Awesome psychedelic songs by (generally) non-psych bands

Johnny Winter: "Birds Can't Row Boats"

Superdrag, "The Art of Dying"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCNORo_tmKs

The Kinks’ purest psychedelic moment may be “Australia” for its musical setting. Davies’ lyrics were never about hallucinatory consciousness-expansion, though. It’s a stretch to call the Kinks “psychedelic” even by the loose standards by which that word is tossed around.

Link Wray: The Sky is Falling
Mott the Hoople: You Really Got Me
Steve Hunter: Eight Miles High

Also, maybe:
Peter Cook & Dudley Moore: The L.S. Bumble Bee
The Cramps: Beautiful Gardens
Van Morrison: And It Stoned Me
Yo La Tengo: Pass The Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind
Paul Roland: Meadows of the Sea
Moby Grape: It’s a Beautiful Day Today

Yellow Magic Orchestra - Lotus Love

Hate to quibble but uh... if Moby Grape is not a psych band, who is?

My take on this would be chuck Berry’s “Concerto in B Goode” - could be a Can outtake

Can a mod just change this thread title to “what makes a song psychedelic”?

sitar-y sounds

phasing fx

good thread concept imo

Mellow psychedelia until it lets loose about 5 min in

https://youtu.be/cBG11b-nyCs

Low - Poor Sucker

https://youtu.be/ob0CILJ93bA

A number of songs on this excellent album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARAcJgWFGB4

herman's hermits - blaze

https://img.discogs.com/4Sgkfjmvb3qaYWOdcSCTkBtLdDM=/fit-in/600x597/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-1152084-1371348081-4335.jpeg.jpg

particularly "moonshine man"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od03nUU0J60

have to imagine there's a whole discussion of "fake psychedelia" elsewhere on ILM

anyway did the hollies ever get heavier than this ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEj0MBhC_7g
the hollies - maker

you'd also have to include chad & jeremy's LP "of cabbages and kings" and "in our image" by the everly bros.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6W4dnD8LkE
everly bros. - glitter and gold

...

lol @ the kinks being a psychedelic band, are you HIGH or something ??

Nancy and Lee - Some Velvet Morning

lots of the so called "baroque pop" acts cross the line sometimes towards psychedelic pop

in this thread the Kinks are psychedelic and Moby Grape is not psychedelic, which tbh makes this thread kinda psychedelic

also someone said Van and Astral Weeks is more deeply truly powerfully psychedelic then a boatload of Austin Powers ass lookin boys twee bullshit

That CCR thing way up there is bitchin'. So is this Youtube comment:

"With this masterpiece the CCR proved, even without a single word, they were not only virtuoso musicians - they were profound philosophers, too."

Was gonna cite 'Daily Nightly' by the Monkees but then realized they have several other songs that fit this bill and then subsequently questioned whether they might not actually be a psych band and then my head exploded into a cloud of multicolored flower petals.

Basically the entirety of Bobbie Gentry's The Delta Sweete.

This really depends on how one defines psych music. I like what Michael Hicks says on the subject,

"To understand what makes music stylistically "psychedelic," one should consider three fundamental effects of LSD: dechronicization, depersonalization, and dynamization. Dechronicization permits the drug user to move outside of conventional perceptions of time. Depersonalization allows the user to lose the self and gain an "awareness of undifferentiated unity." Dynamization, as (Timothy) Leary wrote, makes everything from floors to lamps seem to bends, as "familiar forms dissolve into moving, dancing structures"... Music that is truly "psychedelic" mimics these three effects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_music

But beyond that, great psych music by generally non-psych bands? I'd go with this killer double A side 45, "Walking Through My Dreams/Defecting Gray" by The Pretty Things, even if it doesn't check all of Hicks' tick boxes - http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=ailY08G6hhc

I feel like I'd have to loosen up quite a bit wrt that set of standards (otm though they may be) or nothing beyond Orb's 'We're Pastie to be Grill You' would qualify.

this thread is nonsensical

Sweet, bro, your dose is finally kickin' in.

genre definitions are by nature porous and contextual. The way I break psychedelia down has to do with specific periods and geographies for which the term was widely deployed, at the time that music was being made. And then considering what the common characteristics/identifying markers were for music made within that period and place. What was considered "psychedelic" in the UK in '66-'68 is pretty wildly different from what was considered "psychedelic" in the US during the same period. Similarly that stuff bears little resemblance to later electronic music dubbed "psychedelic". The term is fluid - the only thing that makes a track more "authentically" psychedelic than another is how much it conforms to what was considered "psychedelic" at that particular time/place.

Which is relevant to the thread question, because in the vast majority of cases musicians *moved through* psychedelia, like a costume that was put on and then discarded after it had outlived its usefulness. Some bands committed more heavily than others (the Beatles), some bands may have only made one or two songs in an attempt to cash-in (too many to mention), some bands sprang forth fully formed as psych bands but then moved on (Pink Floyd), some were on the periphery but definitely dabbled (the Kinks), some just followed along with the crowd for awhile (the Rolling Stones). But *all* of that stuff shares common technical approaches, themes, musical vocabularies that are readily identifiable.

With UK psych I think Andy Partridge's truism that it consisted primarily of British R&B bands + novelty record effects + nostalgia for childhood signifiers. Which manifested itself as songs about tea time, mythological and historical figures, WWI/WWII, etc. with an instrumental palette expanded beyond the standard guitars/bass/drums to include tape effects, classical orchestration, Indian/Asian elements, electronics, fuzz pedals, studio trickery. And beyond that is the presentation of the music itself - the Carnaby Street clothes, the day-glo art nouveau record sleeves, TV performances with spinning moire patterns, etc. To my ears (and eyes), anything that ticks a bunch of these boxes qualifies as UK 60s psych, and would have been considered such at the time.

US 60s psych is a whole different thing, of course.

With UK psych I think like Andy Partridge's

Pavement - The Hexx

Gene Vincent take on Summertime if I remember rightly. Reminded me of Can when I listened to it a lot a couple of decades ago.

In the Garden by Eurythmics psych/ Britfolk featuring half of both Can And Blonde as sidemen.

Can are psychedelic?

that’s like saying the velvets are psychedelic

All music is naturally psychedelic when you really think about it, amirite?

especially if you smoke enough weed

i listened to flow motion by can on acid at new year and it was p psychedelic

(specifically the title track)

I think the confusion/tension here is between psychedelic as a descriptor of the music's effect on the listener and psychedelic as a *genre* akin to bebop or dub reggae or NWOBHM.

In defense of my Moby Grape suggestion, "It's a Beautiful Day Today" comes from post-Spence Grape and there is little psychedelic about the "'69" album other than the Spence leftover "Seeing." Even "Beautiful Day" isn't particularly psychedelic except that hearing it makes me feel like something is kicking in.

Soundtracks is probably the most psychedelic early Can record. Or the Inner Space tunes.

Kinks discussion reminds me that early versions of The Who Sell Out came with "FREE PSYCHEDELIC POSTER INSIDE."

https://images.eil.com/large_image/THE_WHO_SELL%2BOUT%2B%2B%2BPOSTER-531494b.jpg

Pretty Things were probably on the path with Emotions and still in the ballpark after with SF Sorrow, plus there's that first Electric Banana record that I've still never heard...

pretty much:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0bdLdTJdKI

never seen that Sellout poster before, v nice!

xps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79bLbv-JCwY

Kinks discussion reminds me that early versions of The Who Sell Out came with "FREE PSYCHEDELIC POSTER INSIDE."

Now this (the 1968 album by Intersystems) really was something else entirely.

https://img.discogs.com/7aptAh1VHDXvmi-zwO1gCf6SMe8=/fit-in/600x600/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-8809427-1470205717-4963.jpeg.jpg

I know I did post this on another thread the other day and I know they were on the fringes of psych sometimes, but this song is certainly the most straightforward psychedelia they ever did and I love it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eFk9bAXzkI

lots of good suggestions in this thread BUT i wish scott was still posting random cool tunes :(

speaking of the bonzos "cyborg signal" by big grunt is pretty psychedelic imo

"i'll search the sky" by the nitty gritty dirt band

i also like psychedelic covers of not necessarily psychedelic songs, like the bluebeards' version of "come on-a my house" or curt boettcher's take on "tumbling tumbleweeds".

Finding it odd that somebody would find the music of Can non psychedelic. I think it is a descriptive that is used quite a bit for it.
I have been listening to psychedelic music since my early teens. So am wondering if you have ears if you are coming out with something like that

Interesting thing about Can is that they didn't use echo/delay and 'psychedelic' effects like stereo panning and phasing - apart from on "Tago Mago", which is why parts of that album sound kind of dated? In my opinion!

Not sure I agree with the premise here. While Tago Mago is where Can really went all out with studio effects, tracks like "Future Days," "Bel Air," and "Chain Reaction" variously use tremolo, phasing, hard panning, field recordings, etc and strike me as very psychedelic in a mellow, balmy way.

looool this thread, well done ilm. I came here to post Blondie's "Fade Away and Radiate," and "Shadow" by The Primitives, a trippy little bit of Indian-sounding psych amongst the pop punk nuggets of Lovely and find 200+ posts of harshed mellow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs6RLx8Jujo

Not sure I agree with the premise here. While Tago Mago is where Can really went all out with studio effects, tracks like "Future Days," "Bel Air," and "Chain Reaction" variously use tremolo, phasing, hard panning, field recordings, etc and strike me as very psychedelic in a mellow, balmy way.

In a subtler, less corny way, for sure. By the way, "Chain Reaction" mellow and balmy, are you sure?

i mean, where are we coming at this from?

evidently everywhere and nowhere at the same time

There’s a solid connection between minimalism and psychedelia. The minimalists’ repetition and drones create unusual effects such as time dilation for the listener, the same way as do Indian ragas and other Eastern musics associated with psychedelia. Just consider Terry Riley.

I posted a Steve Reich piece upthread fwiw

I totally take the idea that minimalism was significant to psychedelia from Butterfield Blues Band's "East-West" to Silver Apples, etc. But I don't believe the appeal of minimalism proper, Reich/Glass etc., was altogether to do with its psychedelic aspect. I think there's an element of it that maybe comes more from 20th century moves away from composer-dominated content, starting in music with serialism and into Cage and which you see in other art forms (surrealist techniques, abstract painting, etc.). And if I'm thinking about Reich's Four Organs, my base-level analysis of what kind of music it is would not be to say, "It's psychedelic music" (though it may have some commonality).

Similarly, one wouldn't say that Kurt Schwitters or Andre Breton were psychedelic writers. This colors my view of things like "European Son" and "Father Cannot Yell" in spite of the fact that one could rightly say that they are not dissimilar to "What's Become of the Baby." I definitely believe that there was an element of the Velvet Underground, and maybe Can too, that was intentionally NOT psychedelic. Is that not why the second and third VU albums had black and white covers? Is that not why "every color is bad???"

"That's what Jaki said"

This is precisely what, for me, distinguishes the cover of Monster Movie from, say, a Hawkwind album cover.

We had a thread recently where we were discussing how the Dead & VU were different, despite their similarities (or something).

I think They Might be Giants must fit into this, something like "See the Constellation" or "I'll Be Haunting You" scans as psych-rock to me which they are definitely not as a whole

"Where Do They Make Balloons?"

https://youtu.be/c9zG0mRvmaE

^^ pastoral psychedelia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_FTSVuyej4

When I was a kid I heard this weird psychedelic avant-garde violin piece by McKendree Spring on late night radio. I bought the album, only to discover the rest of it was decidedly UN-psychedelic wimpy folk-rock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSbZdd-PF7o

I was pleasantly surprised that the 50s Stars Who Tried to Adapt to the Psychedelic 60s video was sincerely appreciative rather than mocking.