the opposite is going to come to topple it, the way grunge wiped hair metal off the map or Elvis Presley kind of made obsolete an entire generation of pop singers and songwriters, or the Beatles changing the landscape immediately.”

Kaye feels Nuggets’ impact was even more pronounced when Sire Records reissued it in 1976, concurrent with the widespread coining of the term punk rock.

“This was during a time bands were kind of cutting the excess and looking for the root of what makes people move,” Kaye explains. He says he’s not sure why he used “punk” as a term in his liner notes. “It was just in circulation from rock writers who were looking for the truer, the short, sharp, shocked without any artistic pretensions, who wanted things to get back to the basics.

“It was just a term, really; I can’t tell you who initially came up with it. It might have gone nowhere except that it became a capital P, a label for a music style that reflected simplicity and drive and a certain ‘don’t fuck with me’ attitude.

“It’s the spirit of reinvention — that’s what punk was, and what grunge was later,” he continues. “The original CBGB bands — Television, Talking Heads, Blondie — they were all so different from each other. The Ramones, who set the template for what would be punk rock — all those bands were extremely different from each other. So what you had was the sensibility of renewal; ‘We’re not gonna listen to what was there. We’re gonna start all over,’ even though you’re drawing so much from what went before. Even the Sex Pistols, with all their rhetoric, sounded as much like the Who and the Small Faces as anybody.

“We build on what has come before, but hopefully it becomes the future, and that, to me, is so important in terms of music’s evolution.”

Nuggets fans are their own legion, of course. Scores of other musicians — Kaye singles out Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie — have complimented and cited the compilation over the years.

“Then there’s that random human in Stockholm who comes up and buys me a beer and tells me Nuggets changed his life,” Kaye adds. Smith is not among them, however. “She might’ve known some of the groups,” he says, “but our reference points were more vocal harmony groups. When I first met her and she started coming into Village Oldies, I spun her ‘Mr. Hero’ by the Blue Notes, ‘Today’s the Day’ by Gray, and ‘Bristol Stomp,’ of course.”

Post-Nuggets, Kaye worked with Smith from 1975 to 1979, and again since 1996, co-producing several of her albums. He had his own band, the Lenny Kaye Connection, during the ’90s and has produced albums for Suzanne Vega, Soul Asylum, James, Cindy Lee Berryhill, the Shams and others. He hosts The Lenny Kaye Program on SiriusXM’s Underground Garage channel, while his first-ever solo album, Goin’ Local, was released July 17.

While a proposed second volume for Elektra did not happen, Nuggets has been reissued in several incarnations, including the Sire reissue and expanded box sets in 1998 and 2023. Other Nuggets releases, not involving Kaye, include Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond, 1964–1969, Hallucinations: Psychedelic Pop Nuggets from the WEA Vaults, Come to the Sunshine: Soft Pop Nuggets from the WEA Vaults, Children of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the Second Psychedelic Era, 1976–1996, Love Is the Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965–1970 and Where the Action Is! Los Angeles Nuggets: 1965–1968.

“The lifeline of Nuggets is rather miraculous,” Kaye says. “The fact that we’re talking about it more than 50 years after this ‘oldies’ album was generated is remarkable. It’s great music. I believe Nuggets’ longevity is not just about garage rock; you really can take any genre and find great songs and make them a Nuggets. There’s always going to be an appetite for that history, and that discovery.”

By mid 1968, Tommy James and his group, the Shondells, had enjoyed a string of good-time AM radio singles, like “Hanky Panky,” “I Think We’re Alone Now” and “Mony Mony.”

But after the band returned home from a summer tour, James sensed a sea change was taking place. “FM radio was happening, and singles were being replaced by albums,” he says. “Songs were getting more serious. I realized that we had to move with the times, or else we’d be extinct.”

With that in mind, James and Shondells drummer Peter Lucia Jr. wrote “Crimson and Clover.” The transcendent, psychedelic-pop gem became the band’s biggest hit, spending 16 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 in late 1968 and early 1969, including two weeks at number one.

“Its impact was incredible,” James says. “It gave us the second half of our career.”

Verse After Verse

James began with the idea of combining two of his favorite words, which he thought sounded poetic as a phrase. After playing a concert, he and Lucia retired to their hotel room, where James played a Gibson Hummingbird while Lucia laid down a beat on pillows.

“I played these three ‘backward’ chords – B, F# and E – at the same time I did the lyrics,” James says. “We didn’t have a recorder with us, so we jotted it down on paper.”

They tried a few iterations of the song, one being, as James describes it, “kind of like James Taylor, with acoustic fingerpicking, but it sounded too dreamy, so we toughened it up.”

Within a few hours, they had enough of it sketched out. “It was kind of a funny thing,” James says. “It was verse after verse, which was also the chorus. That was the hook. We knew we could make it work in the studio.”

The Secret Ingredient

“Crimson and Clover” marked James’ debut as the producer of his own material and his introduction to recording in a 16-track studio, which allowed instruments to be kept separate for greater control during mixing.

“Stereo had become the big thing, and we had to keep up,” he says. The song was recorded in just five hours with Lucia, Shondells bassist Mike Vale and James, who played the bulk of the instruments, including the tremolo-laced electric guitar that became the song’s ear-catching sonic signature.

“I did the guitars using a Fender Jazzmaster through an Ampeg Gemini amp,” he recalls. “The tremolo became a crucial element of the song, and I even put it on my vocals for the fade.”

Album buyers were treated to even more ear candy with an extended mix that featured Shondells guitarist Eddie Gray playing steel guitar and wah and fuzz leads over a lengthy solo break.

“Tom, You’re Done”

Once the session was complete, James made a work tape of the song. “I knew it was a hit,” he says. “It was undeniable.”

While visiting the program director at WLS in Chicago, he played him the tape, and people at the station bootlegged it without his knowledge. “I got in my car and I heard, ‘Here’s a world exclusive on WLS.’ They played the freakin’ rough mix! It was crazy.”

By the time James got back to the New York offices of his label, Roulette Records, he had a situation on his hands. “We were afraid we had blown it with the other big Chicago station, WCFL, and we tried to get WLS to stop playing it, but they refused,” he says.

With “Crimson and Clover” lighting up the phones at WLS, Roulette rush-released the rough mix as the single. “I wanted to do a polished final mix, but I guess it was God’s way of telling me ‘Tom, you’re done.’ Several weeks later, we played the song on Ed Sullivan, and the next day it hit number one.”

“Crimson and Clover” went on to sell more than five million copies and has been covered by artists ranging from Joan Jett and the Blackhearts (who hit number seven with their version in 1982) to Cher (as a duet with her son, Elijah Blue).

James professes his love for all the covers he’s heard, but he singles out Prince’s version (which blends in a blast of the Troggs’ “Wild Thing”) as his favorite.

“Prince did such a futuristic treatment of the song,” he says. “His guitar playing on it was out of this world. He was always such a brilliant guitarist. I was really honored by what he did with ‘Crimson and Clover.’”

The mid-to-late ’60s psychedelic movement was a remarkable time when rock musicians began to see themselves as sonic pioneers, creating new sounds and developing innovative musical approaches.

The scene tends to be viewed, retrospectively, as limited to a few years of activity, mostly in London and on the U.S. West Coast. But in fact it was a much larger phenomenon that drove music, gear and production in innovative ways that are still relevant to this day.

But it had another impact, as well, in how it made us hear and think about sound.

I was born in the early 1960s and came of age, musically speaking, during the psych-rock boom. For my seventh birthday, I received a copy of the Doors’ Strange Days, an ambitious but odd record on which the band and their engineer, Bruce Botnick, experimented with electronics and new recording methods.

It joined my small but growing collection of albums, which included the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, a disc that gave the flowering psychedelic movement such gems as “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” and “In My Life,” with its baroque faux-harpsichord solo.

But I was about to go deeper into psychedelia’s ether.

About a year later, my collection came to include Their Satanic Majesties Request, one of the most reviled albums in the Rolling Stones’ catalog. Although it’s often dismissed as the group’s failed attempt to copy Sgt. Pepper’s, to my young ears it was a remarkable and even magical record.

Its wild sounds entranced me: bassist Bill Wyman’s heavily filtered vocals on “In Another Land,” the synthesizers that rendered wind effects and wild swoops on “2,000 Light Years From Home,” and the hammers and saws that popped up for no apparent reason on “She’s a Rainbow.”

But without a doubt, my favorite sound was Keith Richards’ distorted tremolo guitar tone on “Citadel,” one of the heaviest songs the Stones have ever written or recorded.

I don’t doubt for a second that Their Satanic Majesties Request molded and even warped my brain. It opened my mind to the magic of sound, which is how I’ve gravitated toward music, more than through stylistic choices.

It also made me question how those sounds were created, which sent me off on discoveries beyond the guitar and helped attune my ears to the intricacies of tone and frequency.

More than Sgt. Pepper’s, Satanic Majesties is the album that, for me, defines sonic experimentation and 1960s psychedelic music, with its indulgent and frequently headlong approach to songwriting, arranging and production.

It’s in that spirit of curiosity and discovery that we invite you to turn off your mind, relax and float downstream, beginning with the tripped out “Citadel” lyric video…

Would psychedelic rock have happened at all were it not for Jeff Beck?

As Eric Clapton’s replacement in the Yardbirds, Beck kicked off his 20-month tenure with ingenuity at his first recording session with the group, in April 1965, for “Heart Full of Soul.”

Though he soon moved on to blues rock and jazz fusion, Beck established a template for psychedelia – as well as heavy metal – during his time with the Yardbirds that would be followed by countless future guitarists.

Here are five game-changing tracks from the electric guitar innovator’s mid-'60s psychedelic era…

1. “Heart Full of Soul”

Ground zero for psychedelic guitar, “Heart Full of Soul” shows how ready, willing and able Beck was to cut a new facet in the British Invasion’s rock gem by emulating a sitar with his Fender Esquire through a Sola Sound Tone Bender, with the D string droning beneath his fuzz-toned Indian-tinged riff.

It was the launch of a new exotic era for rock.

2. “Shapes of Things”

Beck upped the psychedelic ante by layering two guitar solos on this 1966 follow-up to “Heart Full of Soul.”

Beneath his slithery fuzz-toned lines, he demonstrates his creative use of controlled feedback and string bending to produce demonic howls that reportedly influenced the Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s “East-West” and Jimi Hendrix’s sonic experiments.

“I started finding the resonant points on the neck where it came in best,” Beck said. “I loved it because it was a most peculiar sound that contrasted wildly with a plucked string, this round trombone-like noise coming from nowhere.”

3. “Over Under Sideways Down”

After creating this cut’s infectious rockabilly bass line, Beck strapped on his guitar and came up with the tune’s topsy-turvy lead line.

"We needed an intro, and Jeff peeled one out, an instantly recognizable peal that completely took us by surprise,” drummer Jim McCarty recalled.

Once again, he serves up a fuzz-toned lead line that melds classic rock and roll rhythms with Eastern exoticism.

4. “Jeff’s Boogie”

This souped-up take on Chuck Berry’s “Guitar Boogie” shows not only Beck’s guitar virtuosity but also the diversity of his range through its incorporation of rock, jazz and blues licks.

Combining hammer-ons, pull-offs, double-stops, false harmonics and more, Beck is a speed demon who could very well have claimed to be the godfather of shred.

5. “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago”

“We were on the threshold of this new thing,” Beck would say. “The Yardbirds were the first psychedelic band.”

No song demonstrates that better than this cut, one of just two that featured the Beck-Page guitar tandem.

Whereas Beck had previously relied on fuzz and exotic scales to produce his lysergic vibes, here he uses everything at his disposal to whip up a maelstrom of police sirens, revving motorcycle engines and squealing licks that send shivers up the spine. 

It’s the aural equivalent of a bad trip.

Written and produced by Jimi Hendrix and recorded by the Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1968 for the group’s third and final studio album, Electric Ladyland, “1983... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” has been widely praised by guitar players.

“His studio versions of “The Star Spangled Banner” and “1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” are unreal,” Joe Satriani told Guitar Player. “I would listen to that stuff for hours, and it would unlock these desires in me to try and create – with my own music – the experience of being a listener and getting off.”

“I didn’t know he wrote riffs like that,” said Warpaint’s Emily Kokal. “I always thought Hendrix was cool, but when I heard that song it instantly became my favorite.”

Now, Australian rockers Tropical Fuck Storm have honored the high priest of psychedelic rock’s original recording with their own epic version.

Described in the band’s press release as “an acid trip nosedive into another dimension,” TFS’s rendition of “1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” is recommended listening for those Hendrix fans with distinctly lysergic leanings.

Tropical Fuck Storm singer/guitarist Gareth Liddiard describes their version of “1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” as, “an attempt to right the recent wrongs perpetrated against Hendrix's classic Angel by some idiot from One Direction doing a karaoke-style ‘tribute’ for Jimi's 80th birthday.”

Appearing on the band’s new EP of covers, Submersive Behaviour, this timeless Hendrix track showcases Liddiard on vocals, guitars and drums along with fellow singers Erica Dunn and Fiona Kitschin and drummer Lauren Hammel. The track guest stars Dan Kelly and Aaron Cupples.

Also featuring a cover of the Stooges’ “Ann,” Tropical Fuck Storm’s Submersive Behaviour is available from today via Joyful Noise Recordings.

Order Tropical Fuck Storm’s Submersive Behaviour here.

There is perhaps no better example of classic-era psychedelic rock than the Electric Prunes’ 1967 single “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night).”

Selected by Lenny Kaye to lead off his seminal 1972 psychedelic compilation, Nuggets, the song checks all the essential boxes, including heavy tremolo and fuzz guitars and snaky Eastern-inspired lead lines that swell up from the record’s depths.

Credit for the latter goes to Ken Williams, who used his sunburst 1958 Gibson Les Paul – purchased for $285 in 1967 – to play the track’s stinging fuzzed-out intro.

“That would be my 15 minutes of fame,” Williams told ThePsychedelicGuitar.com. “Those are the hardest to make, as most players are so ready to show you they can shred.”

Starting out as a L.A. surf act in 1965, the Prunes landed a gig opening for Bo Diddley at the Troubadour before honing their trademark psychedelic sound.

Those stylings tended to obscure the fact that Williams was a terrific blues-rock guitarist, something immediately evident to anyone who’s heard his lead playing on “I Got My Mojo Workin’’’ and “Smokestack Lightning” from the Prunes’ live album, Stockholm 67.

Written by Annette Tucker and Nancie Mantz and recorded by the Electric Prunes at the behest of producer Dave Haddinger, "I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)" is the band’s second single and the lead track from their eponymous debut album.

“I came up with the title one day and called Nancie,” Tucker told spectropop.com. “She loved it and we wrote it the next day in one half hour.”

Following its release in November 1966, the "I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)" single peaked at number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in February 1967.

In the meantime, the band had appeared on the popular music-performance television show American Bandstand.

Aired in January 1967, this clip shows the band performing their famous single before long-time AB presenter Dick Clark helps introduces each member while chatting to singer James Lowe.

Browse the Electric Prunes catalog here.

They once featured future Manson Family member Bobby Beausoleil on guitar, and leader Arthur Lee was friends with Jimi Hendrix.

But Love stood out among the late-’60s psychedelic bands for other reasons, including their interracial lineup and a psychedelic approach that drew from Spanish styles rather than the typical Eastern influences.

The group started out performing a mix of garage rock and Byrds-influenced folk rock but took a more ambitious approach on their second album, 1966’s Da Capo, which incorporated baroque rock as well as jazz rock on the 18-minute jam “Revelation.”

But it was Forever Changes, from the following year, that established the group’s largely acoustic guitar-driven approach to psychedelia.

The tandem of lead guitarist Johnny Echols (who favored a Stratosphere Twin double-neck) and rhythm guitarist Bryan MacLean (often seen with a Gibson Barney Kessel) paired together smoothly on tracks like “Alone Again Or” and “Maybe the People Would Be the Times or Between Clark and Hilldale,” where Echols plied his nimble fretwork against MacLean’s steady rhythm.

Overlooked at the time, Forever Changes has gone on to be one of the most celebrated albums of the first psychedelic era, and one that continues to sound fresh rather than stylistically dated and derivative.

In this fantastic Vinyl Rewind interview, Echols shares some stories about Arthur Lee and the roots of Love in Memphis, Tennessee.

“He’s just always been there. He’s like my big brother,” says the guitarist. “I never knew a time in life (until, of course, when he passed) that he wasn’t there.”

Speaking of the early days, Echols reminisces about visits from his old friend, the “architect of rock ‘n’ roll,” Little Richard.

“He had relatives in the area, and he would always come by,” he recalls. “We would see him in the area and so everyone would rush over because Richard would hand out dollars.”

Elsewhere, Echols talks in-depth about the making of the Love classic Forever Changes.

“It was meant to be dark,” he explains. “It was a reflection of the times in which we lived.”

Browse the Love catalog here.

Erik Brann’s sustaining fuzz-toned lead lines and stinging vibrato made for quintessential psychedelia.

While San Diego’s Iron Butterfly are remembered best for their 1968 stoner-rock classic “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” they were also prog-rock pioneers cut from the same cloth as Deep Purple.

They performed everything from pop (“Flowers and Beads”) to proto-prog hard rock (“Are You Happy”).

But without question, Brann’s fuzz-wah-drenched workout on the 17-minute “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” is his finest moment on record.

From his snarling blues guitar riffing to the elephant trumpets he conjures up near the solo section’s conclusion, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” is a masterful display of musical prowess.

The track may have been pretentious then, and remains so now, but Brann’s performance crystalizes psychedelic electric guitar playing at this singular point in rock’s evolution.

Comprising side B of Iron Butterfly’s sophomore album In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida in its entirety, it is believed the LP’s title track was written by Doug Ingle in a single evening – during which time the vocalist/keyboardist/songwriter drank an entire gallon of Red Mountain wine.

So the story goes, when attempting to pronounce the song lyrics "in the Garden of Eden" for drummer/acting scribe Ron Bushy, the heavily inebriated Ingle could just about muster "in-a-gadda-da-vida.”

The album In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida was a massive success. It reached the number 4 position on the Billboard albums chart and shifted over 8 million units within a year of its release.

Worldwide, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida sold over 30 million copies and was America’s biggest-selling album of 1969.

The follow-up, Ball, was released in January ’69, and hit the number 3 spot on the Billboard charts.

Evidently, Iron Butterfly were a big deal. Yet despite their monumental success, Brann had decided to part ways with the band by the end of the year. This marked the end of the classic Iron Butterfly line-up, though the group would appear in various guises for decades to come.

Browse the Iron Butterfly catalog here.

At its best, psychedelic rock could transport listeners to alternate worlds with tableaux that evoked unusual settings and past eras, as the Beatles did with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

In this regard, it provided fertile ground for Pete Townshend’s growing musical ambitions.

After the Mod stylings of the Who’s first releases, Townshend plied his talents in psychedelia with 1967’s The Who Sell Out, a concept album structured as songs and commercials broadcast by a pirate radio station in London.

“At the time, there was this idea that there was a need to create these new things, and that we needed to create them very, very quickly,” Townshend told Guitar Player. “Because the notion in pop music was that everything was going to be so brief. We never realized that this music would still be around 50 or 60 years later.

While tracks like “I Can See for Miles” and “Magic Bus” stand out as obvious examples of his psychedelic leanings from this time, the songs “Tattoo” (with its early use of Leslied guitar) and “Silas Stingy” are excellent representations of how the genre provided artists like Townshend with a palette for creative storytelling and sound design.

Best of all was the group’s June 1968 single “Dogs,” a whimsical music hall-style number about greyhound racing that includes spoken-word passages.

Though it was a dog on the charts, it is nevertheless a masterpiece of psychedelic pop.

Browse the Who catalog here.

Songs like “Gold and Silver,” “Who Do You Love” and “Pride of Man” gave Quicksilver Messenger Service a sound that stood out from other hippie-era San Francisco bands.

But it was the impossibly slender lead guitarist John Cipollina (1943-1989) who stole the spotlight with his peekaboo ’do, biting tone and signature warbly vibrato.

Wearing two fingerpicks, Cipollina played a cherry-red Gibson SG that he customized with batwing pickguards, binding and a Bigsby tailpiece.

He also inlaid the fingerboard with ivory, added slabs of ebony on the headstock and neck heel to enhance sustain, and topped the control knobs with San Francisco Mint Mercury dimes.

This unique electric guitar was wired for stereo so that he could feed a rig consisting of a pair of Standel solid-state bass amps for the low frequencies and a pair of Twin Reverbs for the highs.

“I like the rapid punch of solid-state for the bottom and the rodent-gnawing distortion of the tubes on top,” he said.

Cipollina could also kick on a Fender Dual Showman tube amp head that powered six Wurlitzer horns, and his effects included reverb, an Astra Echo, a Standel Modulux vibrato, a Maestro Fuzz-Tone and a Vox wah.

“My love for electronic gadgetry has been a shaping influence on my playing,” he revealed. “The trick, however, is learning how to use them just a little bit.”

Browse the Quicksilver Messenger Service catalog here.

Moby Grape stormed onto the San Francisco scene in 1967 with their self-titled debut album.

That it happened at all was thanks to Columbia Records’ unprecedented promotion, the triple-electric guitar lineup of Peter Lewis, Skip Spence and Jerry Miller (who still plays the Gibson L-5 jazz guitar nicknamed Buelah that he purchased in 1966), and the fact that all five members wrote superbly crafted songs.

As experienced players, they had great groove and harmonious vocals that helped establish them as one of the pre-eminent psychedelic bands of the ’60s with songs such as “Can’t Be So Bad,” “8:05” and “Come in the Morning.”

It’s impossible not to still be knocked out by Spence’s “Omaha,” with its furious guitar assault that helped propel it to number 95 in Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time.

“I always thought the world of Moby Grape,” said Sam Andrew, guitarist and founding member of Big Brother and the Holding Company.

“They were guys who’d obviously been in clubs every night since the mid ’50s. It’s amazing what they came up with.

"Skip Spence and [bass player] Bob Mosley brought the psychedelic edge to that band, and they had a lot going.”

In this film clip from 1967’s historic Monterey International Pop Festival, Moby Grape give a storming rendition of “Hey Grandma” – the opening track from their psychedelic masterpiece debut album.

Just days earlier, “Hey Grandma” was released as a single in a bold marketing move by Columbia Records that involved the simultaneous release of four other singles from Moby Grape’s LP (ten of the album’s thirteen songs in total, including B-sides!)

"Hey Grandma" has since been covered by Robert Plant and the Black Crowes.

Following a warm, albeit slightly awkward, introduction by comedian Tom Smothers, “Columbia recording artists Moby Grape” hit the stage, opening up the second evening of this storied three-day Summer of Love festival.

That Saturday night, they were followed on stage by fellow Californian psychedelic rock legends the Byrds and Jefferson Airplane.

Browse the Moby Grape catalog here.

Even before he became famous, Kevin Parker, Tame Impala’s sole member, had no time for rock and roll showboating.

“The bands that rose to the top were always the crowd pleasers,” the multi-instrumentalist says of the scene in his hometown of Perth, Australia, when he was starting out in the mid ’00s.

“I always thought that was so lame.”

That stubborn refusal to please other people has never left Parker. When he released the first Tame Impala album, 2010’s Innerspeaker, what psych-rock scene there was existed largely underground.

Yet the album launched him on a journey that has seen him become a bona fide pop star and the collaborator of choice for everyone from Kanye West to Lady Gaga.

From the start, Parker envisioned Tame Impala as his thing and his alone. 

Creative autonomy gave him the freedom to experiment with sounds, styles and structures, without the hassle of compromise.

Some of the music he was writing was progressive, and some of it was more pop, but it was all heading in broadly the same direction.

By the time he released 2012’s Lonerism, this weird project he’d cooked up in a bedroom in Perth had inadvertently helped instigate a full-blown psych revival.

“[The term] psych was something I cringed at, because it was thrown around so much with my music,” he says.

Things have changed. He’s not just happier with the term these days, he says, but feels more connected than ever to his roots, something evident on Tame Impala’s latest, 2020’s The Slow Rush.

“The Slow Rush reminds me a lot more of that kind of free-flowing music that Innerspeaker has,” he says.

“Knowing now just how little of a clue I had with a lot of what I was doing [on Innerspeaker] makes me realize that maybe I have come a long way after all.”

Browse the Tame Impala catalog here.

The combination of Primus bass player Les Claypool and Sean Lennon was almost guaranteed to generate something off-the-wall and unworldly.

Claypool’s left-field sense of humor was apparent in his work with Primus, and Lennon had already dabbled in music that challenged the boundaries of the conventional with his band the Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger.

Claypool said of Lennon, “He plays things that I wasn’t expecting, and that always intrigues me.”

The first Claypool Lennon Delirium album, Monolith of Phobos, was released in 2016. 

Underpinned by Claypool’s gargantuan sound and thunderous grooves, Lennon revealed himself on the disc as an endlessly creative guitarist, fearlessly unleashing dexterously liquid electric guitar lines that constantly defy expectations, often while using a BilT Revelator with built-in effects.

Best described as prog-meets-psych (with a dash of funk and pop), their music is so varied that no two songs sound alike.

The band’s second album, South of Reality, released in 2019, refines their vision into a more cohesive overall project. While nothing on the album could be called conventional, the songs are full of infectious hooks and memorable solos that keep one’s interest even as the tracks extend past the six-minute mark.

It is easy to see why Lennon’s primary influence as a guitarist was Hendrix, and perhaps inevitably, given Lennon’s heritage, there is even a hint of the Beatles’ own forays into the realms of psych.

Featuring interviews with Claypool and Lennon, this concert film from the House of Blues in Boston, MA, showcases the band in fine form.

Browse the Claypool Lennon Delirium catalog here.

The Rolling Stones have announced the official digital release of their new (and improved) “2000 Light Years From Home” music video.

Appearing on the Stones' distinctly psychedelic 1967 album, Their Satanic Majesties Request and as the B-side of the “She’s a Rainbow” single, the Jagger/Richards-penned song was recorded at Olympic Studios in London.

The Summer of Love was a celebration of freedom for many, though Mick Jagger spent a small part of it banged up in Brixton prison on drugs charges where it is believed he wrote the song’s lyrics.

Having already dipped their toes in the psychedelic waters with the Between the Buttons LP earlier in the year, 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request saw the Stones fully immerse themselves in lysergic experimentation before swiftly returning to stripped-down roots rock with Beggars Banquet in 1968.

“The whole acid thing was a phenomenon,” recalled Keith Richards in a radio interview. “It hit with a bang. I don’t know what people really made of it. I still don’t, actually. Nobody knows what they made out of LSD…

“I tried it out, but I didn’t get carried away with it by myself, but a lot of people around me were definitely out there for quite an extended period of time. And probably didn’t come back.”

Directed by Peter Whitehead (1937-2019) – the notable filmmaker and author behind the Rolling Stones documentary Charlie Is My Darling: Ireland 1965 – the 1967 “2000 Light Years From Home” video has been resurrected in style.

Featuring staged performances by Jagger, Richards, Charlie Watts, Brian Jones and Bill Wyman, the A.V. Club describes “2000 Light Years From Home” as “one of the highlights of The Rolling Stones’ brief psychedelic phase.”

The new "2000 Light Years From Home" music video can be viewed on the Rolling Stones' popular YouTube channel and is just hours away from its premiere.

Be among the first to watch it by clicking the notification button...

Browse the Rolling Stones catalog here.

As the guitarist and main songwriter for Philadelphia’s Nazz, Todd Rundgren emerged in 1968 as a 20-year-old wunderkind of the budding power-pop genre.

His ambitious mix of musical styles doomed the group’s chances – imagine Eric Clapton leading the Who, with Laura Nyro on piano – but it resulted in psychedelic gems like “Open My Eyes,” “Forget All About It” and “A Beautiful Song,” an opus that merged all of Rundgren’s nascent musical interests into 11 breathtaking minutes of orchestrated proto-prog balladry.

He soon abandoned Nazz to make his mark largely as a piano-playing singer-songwriter, but in 1973, years after psychedelic rock had been laid to rest, Rundgren gave the genre a late, last gasp with his 1973 masterpiece, A Wizard, a True Star.

Riding high at the time from the success of his hit “Hello, It’s Me,” he abandoned his career as “the male Carole King” and set out to explore his emerging interest in the music of artists like Yes, Frank Zappa and John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Fortified by psychedelic mushrooms and Ritalin, Rundgren settled into his newly created New York City studio, Secret Sound, and began composing and recording the music of his mind.

The result was a psychedelic mashup of musical styles that included power-pop, hard rock, show tunes, blue-eyed soul and instrumental synth-pop.

Largely considered a career mistake at the time of its release, A Wizard, a True Star has since been celebrated as a landmark work of psychedelic electronica, and hailed by artists ranging from Trent Reznor to modern psychedelic acts like Tame Impala.

Rundgren’s bizarro sound explorations continued on his next release, 1974’s Todd.

Although notable mostly for the keyboard-driven hit “A Dream Goes on Forever,” it also saw him firmly re-embrace the electric guitar, the instrument with which he has ever since been associated.

Browse the Todd Rundgren catalog here.

After its raucous birth in the 1950s and early demise following Buddy Holly’s death, Chuck Berry’s imprisonment, Elvis Presley’s Army enlistment and Little Richard’s spiritual rebirth, rock ‘n’ roll shriveled up.

The epicene years from 1960 to 1964 had been a formative but difficult period in which garage rock bands claimed back a piece of the teen pop charts before the British Invasion groups led the way to a rock ‘n’ roll victory.

Those spirited rebels were anything but monolithic. Many brought together influences of early rock, folk, blues, soul, trad jazz and more.

It’s hardly surprising that the old formulas for songwriting and music production were inadequate to the aims of these young and ambitious performers.

Something had to change, and in 1965, it did, largely due to the work of guitarists.

Fuzz effects, once novelty devices on songs like the Venture’s “The 2000 Pound Bee,” were used in earnest by players like Jeff Beck and Keith Richards for their otherworldly tones, along with already established effects like tremolo and reverb.

It was Beck, too, who introduced the sonorities of Indian music to rock ‘n’ roll with his guitar, soon to be followed by George Harrison and Brian Jones, who did likewise by learning the rudiments of the sitar.

What followed was a radical reconfiguring of teen “beat” music.

In the hallowed halls of recording studios like London’s Abbey Road and Trident, this took place with serious application of orchestras, Mellotrons, electric pianos, harpsichords, organs and early Moog synthesizers.

In the dingy basements and dirty garages of teen bands in the U.S., it was evidenced instead by a deconstruction of norms: screamed vocals and fuzzed-out guitars plied against primitive, pummeling beats.

In either form, this was psychedelic rock.

The shocking new sounds fired off synapses in ways familiar to those who had taken LSD.

The drug had become popular in California’s youth culture, primarily in San Francisco, where the Grateful Dead were at the epicenter of Ken Kesey’s acid-fueled happenings, as well as in Los Angeles, where Byrds guitarists Roger McGuinn and David Crosby dropped LSD with the Beatles in the summer of 1965.

Within months, both of those bands would dramatically change their musical direction as acid opened their minds to new approaches to sound.

By late 1966, in London, a newly arrived guitarist christened Jimi Hendrix was conjuring up his own singular brand of psychedelic guitar rock.

He needed nothing more than a Stratocaster and Marshall stack to do so, but with assistance from early effects guru Roger Mayer, Hendrix blew down the walls and signaled the birth of a potent brew of blues-based psychedelia that redefined the electric guitar.

Rock ‘n’ roll was never the same.

Cream were a tight, powerhouse electric blues trio when they recorded their debut album, Fresh Cream, in 1966.

Shortly before its release, Eric Clapton came face-to-face with a force of nature called Jimi Hendrix and promptly permed his hair and upped his guitar game.

By the time Cream cut their 1967 follow-up, Disraeli Gears, in New York City over five days, they had integrated psychedelia’s surreal lyrics into a heavier riff-oriented blues-rock style.

By this point Clapton had begun playing a 1964 Gibson SG painted with psychedelic images by the Dutch art collective the Fool, an instrument that was key to the harmonically rich, vocal “woman tone” that would characterize his playing during this era.

He had also, notably, picked up a wah pedal that he slathered all over “Tales of Brave Ulysses” and through a fuzz box on “We’re Going Wrong” and “SWLABR” (an acronym for “She Was Like a Bearded Rainbow”).

Cream tempered their psychedelia against more traditional blues on their next two records, Wheels of Fire and Goodbye, by which time both psychedelic rock and the group itself were calling it a day.

Clapton’s longest-lasting contribution to the genre may well be his singular "woman tone" which remains both a hallmark of the era and a Holy Grail for many guitarists more than 50 years on.

In this classic clip from 1968, Clapton explains what each knob of his Fool SG does before  going on to play some signature Cream-era licks. 

First he gets something resembling his trademark "woman tone" before he turns up the treble.

But it gets even better. 

Clapton then engages his wah pedal and plays a few more licks before carefully explaining – and demonstrating – his "woman tone" around 2:00.

Browse the Cream catalog here.

If psych-rock was a fun experiment for some guitarists, it was a discipline for David Roback.

In 1983, after enjoying modest success with the Rain Parade, Roback departed to form the band Clay Allison with fellow Paisley Underground musician bassist Kendra Smith, formerly of the Dream Syndicate.

By 1984, they had changed their name to Opal, a beguiling name for a folk-country psychedelic outfit.

As much as the Rain Parade were psych-rock revivalists, Opal were intent on moving beyond the genre’s Byrdsian tropes.

On their sole full-length LP, 1987’s Happy Nightmare Baby, Roback peels off squalls of Crazy Horse-style distorted wah guitar on tracks like the loping country-punk “Relevation,” the stoner-rocker “Siamese Trap” and the ethereal noise jam “Soul Giver,” but he punctuates the proceedings with plenty of fine blues guitar lines, served up with a generous dose of distortion and reverb.

When Smith departed prior to their followup, Roback tapped Hope Sandoval, a young unsigned singer whose band he was producing.

Changing their name to Mazzy Star, they took their songs at a slower pace and with more bare-bones arrangements that worked his sensuous guitar lines against Sandoval’s tentative vocals.

Their best-known song, “Fade Into You,” is a good measure of their sound and a classic example of Roback’s neo-psychedelic “dream pop” approach.

It was also an odd and unplanned minor hit from an artist with no concern for commercial success.

“It doesn’t matter how well our records do,” he told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1990. “None of that matters, because we’re completely free.”

Despite his low exposure, or perhaps because of it, Roback proved influential to artists ranging from Nada Surf’s Matthew Caws to Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis.

He died from metastatic cancer on February 24, 2020.

Browse the Mazzy Star catalog here.

The Cure’s Robert Smith is vastly underrated as a guitarist, perhaps because his unique vocal stylings and distinctive image tend to overshadow his axe-ploits.

While early recordings by the Cure feature Smith working a minimalist groove, it was always clear that there was plenty more under the hood.

Smith’s friendship with Siouxsie and the Banshees’ bass player, Steve Severin, led to the idea of making an album together, and in 1983, they teamed up to release Blue Sunshine under the name the Glove.

The two musicians’ shared love of psychedelia delivered a record which has become something of a lost classic of the genre.

Smith maintained the psych vibe into the next Cure album, The Top, the following year.

His playing on both albums is expansive and almost visceral at times, in opposition to much of his work with The Cure.

He was clearly on a creative roll when he recorded The Top, perhaps emboldened by the artistic, if not commercial, success of Blue Sunshine.

“Shake Dog Shake” grinds and lurches, “The Caterpillar” builds dissonant layers of jarring tones, and throughout it Smith revels in exploring, expanding and demolishing the boundaries of what the Cure should sound like.

In one revealing quote, he offered a useful hint at how to obtain his sound, noting, “A lot of the things on our record that sound like heavy chorusing are actually just detuned instruments.”

Watch the music video here…

Browse the Cure catalog here.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the Dukes of Stratosphear were the most heartfelt tribute to classic 1960s psychedelia.

The act was a side project for U.K. new wave band XTC, dreamed up by guitarist and singer Andy Partridge, who pushed bandmates Dave Gregory (guitar) and Colin Moulding (bass) to write and produce an album that sounded like it was made in 1967.

In 1984, plans were drawn up and boundaries set for the project, to be released under the Dukes of Stratosphear pseudonym.

“There’s Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, the Yardbirds, plenty of psychedelic Beatles, the Byrds, the Hollies,” Partridge said at the time, rattling off the acts who influenced the effort.

“The criteria was to use older guitars, older amps and older techniques. We used the old thought as well. Everything was first take, which adds to that off-the-cuff feel a lot of those old records had.”

The first Dukes release, the six-track mini-album 25 O’Clock, appeared in 1985.

Partridge’s guitar work always stood apart from his contemporaries, his angular, dexterous riffs and rhythms mixed with soloing that never took the obvious route. But in the Dukes, both he and Gregory considerably expanded their range.

Extended guitar wig-outs were always a little frowned upon by the new wave taste police, but no such constraints applied to the excesses of the late-’60s psych giants.

Although XTC’s role in it was initially kept secret, 25 O’Clock outsold both that group’s previous album and its next record, 1986’s Skylarking, on which XTC continued to reflect their love for psychedelia.

Skylarking producer Todd Rundgren, no stranger to excess, was tailor-made to focus the band’s ambitions into a memorable album.

Partridge’s “Season Cycle” would be the record’s strongest indicator of XTC’s willingness to embrace the joys of late-’60s pop. Its melody and arrangement seemed to hop from Beach Boys-worthy lush harmonies to Beatles-like melodic hooks.

“That’s Really Super, Supergirl,” meanwhile, managed to ally the trademarked XTC spikey rhythmic pulse to a lush, densely layered wall of vocals, and Gregory’s effervescent solo – played on Eric Clapton’s The Fool SG, then owned by Rundgren – injected a dose of infectious tomfoolery into the proceedings.

Partridge needed little persuasion to start working up songs for Psonic Psunspot, the second Dukes album, released in 1987. The tunes were more tightly focused this time, but once again, the influences were everywhere and not too hard to spot.

The opener, “Vanishing Girl,” was more mid-’60s pop than psychedelia, but “Have You Seen Jackie” took the band back firmly into the world of “Arnold Layne”-esque Floyd. There was plenty of Sgt. Pepper’s-era Beatles as well, and the inevitable hint of the Byrds on “You’re My Drug.”

Partridge and Gregory didn’t get as many opportunities to take flight on their guitars, and the album was much more song-focused than its predecessor, but they still crammed in a psychedelic masterclass, with magical fills, twists and turns.

XTC’s Oranges & Lemons, from 1989, was the logical conclusion of the four-album psych-cycle.

The group was still instantly recognizable as the one that turned the new wave rule book on its head, but the depth and breadth of songwriting and invention reached a new peak.

XTC seemed to be fully liberated from the need to observe any rules or conventions, letting the music take them wherever the muse led them.

In addition to creative freedom, it gave them a chart hit in the U.S. with “The Mayor of Simpleton,” a track on which XTC found their voice between the excesses of the late ’60s and the economy of the new wave aesthetic.

Browse the XTC catalog here.

Operating under the banner of the Paisley Underground, bands like the Three O’Clock, the Rain Parade, the Dream Syndicate and – the movement’s most successful group – the Bangles merged elements of late-1960s jangle rock with the DIY aesthetic and attitude of the then-recent punk movement.

In the spirit of the British Invasion groups who covered classic rock and roll, the Paisley Underground bands were less concerned about fidelity to any classic sensibility and more interested in adding their own interpretation to it.

The Three O’Clock demonstrated range beyond the psych-rock realm, and guitarist Louis Gutierrez pounded out slashing power chords and circular riffs with his Rickenbacker 330 and Fender Telecaster that made the band the most rocking of the scene.

The Dream Syndicate drew influences from the well of New York City acts like the Velvet Underground and Television, something evident on their single “Tell Me When It’s Over.”

But guitarist Steve Wynn could also deliver feedback-drenched jams like “The Days of Wine and Roses” that harkened back to psychedelic’s classic era.

The Rain Parade were the most traditional of the groups. Guitarists David Roback and Matt Piucci laid down lovely arpeggiating melodies in Byrds-like fashion, and their debut album, 1983’s Emergency Third Rail Power Trip, was filled with flourishes of backward guitar, fuzz-tone and tremolo.

In the end it was the Bangles who would make the biggest impression of the Paisley Underground groups.

Guitarists Susanna Hoffs and Vicki Peterson had solid power-pop chops with their respective Rickenbacker 320 and Vox electric guitars.

And while there was little traditionally “psychedelic” about the Bangles, they showed flashes of it early on in songs like “Going Down to Liverpool” (penned by former Soft Boys guitarist Kimberley Rew for his next group, Katrina and the Waves), “Dover Beach” and the Byrds-ian jangle of “Tell Me,” and “Where Were You When I Needed You.”

The Paisley Underground would influence many groups, including the U.K.’s Teardrop Explodes and Echo and the Bunnymen.

But its most significant adherent was Prince, who began to adopt psychedelic elements into his 1980s recordings and even called his label Paisley Park Records.

He eventually signed up the Three O’Clock and wrote the Bangles’ 1986 monster hit “Manic Monday.”

With Jeff Beck’s departure from the Yardbirds in 1966, Jimmy Page took over lead guitar duties and assumed a more directorial role.

Although this marked the Yardbirds’ most commercially unsuccessful period, it also produced some of their most overtly psychedelic rock.

On 1967’s Little Games, Page played his guitar with a bow on the middle break of “Tinker Tailor,” used DADGAD tuning on the acoustic guitar jam “White Summer,” employed audio loops on “Glimpses,” and combined distortion and wah on the October 1967 single “Ten Little Indians.”

As the Yardbirds transitioned to Led Zeppelin, Page’s psychedelic efforts continued to a lesser extent but with decidedly more skill.

The solo break on “Dazed and Confused” shows him merging psychedelic rock into hard rock, while the trippy “Whole Lotta Love” finds him conjuring atonal guitar swells and sirens sounds.

While the first psychedelic rock era had died out by 1970, Page continued to explore elements of it in songs like “Friends,” “Achilles Last Stand” and “Kashmir,” the latter two of which aren’t so far removed from the dirge-like incantations of Yardbirds cuts like “Still I’m Sad” and “Glimpses.”

Taking those signature sounds with him from the epicenter of ‘60s psychedelia, Page greatly expanded the sonic palette of ‘70s hard rock, though his taste for the exotic goes back a long way.

Speaking to Guitar Player in this exclusive interview, the guitarist revealed how after going to great lengths to source a sitar, he was finally shown how to tune the instrument by none other than Ravi Shankar.

“I’d listened to Indian music,” said the Led Zep legend. “I’d accessed that on the radio, and this was way in advance of the Beatles. My father worked in a factory near Heathrow where they made wire and cables. Not guitar cables – big industrial stuff.

“He was the personnel manager, and there were a lot of Asians working there, and I said, ‘Dad, would you ask around and see if anyone there knows anything about sitars? See if anyone can access one from over there.’

“There was a guy who said he’s going to get one sent over, and it arrived in this makeshift plywood box… I took out the sitar, and there was this beautiful thing. I had absolutely no idea how to play it. There are all these sympathetic strings on a sitar, so as I plucked one string, the whole thing started to resonate and I thought, Oh my God!

“Sonically, all my learning was from listening to things and making my own interpretations of what I heard, but this was something else! Of course, later I got to meet Ravi Shankar at a concert in London. My friend and I were the only two young people there, and he gave me the tuning for the sitar.”

Browse the Led Zeppelin catalog here.

The Byrds were among the first bands to have success in the folk-rock genre in 1965, with their jangling electric version of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” featuring Jim (Roger) McGuinn’s languid vocals and ringing 12-string fretwork on a Rickenbacker 360/12.

The group continued in this vein over the next year and two albums, during which time they also released their hit folk-rock cover of Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!”

But with 1966’s “Eight Miles High,” they made what is considered the breakthrough psychedelic recording, with McGuinn channeling the cascading modal melodies of saxophonist John Coltrane and funneling them through the ragas of sitarist Ravi Shankar.

While touring the U.S. in 1965, McGuinn had acquired an early portable cassette deck and recorded Coltrane’s Africa/Brass and Impressions albums, along with some music by Shankar, who was then becoming popular in the West.

As McGuinn told The Guardian, the Byrds’ nascent attempt at psychedelia “actually came about as a tribute to John Coltrane.

“It was our attempt to play jazz... I was in love with his saxophone playing,” he said. “All those funny little notes and fast stuff at the bottom of the range.”

McGuinn’s guitar for much of this classic era was his Rickenbacker 360/12, which he purchased after seeing George Harrison play one in A Hard Day’s Night.

He added a Vox Treble Booster to his setup in 1966 at the suggestion of Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner, who also played a Rickenbacker 12-string.

“I took the Rick apart and installed it in the guitar,” McGuinn said.

Compression, a key element to his sonorous guitar sound, was added liberally in the studio, although McGuinn never found an outboard compressor that he liked well enough to use in performance.

“Not until Rickenbacker designed my signature guitar with the built-in compressor did I find one that worked for me,” he said of his late-1980s 370/12 RM model.

A visual history of the group’s remarkable trip comes together in The Byrds: 1964–1967, a 400-page art book curated by McGuinn and former members David Crosby and Chris Hillman.

Visit byrdsbook.com for more information

Formed in 1965 by guitarists Mark Loomis and Ned Torney, the Chocolate Watchband released their first album, No Way Out, in 1967 and followed it a year later with The Inner Mystique.

The guitar work of Loomis (who died in 2014) was inventive and refreshingly original, his playing delightfully angular and completely devoid of cliches.

No doubt the The Chocolate Watchband’s sound was strongly influenced by their early interest in covering songs by obscure British groups instead of playing Top 10 hits like everyone else.

“Dark Side of the Mushroom” offers a good taste of how Loomis orchestrated guitar parts, as do “I Ain’t No Miracle Worker” and “Gossamer Wings,” both tour-de-force examples of the outside-the-box songwriting and production values that made the group one of the most organic and original-sounding psychedelic bands of the time.

Although the CWB have dissolved and reformed many times, they reunited and got back in the studio in 2013 (with guitarist Tim Abbott replacing Loomis) to record the critically acclaimed album This Is My Voice.

To wit, the debut single, “Secret Rendezvous” was heralded as the “coolest song in the world” on Little Steven’s Underground Garage program in February 2019.

Browse the Chocolate Watchband's catalog here.

Born in the full glory of the psychedelic era, the Grateful Dead began their journey as Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions before morphing into an electric band called the Warlocks, in 1965.

As guitarist Bob Weir told GP senior editor Jas Obrecht in 1997, “We were still the Warlocks when we played the first Kool-Aid Acid Tests [a series of multimedia/LSD events hosted by author Ken Kesey], and by that time we were taking LSD and playing psychedelicized.

“We began turning up loud pretty quickly. From the start it was faster, looser, louder and hairier. We were going to see what this baby’ll do. It helped that we were playing in an uncritical situation.

“What didn’t help was that we were completely disoriented, so we had to fend for ourselves and improvise. We got better at it as time went on, so we could take a pretty massive dose and hang in there for a while.”

Classic psychedelic-era Dead tunes include the strangely beautiful “Rosemary” (from 1969’s Aoxomoxoa); “The Eleven” (1969’s Live/Dead), a mostly instrumental jam in 11/4 that features wall-to-wall wailing by Garcia; “China Cat Sunflower” (Europe ’72), with its interlocking guitar riff creating the counterpoint to one of Robert Hunter’s most mesmerizing compositions; and “Viola Lee Blues” (1967’s The Grateful Dead), of which bassist Phil Lesh said, “To my ear, it’s the only track that sounds at all like we did at the time.”

Weir also cited a November 1965 version of “Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)” as representing the band’s truest acid vision.

“That was sort of an ironic name for the tune, because caution was anything but what the tune was about.

"By the first album [1967’s The Grateful Dead] we had moved past our psychedelic era. We had gotten to a point of diminishing returns after taking acid for a couple of years.

“We’d started going back to the same places, and so it seemed, Okay, we got what we could out of that. Let’s move on. We didn’t turn our backs on it so much as we started looking in other directions.

“It sure as hell contributed to a willingness to listen to, and try to beg, borrow or steal from, other musical forms.”

Browse the Grateful Dead catalog here.

Formed in Los Angeles in 1965, the Doors turned their vision of psychedelic music into a pop phenomenon that resulted in millions of records sold in the wake of recording six studio albums in five years.

The Doors didn’t ride the same wave that buoyed rock bands from the San Francisco scene, and, perhaps because of that, the music that Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore created is timeless.

Innate talent may have been the main reason why the band developed so quickly, although having a residency at L.A.’s London Fog – where they played four to five sets a day – as well as becoming the house band at the Whisky A Go Go on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip certainly helped them forge their sound.

However, to account for what the Doors accomplished, one has to appreciate how the sum of the parts made the magic happen.

“Jim told us at the very beginning, ‘I’ve got this concert in my head. I’d like you guys to help me get it out,’” John Densmore recalls.

Morrison’s behavior was unpredictable, to be sure, but he was a poet who possessed a voice like no other.

As Krieger says, “Jim had the most amazing vocal range I’ve ever heard. And not only the range but the power – and he was never out of tune. Jim was a total natural.”

Krieger was influenced by players that ranged from flamenco-master Sabicas to Chuck Berry, Albert King, Wes Montgomery, Bob Dylan and Ravi Shankar (to name a few), but it’s not easy to pin down where outside influences show up in his songs, even the early ones he wrote, such as “Light My Fire,” “Love Her Madly,” “Touch Me” and “Love Me Two Times.”

“Honestly,” Krieger says, “I only stole guitar ideas to write songs out of them, never to copy someone else’s playing style.

“The only exception to that might be Duane Allman, whose slide style I really dug.”

What we know is that Robby came into his own with astonishing speed after moving from flamenco and folk to electric guitar, where his jazz-inspired playing and round, rich tone quickly become sonic signatures for the Doors, particularly on “Light My Fire,” where Krieger’s melodic lead so perfectly balances Manzarek’s charging, harpsichord-like organ work and Morrison’s charismatic crooning and screaming.

On the early albums, Krieger played a 1964 Gibson SG Special with P-90s, which he mainly ran through Fender Twin Reverbs, often adding a Maestro Fuzz-Tone for grind.

In the studio, he says, “I always like to be really near the amp, to keep the dynamics going between the guitar and amp.

“Engineers would always want to put the amp in an iso booth, but that never worked for me.”

He also varied his fingerstyle technique to get the sounds he was after, such as, intentionally or not, making the solo on “Roadhouse Blues” sound like he was using a pick.

“Robby never played with a pick,” Densmore recalled. “He had these long fingernails on his right hand from playing flamenco, so when he’d take a solo or play a riff, he would play it with his fingers.

“They’d sort of crawl across the strings like a crab. It gave him this very unique, liquid style, a gloriously impressionistic sound.”

Browse the Doors catalog here.

History has not been kind to Randy California. His name is stubbornly linked to his estate’s failed lawsuit claiming Jimmy Page and Robert Plant copied his 1968 composition “Taurus” to write “Stairway to Heaven.”

He should be remembered instead for his work with the band Spirit and as one of the great early hard rock guitarists.

Born Randy Craig Wolfe, he was a 15-year-old Los Angeles transplant when he met Jimi Hendrix at Manny’s Music in New York City, in 1966, and joined his band, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames.

It was Hendrix who dubbed him “California,” to distinguish him from the group’s bassist, Randy Palmer (whom Hendrix nicknamed “Texas,” also for reasons of geography).

When Chas Chandler took Hendrix off to London, California and his stepfather, drummer Ed Cassidy, formed their own group with singer Jay Ferguson, bassist Mark Andes and keyboardist John Locke.

Calling themselves Spirit, the band debuted in 1968 with their self-titled debut, a psychedelic pop masterpiece that featured “Taurus.”

A U.S. tour that year saw Led Zeppelin as their opening act, a stint that would later bolster claims that Page had more than a passing familiarity with Spirit’s music.

The group drifted from psychedelia for its next two releases, although California’s “I Got a Line on You,” from 1968’s The Family That Plays Together, and “Dark Eyed Woman,” from 1969’s Clear, were cut firmly in the style.

Spirit returned to the genre in earnest with 1970’s Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, their lowest-charting album at that point, although, ironically, it included a song for which the band remains well-known today, the folk-rock tune “Nature’s Way.”

What’s remarkable about California’s guitar playing is not just his stinging tone or versatility with everything from blues and folk to the blistering maelstrom of wails that peals over the outro of “Nothing to Hide.”

It’s also his supreme gift for melody that graces his solos.

Early on, he used a Danelectro U56, but later photos show him with Fender Stratocasters, Gibson Les Pauls and an Ampeg Dan Armstrong Lucite guitar.

Consistent to his setup for at least the first four Spirit albums was a Jordan Bosstone jack-mounted fuzz unit, which he taped to his guitar’s body for extra security onstage.

Among the best examples of his psychedelic skills can be heard in “I Got a Line on You,” “Uncle Jack,” “Mechanical World,” “Dark Eyed Woman” and his harmonized solo on “1984.”

In this fascinating interview clip from the early '80s, California recalls his time spent with high priest of the psychedelic era, Hendrix, in New York during the mid-‘60s.

“We hooked up spiritually, mentally, and he invited me to play with him,” says the guitarist. “It was his first solo gig at the Cafe Wha?

“We played for three months together; five sets a night, every night of the week except Sunday.”

Browse the Spirit catalog here.

If the Summer of Love had a poster-child band, it was Jefferson Airplane, who started out playing the folk rock featured on their first album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off.

But in 1967, with Grace Slick taking over as lead singer, their album Surrealistic Pillow soared into the stratosphere, fueled by “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit.”

Guitarist Jorma Kaukonen (who gave the band its name) was a folk and country-blues fingerpicker whose style was heavily influenced by having spent his youth in Pakistan, where he would listen to local sitar players, something that was very evident in his snaky phrasing.

“The fact that I had listened to a lot of ethnic music played a role in what I did with the Airplane,” he said.

“I also didn’t really know how to play the electric guitar, so I was open to adapting a lot of stuff, which is where things like the moderately psychedelic solos on ‘White Rabbit’ and ‘Somebody to Love’ were coming from.

“People say, ‘How did you figure that out?’ My answer is, ‘I didn’t know any better.’ I couldn’t figure out how to do a lot of the stuff that I heard people like Michael Bloomfield doing, so I just dicked around until that came out.”

Kaukonen says the band’s first truly psychedelic album was 1967’s After Bathing at Baxter’s, mainly due to the jamming.

“At that time we were getting into the technology of learning how to play electric instruments in the style that became our benchmark, and that was the first time where [bassist] Jack Casady and I really start to stretch out.”

Kaukonen also discovered the wah-wah in 1967 and moved from a Guild Thunderbird (as heard on Surrealistic Pillow) to a Gibson ES-345 stereo guitar that he ran though four Fender Twin Reverbs.

“The front pickup was the wah channel and the back pickup was the Ampeg Scrambler channel. That was it.”

Kaukonen called the 1968 live album Bless Its Pointed Little Head “the essence of what the Airplane did.” He and Casady formed Hot Tuna in 1969 and have released some 21 albums.

Jefferson Airplane showcased their live prowess during this period at the historic 1969 Woodstock festival. 

Following the Who, Sly and the Family Stone, Janis Joplin, Grateful Dead, Santana and other such legends onto the stage that day, the band performed a spellbinding rendition of "White Rabbit" that perfectly encapsulates the sound of the late '60s psychedelic rock era.

Browse the Jefferson Airplane catalog here.

Browse the Hot Tuna catalog here.

Australia’s King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have an extensive back catalog that embraces everything from ’70s stomping glam to thrash metal, surf music and jazz.

For many, however, the band is most readily identified as part of the ongoing revival of psychedelia and prog rock that has informed so many artists’ work, whether openly acknowledged or not.

It wasn’t until the band released their third album, 2013’s Float Along – Fill Your Lungs, that they fully embraced the psych ethic.

“Head On/Pill,” the 16-minute-long opening track, comes out of the gate with every trick in the playbook. 

Electric sitar? Check. 

Ambient, spaced-out grooves? Check. 

Incoherent, vaguely meaningful lyrics? Check.

Five minutes in, it morphs into a Hawkwind-like “Silver Machine” boogie, with guitars and keyboards swirling in a hazy whirlwind of stoned delight.

Singer/guitarist Stu Mackenzie and fellow six-string comrades Joey Walker and Cook Craig are constantly looking for ways to expand the guitar’s traditional role and break with the predictable song structures.

They took this approach beyond expectations with their 2017 experimental album, Flying Microtonal Banana, the first of five records the group released that year.

Mackenzie charged the band with modifying their instruments to be able to play the complex microtonal music referenced in that album’s title, inspired by a guitar he’d acquired and similarly named.

Mackenzie has acknowledged that, with three guitarists in the band, the potential for overkill and chaos is always there.

That said, the division of labor is carefully thought out and, despite the number of players onboard, extended guitar solos are in surprisingly short supply in their music.

Mackenzie notes that none of the guitarists were strongly influenced by guitar-driven artists, and, consequently, King Gizzard’s approach is primarily textural, probing at the possibilities to open up new sonic dimensions.

While the band’s interest in an unconventional microtonal approach may be the logical end result of their quest for the road less traveled, it is actually informed by a love for great songs.

Strip back the elaborate thematic and rhythmic approaches that King Gizzard employ, and you’ll find that at the heart of most of their work lies a strong sense of melody and composition.

Given their ongoing search for the unconventional, it’s perhaps not surprising that the guitarists of King Gizzard prefer cheap ’60s bargain-basement gear, though they also play instruments constructed for them by Australian luthier Zac Eccles.

In common with the forerunners of the genre, King Gizzard’s psych leanings are very evident in their exploration of non-Western stringed instruments.

The use of the sitar is a given for so many acts reflecting their ’60s influences, but King Gizzard go much further, utilizing such exotic instruments as the Persian setar and a Turkish baglama.

The moveable frets of both instruments were key to Mackenzie’s microtonal flights of fantasy, although he was just as happy to butcher existing guitars to achieve the result that he heard for the band.

King Gizzard’s ongoing desire to push back the boundaries puts them as firmly in the prog rock camp as the psych camp, but for lovers of the unconventional and unpredictable, the band’s music is endlessly rewarding.

Browse King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s catalog here.

Visit the band's website here.

No player bridged psychedelic San Francisco’s acoustic and electric guitar waters like Jerry Garcia.

To see what I mean, delve into the historic details of Jerry’s Herringbone Martin D-28 and his “Alligator” Fender Stratocaster in my recent features on the Grateful Guitars Foundation.

Honored with the opportunity to record a track using them at Lucky Recording Company, I reworked one of Garcia’s signature acoustic guitar tunes.

Check out Alligator’s flexibility on this Grateful Guitars cover of “Friend of the Devil.” 

Here are insights I discovered on that epic trip…

Original Insights

“Friend of the Devil” was written by Garcia and John Dawson (New Riders of the Purple Sage) with lyricist Robert Hunter.

The Dead’s studio version from 1970’s American Beauty begins with a simple descending motif played by David Nelson (New Riders of the Purple Sage) that is quickly joined by Garcia’s meandering acoustic licks.

David Grisman’s groovy mandolin playing adds to the acoustic jamboree.

Tuning is standard, in the key of G. The main motif is a diatonically descending G major scale played in quarter notes that outlines a I to IV verse chord progression: Play a bar of G, plus a bar of C, and then repeat.

The chorus chords are D and Amin7.

You can play everything in open position if you start the motif on the open G string, but peeping live videos of Garcia, I notice he begins in third position on the fourth string before switching to open position.

He starts by using the third finger for the G at the fifth fret, followed by the second finger at the fourth fret for F#.

He then switches to open position to play the E at the second fret with his second finger, followed by the open D string.

Jerry plays the second half of the motif out of a C chord formation, walking the bass notes on the fifth string from C down to B, hitting the open A string and landing on the G at the third fret of the sixth string.

Interestingly, he sometimes played that using his pinkie. He probably found it easier to stretch that way while holding the top half of the C chord above, which equates to an Amin7 with a G in the bass at that point.

Cop a Swing Feel

The studio version has a swing feel: “1 a-2, 3 a-4.” You can achieve it by plucking a ghostly G note with an upstroke on the open third string for the “a” while using downstrokes to play the main quarter notes.

As the tune progresses, it takes on a jubilant, rollicking feeling. For a galloping giddy-up, try using a “down, down-up-down” plucking pattern to achieve a feel of “1 and a 2 and a 3 and a 4.”

That can either be precisely focused on individual notes, or opened up for a lively feel like boom chicka boom chicka.

For the latter, downstroke on the first note, then do a down-up stroke on the second and third strings for maximum chordal resonance.

Next Level: Open It Up

Put the guitar in open G to add more jangle (low to high: D G B D G B). Play both halves of the lick Jerry’s way, as the fingering now remains the same.

For chords, try a partial barre instead of a full one. For example, find the V chord at the seventh fret, but only barre strings five through three. Leave the top two and the bottom string ringing open for a huge D.

Use that same partial barre to add cool suspensions in the chorus and bridge, which includes II, IV and V chords played at the second, fifth and seventh frets, respectively.

Advanced Level: Try It My Way

Honoring Garcia’s creative spirit, I spiced up the rhythm and applied the A modal tuning associated with my group, Spirit Hustler (low to high: E A E E A E).

I brought the key up to B for vocal considerations, using a capo at the second fret.

The root is still on the fifth fret, and the partial-barre trick applies similarly.

Refer to this Frets Learn article to cop the “fingerstyle slap” technique I incorporated to take “Friend of the Devil” to another level.

Jimmy Leslie has been Frets editor since 2016. See many Guitar Player– and Frets-related videos on his YouTube channel, and learn about his acoustic/electric rock group at spirithustler.com.

Although his career now spans six decades, and luminaries from former R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck to Silence of the Lambs director Jonathan Demme count among his admirers and collaborators, 69-year-old singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock has never had the sort of mainstream success that would allow him to stop being a very much working musician.

Before the COVID lockdown, the London-born Hitchcock, who now splits his time between the British capital and Nashville, was still averaging almost 100 solo acoustic shows a year, crisscrossing the globe – often with his wife, the singer Emma Swift – to perform for the devoted fans of his often surreal and spidery brand of pop.

“When lockdown came, all the income dried up, so we had to make money somehow,” Hitchcock says. “So we started Patreons and doing our bi-weekly Live From Sweet Home Quarantine internet broadcasts, which was great when there was nowhere else to go and nothing to do.”

The performances – which often featured Swift on backing vocals, as well as appearances by the couple’s two Scottish Fold cats, Tubby and Ringo, a plush Gorilla named the Edge, and Perry the stuffed lobster – kept the couple solvent.

And when he wasn’t preparing for the show, Hitchcock found his isolation to be uniquely productive. “Artistically, it was wonderful,” he says. “It gave me time to do some painting that I never would have gotten to otherwise.

“And of course, it gave me time to start recording Shufflemania!”

Using a Zoom H6 recorder to capture most of his guitars and vocals, Hitchcock then enlisted an impressive group of friends to flesh out the album’s tracks.

Former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr contributes guitars, bass and drums to the ethereal “The Inner Life of Scorpio,” Sean Lennon adds Mellotron, celeste, Hohner Clavinet and more to the cautiously optimistic “One Day (It’s Being Scheduled),” and the Raconteurs’ Brendan Benson and Wilco’s Patrick Sansone also provide valuable assists.

Two members of Hitchcock’s legendary late-’70s group, the Soft Boys, are also on hand: Drummer Morris Windsor flies in vocal harmonies on the aforementioned “One Day…” and guitarist Kimberley Rew (guitarist for Katrina & the Waves and the composer of their hit “Walking on Sunshine”) performs on the darkly humorous “Socrates in Thin Air” and the driving “The Sir Tommy Shovel.”

It’s a typically Hitchcockian combination of tuneful absurdism, existential dread and pure power-pop bliss, one that the singer hopes will bring his fans some measure of solace at a time where the world seems to be perpetually teetering on the brink.

“I’m an anxious person, and maybe my view is skewed 13 percent to the dark side,” Hitchcock states. “But we have pestilence and famine, and you could have nuclear war by Christmas, right?

“And one of the functions of music is to keep people company, to let you know that someone else is there. The records that I listened to as a teenager and could still go back to, like Love’s Forever Changes, or Revolver, or Blonde on Blonde, their main function has always been to be like a voice in my ear going, ’You are not alone. Whatever you feel about life or how sad it is is reflected here.’

“And I suppose that’s the job that I have now, to give people, if not hope, then at least something to believe in.”

Watching your Live from Sweet Home Quarantine broadcasts, it seems like you relied primarily on three acoustic guitars: a British-made Fylde, a Larrivée and a ’60s Gibson Folksinger. Which guitar does what for you?

My first Fylde Olivia, Olivia I, is my absolute go-to guitar. I’ve had it for about 40 years, and I started playing it on the album I Often Dream of Trains. It’s also on the songs “Balloon Man” and “Queen of Eyes.” It’s got a rather wide neck, which I prefer. The other guitars you mentioned I generally use for different tunings.

What are some of your favorite tunings? Did you use any in particular on Shufflemania!?

There are three or four that I use pretty frequently. I’ll often just drop the low E to D, but I also like open G, which is D G D G B D, and DADGAD. On the new record I actually used a variant of DADGAD, D A D G A E, on several songs like “The Man Who Loves the Rain.”

Another one that I made up and like is F G C G C E. You can hear that on the song “Heliotrope’ from my album Moss Elixir. I never play it live, because I can’t put my guitar in that tuning and then go back, and I can’t afford a guitar tech to travel around and do that stuff for me.

And then there’s a lost tuning: I used it on the song “The Green Boy,” from A Star for Bram, and I can’t remember what it was. People have written in suggesting what it might be, but that one’s gone.

Did you use any of those when you were in the Soft Boys?

You know, if I started playing the guitar in 1967, I think I learned to tune it in 1968. Then I got a guitar that was actually in tune in 1969, and I started playing electric seriously with the Soft Boys in 1977.

So I don’t think I put the guitar into open tuning on electric at all. I kept it really straight.

The sinewy interplay that you had in the Soft Boys with the other guitarist, Kimberley Rew, is in full evidence on “Socrates in Thin Air” and “The Sir Tommy Shovel,” the two tracks where he appears on Shufflemania! Did the two of you have to work at developing that kind of musical dialogue?

I think we immediately had a guitar battle, actually! I mean, he was three times better than me, and twice as loud. As I say, Kimberley could drown you out on a tennis racket. [laughs]

Kim was the prodigy genius guitar player in Cambridge in the mid ’70s. When I got to town, everybody said, “Oh, Rew, he’s the best guitar player in Cambridge.” And it took us about two years to get him into the Soft Boys.

Once he was in the band, I just kind of defiantly played in my channel and he played in his. It’s probably a much happier process now.

You once referred to the years 1969 and 1970 as being “the great bullshit years of the guitar,” because players of that era developed an over-reliance on blues tropes. Was that something you were very conscious of avoiding as a young guitar player?

Even by the end of 1967, you had Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton and a few others who were obviously brilliant.

And then you had another 200 people who played like that. And people also realized that they could get a record deal without really having songs. All they had to have was long hair, long jams and, you know, the attitude. So my instinct was just not to bother to try to learn to play like Eric Clapton.

Also, none of the groups I liked best had conventional guitar heroes, but they all had that very incisive playing. People like Barry Melton from Country Joe and the Fish. That band had a rhythm section that weren’t seasoned rock players. It was sort of quite tentative, but they made nice landscapes, and Barry Melton could play some really exciting lead guitar that was a little bit raga-ish.

I also particularly like Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band. I got Trout Mask Replica as an import when I was 15, and it was so expensive that I had to learn to love it. [laughs]

And then there was the Velvet Underground. Lou Reed, when he played lead, would play what we called “torture guitar.”

Davey Lane, who formed the Australian band You Am I, plays on “The Raging Muse.” Those lead parts are very incisive and aggressive, almost reminiscent of the guitars on the Bowie “Berlin Trilogy” albums of the late ’70s.

Oh yeah, yeah. I know what you mean. You mean something off Low. I think the keyboard that my mixer, Charlie Francis, put on it also adds to that. That’s one of my tendencies: If I think something is similar to something else, I make it more so.

I would probably be more of an innovator if I did the opposite. Like, “This song sounds like John Lennon so, let’s put banjo on it!” But I try to the make music I like. And I suppose that some of what I like is so old [laughs] that that’s why you get echoes of the past like that.

Order Shufflemania! by Robyn Hitchcock here.

Psychedelic rock owes much to the Fab Four, and not just because of the group’s obvious entries in its canon: Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour.

From the chiming circular guitar lines that close 1964’s “A Hard Day’s Night” to those that run throughout 1965’s “Ticket to Ride,” George Harrison and John Lennon made droning, arpeggiating riffs a stunning motif of mid-1960s electric guitar playing and psychedelic rock.

And as much as Jeff Beck laid the groundwork for Eastern influences, the Beatles helped cement it into the psychedelic palette with Harrison’s sitar work on “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” and the bouzouki-like guitars on “Girl,” both from 1965’s Rubber Soul.

It was but a prelude to Paul McCartney’s raga-influenced solo on “Taxman” and the classical Indian instrumentation on “Love You To,” both from the group’s 1966 psychedelic rock milestone, Revolver.

That album also saw Harrison record a backward guitar solo on “I’m Only Sleeping,” laying the foundation for sonic experiments by psychedelic axe slingers Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page.

Over the next year, the Beatles would continue to define psychedelic rock with Sgt. Pepper’s and Magical Mystery Tour. But where other guitarists opted for the obvious fuzz-box-and-reverb recipe, the Fabs took a more soporific approach (McCartney’s exhilarating “Taxman” solo notwithstanding).

In addition to Harrison’s lysergic droning solo on “I’m Only Sleeping,” there are that song’s druggy, offbeat acoustic guitars, while on Magical Mystery Tour’s “Flying,” the electric guitars plod out the melody not only behind the beat but with a dollop of echo that makes them sound leaden.

And lest anyone forget, it was Harrison who wrote the group’s 1967 ode to LSD, the Sgt. Pepper’s outtake “It’s All Too Much.”

“I just wanted to write a rock and roll song about the whole psychedelic thing,” he said. “Because you’d trip out, you see, on all this stuff, and then, whoops, you’d just be back having your evening cup of tea!”

Today, the Beatles’ psychedelic rock landmark, Revolver, is available to listen to with a brand-new stereo mix by producer Giles Martin and engineer Sam Okell.

In addition to a Standard 14-track edition, Revolver appears in a 29-track two-disc Deluxe edition that includes session highlights, and a five-disc Super Deluxe edition with 63 tracks, including 31 session cuts and the album’s original mono master.

Get 22% off the Beatles’ Revolver Super Deluxe 5CD Box Set here.

As the high priest of the psychedelic era, Jimi Hendrix created a sound that was entirely different from anything anyone had ever heard. Regardless of how progressive Sgt. Pepper’s may have seemed, when Hendrix’s psychedelic masterpiece “Purple Haze” detonated on the airwaves in 1967, it was clear Jimi held the psychedelic high ground.

Besides being a great song, it was the first time anyone had heard the ringing, double-octave sound of the Octavia, Hendrix’s secret weapon that was invented by British electronics designer Roger Mayer.

Hendrix and Mayer bonded right off, and since both were pioneers in their own right, they continued to work together to create evocative sounds, mainly via evolutions of the Octavia, on the albums that followed: Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland, Hendrix’s final studio album.

Jimi, of course, carved out his own rock sound using a Stratocaster that he flipped upside down and restrung for left-handed playing, which he ran through Marshall Super Lead amps, along with a Vox wah – used famously on “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” and a host of other tunes – the Octavia, a Dallas-Arbiter Fuzz Face and a Uni-Vibe phase shifter, all hooked up in that order.

Hendrix told GP that Muddy Waters, Elmore James, B.B. King and Eddie Cochran were early influences, and you can certainly hear the soul of Curtis Mayfield in his playing too. 

He apparently also dug Howlin’ Wolf, because he opened his performance at Monterey Pop with Wolf’s “Killing Floor.”

Hendrix did Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” at Monterey and he presented “All Along the Watchtower” on Electric Ladyland. So how does any of this explain how Hendrix literally changed the world on Are You Experienced, an album where bluesy numbers like “Red House” and “Highway Chile” sit alongside such progressive tunes as “Third Stone from the Sun,” “Fire,” “I Don’t Live Today” and the title track?

And he continued on Axis: Bold as Love with tunes like “Little Wing,” “Spanish Castle Magic” and “One Rainy Wish.”

“All of my songs happen on the spur of the moment,” he told Guitar Player in 1968. “I write songs to release frustration, and I like to play lead sometimes so I can express myself. But the way I play lead is a raw type of way. It comes to you naturally.

“On some records, you hear all this clash and bang and fanciness, but all we’re doing is laying down the guitar tracks, and then we echo here and there. We’re not adding false electronic things. We use the same things anyone else would, but we use it with imagination and common sense.

“Like in ‘House Burning Down’ [from Electric Ladyland], we made the guitar sound like it was on fire. It’s constantly changing dimensions, and up on top that lead guitar is cutting through everything.”

Hendrix was evolving his sound when Guitar Player spoke with him, and he mentioned using Sunn tube amps and spoke of playing a Gibson on some of the Electric Ladyland tracks: “You can’t just get stuck up on guitar,” he said. “You have to use a little bit of imagination and break away.

“There are millions of other kinds of instruments – there’s horns, drums, everything. Music is getting better and better, but the idea now is not to get as complicated as you can, but to get as much of yourself into it as you can. Music has to go places.”

Ahead of the late music icon’s 80th birthday on November 27, a new Jimi Hendrix Experience live album titled Los Angeles Forum: April 26, 1969 will be released on November 18 on 2LP vinyl, CD and all digital platforms.

Taken from the album, a blistering live performance of the iconic psychedelic rock track “Purple Haze” is available to listen to here…

Pre-order the new Jimi Hendrix album, Los Angeles Forum - April 26, 1969, here.

Reportedly, it was Elevators guitarist Stacy Sutherland who coined the term psychedelic rock, leading the Austin, Texas, group to title its 1966 debut The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators.

Sutherland’s co-architect in the group’s intergalactic electric guitar tones was lead singer Roky Erickson.

Running their Gibson ES-330s through Fender blackface Twin Reverbs, Fender Reverb units and Gibson Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tones, they kicked up a gnarly echo-and-reverb-laden sound that served as a template for many other psychedelic groups to come.

As Erickson revealed in this 1980 interview clip, the Elevators assumed they had an exclusive on the style until they heard the Yardbirds’ “Shapes of Things.”

“That really bothered us, ’cause we had some stuff that we’d already recorded and hadn’t been released,” he said.

Speaking of their pioneering days during the mid-‘60s, Erickson recalled it was, “Real strange for the Elevators to be the only ones doing this feedback and standing on your amplifier and banging your guitar and hear groups like the Who and the Yardbirds who were doing that too.

“Like when we heard ‘Shapes of Things,’ we said, ‘My God! We’d better get our stuff out, man!’ …These cats are in on it!”

Soon after, the group’s 1966 debut single, “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” reached 55 on the Billboard Hot 100.

They remained a cult act to the end, but in their brief tenure the 13th Floor Elevators helped launch psychedelic rock from obscurity to the record charts.

Browse the 13th Floor Elevators catalog here.

Just as Jeff Beck plugged into a Tone Bender to mimic a sitar on the Yardbirds’ “Heart Full of Soul,” Keith Richards ran his 1959 Gibson Les Paul into a Gibson Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone to perform the lick he’d originally written for horns on the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” (released June 5, 1965, one day after the Yardbirds’ single).

While no one would mistake that Stones’ hit for a psychedelic rock record, it did help popularize the fuzz-tone effect, which would become a staple of the 1960s psychedelic rock sound.

No less influential was Brian Jones’ use of a sitar on the group’s 1966 gloom-rock hit, “Paint It Black.”

Although it was released in May 1966, some six months after the Beatles gave the sitar its rock debut on Rubber Soul’s “Norwegian Wood,” “Paint It Black” was issued as a single and went to the top of the U.S. and U.K. charts, giving it broader exposure.

And, like Beck, Richards would imitate the instrument’s sound with his guitar on the Stones’ next single, “Mother’s Little Helper.”

Soon after, they dipped a toe in the psychedelic waters with Between the Buttons, using a range of baroque instruments, including dulcimer, harpsichord and recorder, on tracks like “Ruby Tuesday” and “Yesterday’s Papers,” and sprinkling it with traces of old-time music-hall brass.

It was but a prelude to the Stones’ full-on plunge into psychedelic rock with 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request.

Here, the group both adopted and created some of the sonic tropes of the emerging genre.

Richards’ handiwork is well represented with the crunchy tremoloed guitar riff on “Citadel,” one of the Stones’ heaviest rock tracks, and the snaky lead lines on “2000 Man.”

On “2,000 Light Years From Home,” Keef dons a fuzz bass to deliver that song’s proto-punk one-note solo.

Although their follow-up, Beggars Banquet, marked a hard turn toward stripped-down roots rock, the Stones’ imprint is all over early psychedelic rock.

And in this hilarious radio interview, Richards recalls his memories of this heady time (at least the few that remain!)

Browse the Rolling Stones catalog here.

With his folk guitar jangling and surreal lyrics, Bob Dylan more than perhaps anyone laid the groundwork for psychedelic rock’s more fanciful abstractions.

His raw-boned tunes were transformed into baroque-pop balladry by psychedelic-rock trailblazers like the Byrds (“Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Chimes of Freedom” and “All I Really Want to Do”), the 13th Floor Elevators (“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”) and Manfred Mann (“The Mighty Quinn”).

But many other groups found in Dylan’s songs inspiration for their own peculiar musical explorations.

While his early tunes like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” are charged with mysticism, Dylan’s lyrics had largely lost their fanciful edge and turned dark, more surreal and menacing by the writing of 1965’s Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited.

Songs like “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Maggie’s Farm,” “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” and “Highway 61 Revisited” describe danger zones and deals to be avoided, pointing the way to psychedelia’s darker side.

This menacing style can be heard in everything from the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.”

Dylan could still be playful: A tune like “Desolation Row” presages the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s, with its mix of historical and literary characters, fanciful themes and flirtations with fatality.

Speaking of which, it was Dylan who turned the Fab Four on to pot, which inspired the earliest psychedelic stirrings of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s music and the group’s nascent studio trickery.

And lest anyone forget, it was Dylan whose look, sound and music inspired a young Black guitarist to let his processed hair go natural and begin singing in his own imperfect style in the clubs of Greenwich Village.

As Jimi Hendrix, he became the biggest guitarist in late-’60s rock and scored his highest-charting U.S. hit with a transformative reworking of Dylan’s own psychedelic nightmare, “All Along the Watchtower.”

Browse the Bob Dylan catalog here.

It was the 1960s, and everything was groovy. Musicians pushed the boundaries of sonic expression and experimentation, with guitarists boldly leading the way.

The hallucinogenic effects of mind-altering drugs, most notably LSD, are credited to have contributed to the creation of a new “psychedelic” sound, with guitarists developing a unique and colorful palette of fuzzed-out – and sometimes just plain weird – tones, inspiring generations of players to come.

While we don’t encourage you to indulge in hallucinogenics, we do suggest you grab your guitar, as we begin our adventure into psychedelic guitar playing.

One simply cannot revisit the 1960s without paying tribute to the Beatles, who began as a mop-topped pop quartet, but soon morphed into a psychedelic songwriting juggernaut with multiple iconic album releases spanning 1966 and 1967, including Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour.

On 1966’s Revolver, George Harrison can be heard going into full bizarre mode, adding time-warped backward guitar (lead guitar lines that are recorded and then played backwards during the song) on “I’m Only Sleeping.”

In addition, Indian music’s heavy influence on Harrison and the psychedelic sound in general can be heard in his sitar-like motifs from “She Said She Said,” also from Revolver.

See Ex. 1 for a riff inspired by this song, and pick near your guitar’s bridge to emulate the sitar’s timbre.

Along with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones ventured into this brave new world with album releases like 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request, featuring the track “2,000 Light Years from Home.”

After a 40-second intro of some rather terrifying processed atonal piano musings, Keith Richards enters with a palm-muted single-note guitar riff, which sounds as if it could be the persistent ticking of a clock from an imaginary episode of the bizarre 1960s TV series The Twilight Zone. (In fact, a similar guitar line, albeit less rhythmical, appears in the show’s actual theme music.)

No fuzzy tones here – Richards simply goes with an understated clean electric guitar sound, allowing the staccato jabs of his palm-muted notes to do the talking.

See Ex. 2 for a line inspired by this same track.

Try moving it around the neck in various keys and octaves to experience different shades of mystery. 

March 1965 was a monumental month for the up-and-coming British guitarist Jeff Beck. Upon Jimmy Page’s recommendation, Beck was asked to join the Yardbirds, famously replacing Eric Clapton.

Those were big shoes to fill, but Beck did not lack confidence or imagination. And while his stint with the band lasted just 20 months, his influence from this period, as well as his solo career that followed, would be felt by scores of guitarists.

A great example of Beck pushing sonic boundaries can be heard in the Yardbirds’ 1966 single “Over Under Sideways Down.”

Here the guitarist adds a wildly strange melodic motif, which, while initially met with some skepticism by his bandmates, came to be widely regarded as the song’s signature hook.

Beck combines some deft single-string playing with a gnarly tone. See Ex. 3 for a similar line, inspired by this song. 

The next stop on our magical musical tour brings us to the legendary Jimi Hendrix. His trippy songwriting combined R&B-influenced rhythm playing with soaring guitar solos, steeped in blues and drenched in fuzz.

Jimi somehow managed to control, at will, the beast that is amplifier feedback, creating new tripped-out sonic journeys for his audience.

Hendrix regularly summoned, as if by magic, all manner of new sounds from his guitar. With the song “Fire,” from the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s debut 1967 album, Are You Experienced, he introduced himself with a guitar solo consisting of a veritable onslaught of stinging string bends and vibratos.

Ex. 4 brings to mind this face-melter. Note that I’ve added an octave-up doubling effect to further capture Jimi’s sound, as this is something he employed frequently via his Octavia pedal.

This pedal, designed specifically for Jimi by his sound technician, Roger Mayer, doubled every note one octave higher, while adding fuzz. It often sounded as if Jimi’s guitar was tearing apart at the seams.

While discussing Jimi, let’s give a nod to another great guitarist from a later generation who was influenced by Hendrix’s psychedelic sound, namely Prince, whose musical legacy continues to live on despite his untimely death in 2016.

An iconoclast, Prince often fused his R&B/funk/soul foundation with elements of pop, rock, jazz or whatever suited him in the moment.

One of his 19 top-10 hits, the single “When Doves Cry,” off of 1984’s smash album, Purple Rain, went to number one on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, where it stayed for five weeks.

Prince notably played every instrument on the track. The song bursts through the speakers with a virtuosic unaccompanied electric guitar line, which seems to answer the question “What would Jimi Hendrix sound like if he were still alive today – after having taken a trip to Mars?”

Prince tips his hat to the master more directly with his choice of tone, as he employs Hendrix’s signature combination of fuzz and octave doubler.

The entire intro solo is masterfully played, darting around in fits and starts, and Ex. 5 is inspired by Prince’s wicked opening statement.

We return to the 1960s with another purveyor of the psychedelic movement: the San Francisco–based band Jefferson Airplane.

In the classic song “White Rabbit,” from their seminal 1967 release, Surrealistic Pillow, songwriter Grace Slick’s lyrics evoke 1960s drug culture while guitarist Jorma Kaukonen weaves sinewy lines over a brooding rhythm.

Kaukonen accomplishes this by deftly employing an exotic scale, another element of the psychedelic sound. While the song is broadly in the key of A major, the intro and verses center around a chord progression of F# to G, which is technically out of key.

Kaukonen navigates these chords using the 5th mode of harmonic minor, commonly referred to as Phrygian-dominant.

Harmonic minor (1, 2, b3, 4, 5, b6, #7) is nearly identical to natural minor (1, 2, b3, 4, 5, b6, b7), the only difference being its raised 7th scale degree. Note how this creates an unusual augmented 2nd interval (one and one half steps) between the 6th and 7th degrees.

The term “5th mode” simply means that Phrygian-dominant’s root is the 5th degree of the harmonic minor scale. This is the note that will sound like “home.” 

In “White Rabbit,” Kaukonen employs F# Phrygian-dominant (F#, G, A#, B, C#, D, E), the 5th mode of B harmonic minor (B, C#, D, E, F#, G, A#). But you can take off your thinking cap and mellow out to Ex. 6, a trippy line inspired by this song.

Note the aforementioned augmented 2nd interval between the G and A# in the last bar.

Many critics consider the release of the Byrds' 1966 single “Eight Miles High” to be the dawn of the psychedelic era.

Influenced by the music of sitarist Ravi Shankar and jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, it is led by the twang of Roger McGuinn’s signature 12-string Rickenbacker electric.

The song as a whole juxtaposes droning instrumental sections with hauntingly beautiful vocal harmonies in much the same way that McGuinn’s playing ebbs and flows between sitar-like melodies and fiery bursts of single notes.

Ex. 7 is reminiscent of his alternately melodic and frenzied playing throughout the song.

Note that you can use an octaver, set to double an octave higher, to approximate the sound of McGuinn’s 12-string, as I have done here. 

In 1966, along with his brother Sly, guitarist Freddie Stone co-founded the dynamic psychedelic funk ensemble Sly & the Family Stone. 

The band drew inspiration from a myriad of styles – R&B, rock, church music and beyond – and Freddie’s nuanced playing was an integral part of their rhythmic foundation.

But rather than in-your-face raucousness, he preferred to pick his spots, his guitar often peeking out from inside the band to add subtle textures.

For example, in their 1968 hit single “Everyday People,” a cry for racial harmony which still resonates today, Stone interjects just a few fuzzed-out bass notes here and there. They never fully grab the spotlight, but they make an important sonic contribution nonetheless, adding a touch of psychedelia.

In 1969’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” the guitarist fires up his wah pedal and alternates between funky strummed 9th chords and staccato single-note phrases.

Ex. 8 is not unlike his approach throughout the song. A master of understatement, Stone could convey so much, often with just a few notes. 

Spanning decades, with some original band members still going strong as Dead and Company, the Grateful Dead’s music inspired an intense devotion from their Deadhead fans, who faithfully followed the band from show to show as they crisscrossed the country.

The band’s songs, often crafted to be long jams when played live, left plenty of room for late master improviser Jerry Garcia to work his magic.

While many of the players above utilized varied and often strange tones, Garcia often chose a simple clean tone for his electric musings, allowing his colorful note choices and imaginative rhythmic sense to hypnotize audiences. 

Ex. 9 is inspired by Garcia’s effortlessly fantastic playing throughout “Dark Star,” the Grateful Dead’s 1968 single, and showcases one rhythm – the quarter-note triplet – throughout the four-bar phrase, with only occasional respites.

Tension is certainly created by the sheer repetition, but more subtly, it is the way its lilting rhythm sits atop and “rubs” against the song’s straight-eighths feel that grabs our attention and keeps us hooked for the duration.

It’s the sort of magic Jerry Garcia could seemingly conjure on demand, night after night.

The 1960s psychedelic movement, spearheaded by a wave of innovative guitarists unafraid to break down traditional norms of playing and tone, directly reflected the tumultuous political and social times they inhabited.

Many more recent iconic bands, such as Red Hot Chili Peppers, Smashing Pumpkins, My Morning Jacket and the Flaming Lips, owe a debt of gratitude to the risks these players took as they created music that often seemed to be the stuff of dreamscapes.

Have a question or comment about this month’s lesson? Feel free to reach out to Jeff Jacobson on Twitter @jjmusicmentor or at jeffjacobson.net.

Jeff offers private guitar and songwriting lessons virtually.

The Beatles’ Revolver is a psychedelic rock landmark, a sonic marvel that marked a sea change in music production and culture.

Joined by their new recording engineer Geoff Emerick, the group and producer George Martin set about using the recording studio as their sonic workshop, creating sounds never heard before and introducing classical Indian music into Western pop rock.

But like most pre-1968 Beatles albums, Revolver was recorded to four-track tape, with the result that the main rhythm instruments – usually guitar, bass and drums – were placed together on one track, making it impossible to separate them for stereo mixes.

Until now, that is.

Using groundbreaking de-mixing technology, Giles Martin – George Martin’s son, and the producer behind much of the group’s reissues in recent years – was able to separate the instruments, and even the individual pieces of the drum kit, without losing the room ambience or creating ugly artifacts.

Fans can hear the results on October 28, when Revolver is reissued in a new stereo mix that reveals the music with newfound clarity and definition.

In addition to a Standard 14-track edition, Revolver will come in a 29-track two-disc Deluxe edition that includes session highlights, and a five-disc Super Deluxe edition with 63 tracks, including 31 session cuts and the album’s original mono master.

Both deluxe editions will boast new stereo mixes of the album singles “Paperback Writer” and “Rain.”

Revolver’s new Dolby Atmos mix will be released digitally.

At a listening session for the reissue, Martin demonstrated the technology using the rhythm track from “Taxman,” removing the electric guitar, then the bass, and then the drum kit, piece by piece, down to the snare.

As Martin explained in our subsequent interview, this novel technology brings with it a new dilemma: “How does one represent an artistic work years after nearly everyone who created it is no longer around to weigh in?”

What were the challenges of de-mixing and re-mixing Revolver?

Well, it’s funny. Geoff Emerick, the Beatles and my dad were pretty good to begin with, and the album sounds pretty good. And, you know, it is very compressed, and I’ve still respected that.

But in order to have the band sound like they’re in a room, you kind of have to pull them apart to a certain extent and put some air between them.

And you know, on Revolver, John Lennon never sings in the same voice. It’s different on every song. Same thing with the guitars and drums. Remixing it was like mixing eight different bands.

It’s come down through history that Geoff Emerick was critical to helping your father and the Beatles create these new sounds. Is that assessment accurate?

Listen, Geoff was a genius, yes. But I think it comes from their fingers and the guitars; my dad would say this, and Geoff would have said this as well, I think – before he became too bitter.

The sounds came from themselves and their willingness to innovate, especially with guitars. So the disappointing answer for everyone is, “It’s the band.” And the reason why it’s disappointing is because you’re looking for what knob you can turn – [laughs]

And what box you can plug into.

Absolutely – to get that sound. And that’s the tricky thing.

There’s a video of you, your father and Dhani Harrison listening to a “lost” George Harrison solo on “Here Comes the Sun” that you discovered. Were there any surprises like that with Revolver?

No, but there was a thing with fuzz guitars: They were originally going to play the horn lines on “Got to Get You Into My Life,” but they decided to go with brass instead.

Just the opposite of what happened on the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.”

Yeah! So that exists in a previous version of the song. But because the recordings were four-track, if they didn’t get something right, they’d just record over it. So there are no hidden gems. But you really get a sense of their efficiency.

For example, “Paperback Writer”: There’s just one and a half takes of the basic track, which is guitars and drums. So I’ve just left the tape running for this box set. They play, it breaks down, they immediately play it again, and that’s it! It’s all done but the bass and vocals. It’s very efficient.

Revolver is a psychedelic rock landmark, and I imagine de-mixing presents you with an opportunity to make it more vivid – more what they might have done had the multitrack technology existed.

The tricky thing is, the claustrophobia you get from mono can make things sound more psychedelic. And when you open things up, it can sound less so. And the challenge is with something like “Tomorrow Never Knows”: The expectation is it’s this crazy song. And it is – but it isn’t.

There’s bass and drums, there’s a bit of tamboura, there’s an organ, tape loops… And that’s it! There’s not much going on. And so you really have to work at it to create something that satisfies the expectation.

When I was working with [Martin] Scorsese on the George Harrison film [the 2011 documentary Living in the Material World], he questioned my revisionist approach to mixing. And then I played him some stuff I’d done, and he liked it. And I said, “I just try and make songs sound how we remember them, not how they are.”

Having literally dissected Revolver, what’s your takeaway about the Beatles at this point in their musical evolution?

You can hear them like kids in the back of a car saying, “We’re bored! We want to do something different.” That’s what’s going on with Revolver. It’s like a prog record – kind of like, “Look how many ideas we have!”

And what I find fascinating is that they went from being this four-headed monster with Beatles suits on to being these four individuals going in different directions – but helping each other.

Like, no one’s saying, “Come on, John, change chords on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows.’” Or, you know, “Why are we doing Indian songs? We’re from Liverpool!” It’s like that pure confidence of jumping out of the plane without a parachute and knowing you’re going to land safely.

It is kind of a fearless record.

Pre-order the Revolver Special Edition Super Deluxe 5CD box set here.

Pre-order the Revolver Special Edition Super Deluxe 4LP + 7” Vinyl EP 7", box set here.

Pre-order the Revolver Deluxe Deluxe Edition 2CD here.

Pre-order the Amazon exclusive Revolver Special Edition 1LP vinyl & turntable mat here.

Formed 40 years ago, Oklahoma’s Flaming Lips have always embodied a strong experimental/psych approach to their music.

Given that they covered The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety in 2009, there is little doubt where their roots lie.

Frontman Wayne Coyne has been an ever-present member since founding the band, sharing guitar duties first with Ronald Jones, and now with guitarist and multi-instrumentalist, Steven Drozd, who originally joined the group as a drummer.

Jones was deeply into experimentation with signal processors, looking for ways to redefine the typical parameters of the guitar in a rock band.

And while Drozd was playing drums in the band, he was also laying down rhythm guitar tracks and collaborating on songwriting, so his shift into the guitar seat when Jones left in 1996 was a no-brainer.

Jones’ sound was built on the use of Eventide Harmonizers mixed with a plethora of sonic shapers to obtain otherworldly tones that provided a key component of the band’s signature sound.

Drozd quickly acquired a formidable arsenal of effects when he replaced Jones, and – influenced by Jimmy Page – worked in altered tunings, which added yet another line of attack to the band’s songwriting process.

A fan of single-coil guitars, Drozd favors vintage Jazzmasters and an old Fender XII. His use of the XII was inspired by Page, once he realized that it was Page’s 12-string of choice for Zep’s albums.

The last Flaming Lips album with Jones onboard, 1995’s Clouds Taste Metallic, was the band’s most fully realized encapsulation of their psych-meets-alt approach, but for many, the definitive Lips album is 1999’s The Soft Bulletin.

On it, Drozd carves out his own distinctive niche in the band’s sound and stamps his identity firmly on their music – no mean feat with the big shoes of Jones to fill.

Unlike many bands who have dabbled in psychedelia before returning to their original mission statement, the Flaming Lips have remained unwaveringly true to their original artistic vision.

Browse the Flaming Lips’ catalog here.

Would psychedelic rock have happened at all were it not for Jeff Beck’s attempt to emulate a sitar with his Fender Esquire and Sola Sound Tone Bender fuzz?

As Eric Clapton’s replacement in the Yardbirds, Beck kicked off his 20-month tenure with ingenuity at his first recording session with the group, in April 1965, for “Heart Full of Soul.”

Songwriter Graham Gould’s exotic hook suggested a sitar line, but the musician hired for the job couldn’t perform it to anyone’s satisfaction.

“What he was doing was totally magical, but it just didn’t have any groove to it,” Beck revealed. “And I showed him on guitar what I thought would be a good idea, which was that minor riff with the D string droning an octave below. And everyone said, ‘That sounds great. Let’s just leave that.’” 

With one line, Beck introduced an evocatively exotic sound and musical scale to rock and roll.

“When I heard Jeff’s playing, it was noticeably different, even then to my young ears,” Aerosmith’s Joe Perry recalled. “There was a sound to his guitar that kind of stood out and was different from the usual pop stuff. The notes he was playing. It was more lyrical, to me.”

What was different about Beck’s playing was certainly his talent for bends, which he developed by listening to Indian ragas by Ravi Shankar and Ustad Vilayat Khan. He marveled at their fluid string bending.

“How could this be adopted into the guitar?” he recalled wondering, “this bending of the string, to such an extent that you can play a melody with one bend?”

He came close on the Yardbirds’ next single, 1966’s “Shapes of Things,” widely considered the first psychedelic rock release.

He continued to push the emerging genre forward with the group’s next release, the fuzz guitar-drenched “Over Under Sideways Down.”

But it was with “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” that Beck, playing alongside new band member Jimmy Page, blew young guitarists’ minds by combining his Indian-tinged lead work with incendiary solos in which he conjured a maelstrom of sirens and revving engines.

Though he soon moved on to blues rock and jazz fusion, Beck established a template for psychedelia – as well as heavy metal – that would be followed by countless future guitarists.

Don’t miss our December 2022 issue where we examine 50 psychedelic guitarists from the past 60 years of rock!

Happy birthday to Guns N’ Roses guitarist Richard Fortus!

A member of the hard rock titans for the best part of two decades Fortus’s long and varied career has seen him perform with a diverse range of artists including Thin Lizzy, Psychedelic Furs, and The Dead Daisies.

As one of the industry’s most prolific session guitarists Fortus has lent his superlative talents to countless projects over the years. From some of the world’s biggest names in music such as Enrique Iglesias and Rihanna to film scores, commercials and video games – he’s done it all!

While being immersed in such a broad variety of gigs over the years, Fortus has constantly strived to refine his electric guitar tone, and his new Gretsch signature Falcons – the white, Bigsby-equipped G6636T-RF and black, V-stoptail G6636-RF – are the culmination of a lifetime's experience in music.

These Falcons are not just any Gretsch semi-hollowbody electric.

“Gretsch is, in many ways, the tone of rock ‘n’ roll for me,” says Fortus. “From classic Duane Eddy [and] Cliff Gallup to Malcolm Young – it really encapsulates rock ‘n’ roll.”

With a solid bottom end and sparkling, chime-y top end Fortus’s classic Gretsch Filter’Tron sound sits around Slash’s more midrange-prominent vocal guitar tone, allowing each to occupying their own space within Guns N’ Roses’ unique sonic picture.

Far from being off-the-shelf parts the pickups in the new Gretsch Richard Fortus Signature Falcons are the result of painstaking experimentation.

“Gretsch were in rehearsals with us, and they were winding pickups on the spot while I’m trying them out,” Fortus told Guitarist magazine. “We had a cycle of four different guitars, as well as my normal live guitars to compare them to. Plus, when you’re on in-ears, you’re listening under a microscope. You can hear every detail.

“Our front-of-house engineer was in the other room in a control room environment, so he was listening too and giving us feedback. We’d go back and forth zeroing in on the perfect tone. Gretsch were amazing. They were as tenacious as I was in trying to find the perfect blend.”

The team eventually settled on a unique design incorporating elements of vintage-style PAF and Filter’Tron pickups. Consequently, this versatile humbucker is able to produce both iconic tones. 

“When you roll the volume down to around seven, you’re very much in classic Filter’Tron territory," says Fortus. "And as you bring the volume up you get more of that round PAF thing.”

Here’s a quick rundown of specs for each of the two models…

G6636T-RF Richard Fortus Signature Falcon

BODY

• Arched laminated maple top and back
• 1.75" (44.45 mm) depth
• Center block construction
• Vintage White gloss finish

NECK

• Maple set-neck construction with U-profile
• 25.5" (648 mm) scale length
• 22-fret ebony fingerboard with 12" (305 mm) radius
• Pearloid Neo-Classic Thumbnail inlays

ELECTRONICS

• Dual custom wound Filter'Tron pickups with nickel covers
• Master volume with treble bleed
• Master tone with no-load pot

HARDWARE

• Bigsby B6CP
• TonePros TP6R bridge with roller saddles
• Grover Rotomatic die-cast tuners
• Nickel finish

G6636-RF Richard Fortus Signature Falcon

BODY

• Arched laminated maple top and back
• 1.75" (44.45 mm) depth
• Center block construction
• Black gloss finish

NECK

• Maple set-neck construction with U-profile
• 24.6" (625 mm) scale length
• 22-fret ebony fingerboard with 12" (305 mm) radius
• Pearloid Neo-Classic Thumbnail inlays

ELECTRONICS

• Dual custom wound Filter'Tron pickups with nickel covers
• Master volume with treble bleed
• Master tone with no-load pot

HARDWARE

• V-stoptail
• TonePros TP6R Tune-O-Matic bridge
• Grover Rotomatic die-cast tuners
• Nickel finish

Visit the Gretsch website for more information.

Back in 2015, Sean Lennon’s band the Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger was the opening act on a tour co-headlined by Primus and Dinosaur Jr. Which is how Lennon ended up in an impromptu jam session with Primus bassist and lead vocalist Les Claypool one night before a show.

“We were playing on acoustics in the back of Les’s tour bus, 10 or 15 minutes before one of us was supposed to go onstage,” Lennon recalls. “And we came up with a bunch of things really fast. I remember Les being like, ‘Yeah, I noticed that you were kind of writing a song as we jammed, as opposed to just noodling.’ I think he liked that.”

“He was playing things that I wasn’t expecting, and that always intrigues me when I play with someone,” Claypool adds. “So I could tell right away that we had an interesting dynamic together. And I also liked the fact that Sean sometimes has odd approaches to what he does.” He laughs. “Because as you may know from my work, I’m a little off-center, too.”

“Off-center,” of course, doesn’t even begin to describe the supreme oddness of Claypool and Lennon’s individual artistic output. As the frontman and main songwriter for Primus, the former has spent the past three decades or so crafting some of the knottiest, most dizzyingly complex and bizarre bass lines heard in modern music, and then grafting them to similarly wacko punk-funk-prog-rock creations with titles like “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver” and “Shake Hands With Beef.”

As for Lennon, he’s a multi-instrumentalist with a ridiculously long résumé. In addition to his solo and band pursuits, he’s collaborated with artists in pop, rock, metal, avant-garde, hip-hop, psychedelia, folk and other genres – and that’s in addition to his work scoring films, producing records, acting and more. (He is also, of course, the offspring of John Lennon and Yoko Ono.) Put these two off-center individuals together in a room – or the back of a tour bus, as it were – and the result is, as Lennon says, “definite creative chemistry.”

The outcome of that chemistry is the Claypool Lennon Delirium, a project that serves as a conduit for the two artists to explore the outermost reaches of their shared musical sensibilities. The duo issued their debut album, Monolith of Phobos, in 2016, and followed it up in 2017 with the EP Lime and Limpid Green, which featured covers of songs from Syd Barrett–era Pink Floyd, King Crimson, the Who and the late-’60s Japanese rock group Flower Travellin’ Band.

Their latest album, 2019’s South of Reality (ATO Records), finds Claypool and Lennon indulging their shared love of ‘60s and ’70s prog, psych and garage rock and melding it to jam-band-esque instrumental excursions, sweet-and-sour vocal harmonies and a lyric approach that is one part dark ruminations on the human condition and one part word-salad whimsy. All of which is to say South of Reality is, in one sense, exactly what we might expect from a meeting of these two oddball minds. At the same time, it sounds quite unlike anything else in popular music at this time.

Around the time of the album’s release, Claypool and Lennon sat down with Guitar Player to discuss their unique artistic bond, their unusual recording arrangement (which includes, on Lennon’s part at least, the use of a hefty number of sound-warping pedals) and what it is they like about working with one another. Central to this last point, Lennon says, is the fact that “we have an easy flow together.”

Which is, Claypool adds, an important, if not essential, aspect of the Delirium. “It has to be easy,” he says. “Because I don’t like pushing things. If things aren’t coming easy then I’ll go do something else – like catch a fish or something.”

The two of you pull from a lot of different sounds and styles in the Claypool Lennon Delirium. But what’s most pronounced in it are elements of late ’60s and early ’70s prog. What do you love about that music?

Sean Lennon: I think we love prog because it’s open-ended, and you can kind of do anything with it. It’s expansive. So it suits us, because it doesn’t seem strange to write a song in three sections about a rocket scientist [the South of Reality track “Blood and Rockets,” about American rocket engineer Jack Parsons]. It’s the theatrical version of rock and roll. [laughs] In prog, you’re allowed to write about “By-Tor and the Snow Dog,” or whatever. So it does kind of suit the Delirium in that way.

Les Claypool: I like it because it’s a rock that I haven’t really turned over on my own yet. And I tend to turn over a lot of rocks. I think Primus has always been pretty progressive, but in a different way. Primus is a heavier band. This to me is more reminiscent of Syd-era Floyd stuff and things that were going on around that time. And we come at it from different angles.

As a kid, I was a big fan of Rush and Yes and Utopia and Jethro Tull, whereas I think Sean was coming from a more psychedelic side of things. I remember, we were in his car one time going from his place in upstate New York back to Manhattan, and he was driving and I thought he was going to kill us because he was playing disc jockey the whole time, trying to get me to listen to all this psychedelic shit. So we like turning each other on to different things.

What was the collaborative process like for South of Reality? Were you guys coming up with ideas independent of one another, or were you working on everything together?

Lennon: Both. Les has a really good work ethic in a lot of ways. For example, he has this policy that everyone shows up for rehearsal the first day knowing, basically, everything. [laughs] Like, they should know all the songs for a tour. Every part! As far as I know, a lot of people, and me especially, don’t mind rehearsing at rehearsal.

But he wants you to do your homework. It’s kind of like that for him when making a record, too. He does his homework before he gets there, and he shows up with a lot of ideas. But then there are other things that we came up with just by jamming together in the studio. Les is a really fast songwriter. Sometimes we would write a song a day for several days in a row. We’d just be cranking them out.

Sean, as a guitarist, is Les an intimidating guy to play with?

Lennon: He’s not intimidating in terms of his personality, but I’m definitely years behind him in terms of technical prowess and accomplishment on my instrument. The idea of holding my own in that way was a little bit daunting for me. But it pushed me to practice a little bit for… well, for pretty much the first time in my life. [laughs] Because I never really had a goal of becoming a guitar player specifically. I always considered the guitar to be a vehicle for me to write songs. So I wound up doing a little bit of practicing at first, and I still do. Whenever I’m going to go play with him, I practice some scales and exercises that I’ve found on YouTube or that different people have taught me. Because I don’t want to get tired out with Les, especially onstage. Sometimes the solos go on for quite some time.

Claypool: [laughs] Sean’s a pretty humble guy. He always worries about whether he’s up to snuff when we get ready to do some shows, and he wants to rehearse probably more than I would normally rehearse. But he’s a great guitarist. And a very intuitive player.

In addition to your musical connection, there seems to be a shared sensibility as far as the lyrics and artwork go. You guys both have a knack for conjuring dark but whimsical imagery.

Lennon: I think that’s one of the fun things about the character of the band. Because of Les’s personality, which is so strong and unique, there’s always a bit of humor mixed in as one of the ingredients. That definitely opens doors. It kind of gives you an excuse to take certain risks that you might not otherwise take. And that’s nice for me, because it makes me feel like I can write songs about imaginary things and surrealist things and funny stories and bizarre histories. Whereas sometimes, if I’m writing for myself, like under the title of Sean Ono Lennon or something, I wind up writing about things I feel or think. But in the Delirium I can write about sci-fi and children’s books and horror and comedy. The door is open to come up with fantastical story lines.

Claypool: I tend to bring this sort of twisted Americana element to everything I do, which is just me reflecting my background. But the great thing about Sean is, he’s like a scientist. He’s constantly delving into realms of science and lore and whatnot that most people just don’t delve into as deeply as he does. And, of course, when you have conversations with Sean and you talk about your childhood — or, I should say, my childhood — it’s quite a bit different than what his childhood was like. So you get two different perspectives and experiences of being on the planet.

What gear are you guys using on South of Reality?

Claypool: I’m using one of my Pachyderm basses, which I make with a buddy of mine that I went to high school with named Dan Maloney. For pedals I have a Line 6 [DL4] Delay and a Line 6 [DM4] Distortion, and I have a Boomerang [Phrase Sampler] and a [Fractal] AX8 [Amp Modeler and Multi-Effects Processor]. And I don’t use an amp: I have two API 7600 channel strips, and then I go into the console and into Pro Tools.

Sean, what were your main electric guitars on the record?

Lennon: My Delirium guitars are kind of flashy, in a funny way. I have two custom Bilt Zaftig guitars that are my main axes. One has a kind of greenish-teal glitter finish, and the other is all silver, with a mirror pickguard. I play them onstage and also in the studio, because Les and I tend to use the same gear for both. I have my same pedalboard setup in the studio, too. For my amp, I mostly used this little old Mesa/Boogie of Les’s. We put the Mesa/Boogie in this closet-shower contraption in the corner of the studio.

Claypool: You have to imagine, my whole house [Rancho Relaxo, in northern California, where Claypool records] is like a time capsule from the ’70s. It was built in 1978, so it’s very Boogie Nights. The bathroom in the studio is all brown – even the toilet. So the amp is shoved into this little brown shower, and we mic it up, throw some pads around it, shut the door and away we go.

Lennon: Once we get the amp sounding really nice, we don’t really think about it again. From there, any changes in the guitar sound come mostly from my pedalboard. We also don’t have any assistant engineer or anything. It’s just Les running Pro Tools and the API board.

So it’s just the two of you in the studio?

Lennon: Yeah. It’s literally only the two of us.

Who’s playing drums on the record?

Lennon: I am. Though we also had Paulo Baldi, who has played with Cake, come in and play on three songs.

Sean, you use effects pretty extensively in this band. Can you talk about what you had on your pedalboard in the studio?

Lennon: My pedalboard is kind of ridiculous. I start with a simple [Seymour Duncan] 805 Overdrive, the turquoise one. Then I have another overdrive pedal, this thing called a Crazy Tube Circuits Starlight, which Nels Cline gave me, and then I have a Pro Co RAT. After my overdrives and distortion is an Electro-Harmonix Mellotron pedal [the MEL9]. That goes into an Electro-Harmonix Ravish Sitar pedal. That’s a very hard pedal to control, but I like to use it for the drone-y, sympathetic-string sound. And then I have my wah, which is actually the [Dunlop] Zakk Wylde Cry Baby. I tend to use that one because it has a wider frequency sweep.

From there I go into a DigiTech HardWire [SP-7] phaser, an Electro-Harmonix Nano Small Stone and an Electro-Harmonix POG. After that I have a tremolo pedal, and after that comes my first delay pedal, which is just a standard Electro-Harmonix Memory Man. I’ve also been using the Catalinbread Belle Epoch tape echo pedal and this weird Death by Audio reverb [the Reverberation Machine] that’s kind of trashy and vintage sounding. It’s very hard to use, and you have to set it really carefully, but it has a very beautiful and moody ambience. And after that reverb I have an Electro-Harmonix Holy Grail, which is my favorite reverb ever. That’s my basic setup live, and it’s what I have in the studio, too.

When it comes to recording your guitar tracks, are you manipulating the pedals in real time?

Lennon: Yes. I do that a lot. I try to be very close to the pedals so I can mess with them as we’re recording.

Les, what do you think of the way Sean uses his pedals?

Claypool: Sean’s very good with his pedals and knows his way around them. There’s a little bit of pasta-throwing at the wall [laughs], but he tends to know what he wants. For the most part he’ll hear something in his head and he’ll grab what he thinks will work. And nine times out of 10, it is what works.

Sean, you also get ample space to play some lead guitar throughout the record. How did you approach your solos?

Lennon: Well, again, Les really has his own philosophy about soloing. And that’s been helpful, because he has a sense of when he feels a solo is going somewhere and when it’s not.

Claypool: I like getting a whole performance, because to me it just flows better. You get that emotion – you get that dynamic and continuity. I just like capturing the moment. I’m not one for comping together a solo. So in the studio I would push Sean. But I kind of push everybody.

Lennon: As far as how I approach my solos? I try to think of them melodically and as having a narrative that has a structure to it. I try not to start at 11. [laughs] But mostly I just try to think of a melody, because I’m not the most technical player. I’m not going to rely on some sort of athleticism, so I have to think of something that will sound musical in order to get me through to the other side.

You guys have now made two albums and an EP together. What is it about your dynamic together that works so well for the two of you?

Claypool: There’s a few things, but the best thing is the hang. Sean and I have a great relationship just as a couple of humans on the planet, you know? That’s where it really starts. Beyond that, we tend to make each other laugh and we tend to stimulate each other intellectually and musically. And we challenge each other. It’s also great to be in the studio with someone that has equally as much to offer lyrically and composition-wise. This is definitely the strongest collaboration I’ve ever had with another songwriter.

How about you, Sean?

Lennon: Honestly, the best thing about working with Les is being able to sit around and hang out with him. He’s such a funny guy. And he takes me fishing. We went… what is it, crabbing? We went crabbing and got some king crab.

Claypool: We almost sunk!

Lennon: And the other thing I like is the shows. Playing with Les and this band is so different than any other band I’ve played with. It’s a different experience because I’m given different responsibilities that I’ve never really had before, especially in terms of playing so much lead guitar. Because in my own music there are never these long periods of improvisation. But sometimes Les will just point at me onstage and say, “All right, go for it!” Or sometimes he’ll just walk offstage. He’ll look at me and be like, I’m going to get some water, or something like that. And then I’ll be alone up there and have to improvise and come up with something cool to entertain people.

Les, you’ll really just walk off the stage and leave Sean there alone?

Claypool: Yes.

Why?

Claypool: Well, with Primus we have a lot of material; with Delirium, not so much. So there are a couple of songs where Sean starts with the little strummy-strum-strum thing, and I’ll just leave the stage and let him run with the ball for a little bit. Because he’s a very inventive guy. So he’ll come up with some cool shit.

Sean, how do you feel about that?

Lennon: At first it was really scary. But now it’s just exciting.

Browse The Claypool Lennon Delirium music here.

Progressive rock’s most expressive lead guitarist, David Jon Gilmour was born in Cambridge, England, on March 6, 1946. Joining Pink Floyd in 1968, Gilmour would go on to lead the band to international success as one of the highest-selling groups in music history.

Here are five reasons Gilmour is a guitar legend…

1. Early Starter

As a youngster, he became interested in music after hearing early rock and roll hits by Bill Haley, Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers. At age 13, he borrowed his neighbor’s guitar and never returned it, teaching himself to play using The Folksinger’s Guitar Guide, a lesson book and record by Pete Seeger. While in grammar school, he befriended future Pink Floyd founders Syd Barrett and Roger Waters.

2. Prog Rock Pioneer

In December 1967, Gilmour was invited to join Pink Floyd as guitarist and co-vocalist to help cover for the increasingly erratic Barrett, who would leave the following year. The band became one of prog-rock’s most influential and successful acts through albums like The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall. Following Waters’ departure in 1985, Gilmour led the band through three more studio albums before they broke up in 2014.

3. Signature Style

During this time, Gilmour became known for his distinctive lead guitar style, characterized by bluesy phrasing and expressive note bends. His main electric guitar was his legendary Black Strat, which he purchased at Manny’s in New York City in 1970 and modified frequently. His tone also relied on effects like the Binson Echorec delay, the Colorsound Power Boost, and rotary speakers by Leslie, Yamaha and Maestro.

4. Collaboration

In addition to releasing four acclaimed solo albums, including 2015’s Rattle That Lock, Gilmour helped Kate Bush get her career started and has worked with artists including Roy Harper, Jimmy Page and Paul McCartney.

5. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Gilmour was inducted with Pink Floyd into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996, and in 2003 was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).

Browse David Gilmour releases here.

Happy 80th birthday to guitarist Dave Brock – the Godfather of Space Rock!

Having founded the genre's quintessential band in 1969, he is the only Hawkwind member to have remained on board during its wild ride over the decades and remains firmly in the Captain's seat to this day.

Emerging from the melting pot of London's psychedelic music scene at the tail-end of the '60s, Hawkwind took a trip on the dark side and rapidly evolved with a distinctly heavier, yet equally spaced-out sound. Mangling electronic oscillators with grinding electric guitar hooks and hard-rocking rhythms the band became a hit on the UK's underground gig circuit, adored by those on the fringes of popular music.

Like a British equivalent of Grateful Dead, Hawkwind are revered by the cult following that continues to pack out venues across their homeland. As one of the country’s most beloved bands they remain a benchmark of authentic British psychedelia (not to mention the soundtrack to many a misspent youth!)

Hawkwind’s new album – Somnia – is due out on September 10 and is available here.

This week in 1967, Pink Floyd released their landmark debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Other monumental debuts that year include The Doors’ and The Grateful Dead’s eponymous long-players, along with Janis Joplin’s Big Brother & the Holding Company and Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced albums.

Politically and culturally, it was the dawn of a new era, with music taking center stage in the countercultural movement on both sides of the pond. And while psychedelic rock fueled the soundtrack to the Summer of Love, not everybody was on board.

In this 1967 clip from the BBC show The Look of The Week, presenter Hans Keller introduces Pink Floyd as “a bit boring” before grilling Syd Barrett and Roger Waters about their band’s use of loud guitar amps. “I want to ask one fundamental question: Why has it all got to be so terribly loud?” he enquires, bristling with irritation.

"For me, frankly, it’s too loud. I just can’t bear it. I happen to have grown up in the string quartet which is a bit softer,” says Keller, at which point Barrett and Waters share a knowing look.

“That’s the way we like it. And we didn’t grow up with a string quartet,” counters Waters. “I guess that could be one of the reasons why it is loud. It doesn’t sound terribly loud to us.”

“Yes. Actually, not everybody who hasn’t grown up in a string quartet turns into a loud pop group. So, your reason is not altogether convincing,” argues Keller.

Keller’s summary of Pink Floyd ends with more of a psychoanalytical diagnosis than an introduction to one of the world’s most influential rock bands. “My verdict is that it is a little bit of a regression to childhood,” he concludes. “But, after all, why not?”

Why not, indeed?

Get The Piper at the Gates of Dawn here.