THE BYRDS | Eight Miles High (1966)
‘66 was the year that psychedelic music really started to come into its own; The Beatles unleashed their backmasked Revolver on an unprepared world, the Beach Boys offered up Good Vibrations and The Byrds introduced their transitional album The Fifth Dimension. Side two, track one was the spectacular ‘Eight Miles High’; with its blatant drug references and warm, ethereal harmonies, this eerie and highly experimental track was crucial in opening the doors for psychedelic music and developing the distinctive West Coast style.
JULY | Dandelion Seeds (1968)
This little-known, retrospectively-celebrated Ealing-based band produced one of the finest and most underrated records in the history of psychedelic music. Dandelion Seeds, an off tilt and dark track is as trippy as its album cover art suggests; the band’s name bleeds from the nose of a reptile-covered hippopotamus. Built on a killer zoom bass groove, Dandelion Seeds is a pop, R&B and world music hybrid with a touch of distorted blues thrown in for good measure. Fuzz guitar fades in and out, ghostly vocals linger, tempo increases and decreases, conga drums roll; it's too much good to handle.
13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS | Levitation (1967)
Levitation is a whirling and swirling, spooky and sinister piece of glorious, golden psychedelia. Tanked up on LSD and peyote, short-lived Texan quintet the 13th Floor Elevators produced some jaw-droppingly dope music that’s still as exciting today as it was upon its conception, even despite its crackly lo-fi production. This track sounds so overheated; the gnarling, snarling, bluesy guitar, the reverb, Roky Erikson’s deep-southern screeches and Tommy Hall’s electric jug work up something so exceptional, it's on the verge of bursting into flames. Probably the most legal trip you could have.
Anything from Barrett’s debut solo album The Madcap Laughs is worthy of a place on this list for showcasing his unique brand of psychedelic folk, but Love You stands out by a mile. This love song is a burst of sunshine, a glimmer of joy on an otherwise downbeat album that gives a powerful insight into the crazy diamond’s shambolic state of mind. Probably made on one of the better days of his LSD-induced post-Floyd meltdown, this track sounds like a very spaced-out Syd got his hands on an ice-cream van and took it on a colourful and chaotic ride through London; rambling and jaunty, his nonsensical Cambridgeshire drawl erratically overlays a distinctively chirpy music hall piano. Dischordant and totally haphazard, but this is where its brilliance lies.
SILVER APPLES | Program (1968)
New York based Silver Apples were way, way, ahead of their time, zooming off into the cosmos at break neck speed with their otherworldly sounds. The duo’s avant-garde blend of psychedelic and electronic sounds was groundbreaking, and Program is a great example of their unparalleled style, featuring synthesizers and heavy sampling, of which they were pioneers. Program’s pulsing, monotone drum machine beat predicted the dance music revolution over a decade before it actually happened.
STRAWBERRY ALARM CLOCK | Incense and Peppermints (1969)
The quintessential psych song, and a popular one at that; reaching number one in the U.S. charts in November ’67. With Incense and Peppermints, L.A.’s Strawberry Alarm Clock had produced a classic track that was stereotypically flower power in its subject matter and style; mentions of ‘beatniks’, ‘lunatics’ and ‘the colour of time’ met with sweet vocal harmonies and a melange of wonderfully psychedelic sounds made with harpsichord, flute and organ.
LOVE | Singing Cowboy (1969)
Love didn’t end with Forever Changes, as many claim. And this track is the reason why. After the dissolution of the classic line-up, Arthur Lee reformed Love and produced the underrated album Four Sail, which features the epic Singing Cowboy. This fuzz-heavy, rolling ballad in all its marching drum and maraca-filled glory showcases a neo-Love sound that is much more psychedelic and electric in composition. Lee’s ferocious vocals are well suited to this new sound, and lyrically, Singing Cowboy has great autobiographical importance; with lines like ‘When you say goodbye, don’t you cry’ it’s difficult to tell if Lee is lamenting or renouncing his lost Love.
CAN | Yoo Doo Right (1969)
Yoo Doo Right, a gripping twenty minute tour de force, is the product of what happened when elaborately-structured psychedelic sounds collided with the antithetic and minimalistic burgeoning genre of Krautrock. Taken from Can’s debut album ‘Monster Movie’, this tribal-tinged track marries the simplicity of repetitive, hypnotic drums and bass with progressive jamming-style psychedelic influences (it was edited down from 6 hours of improvisation) and extended guitar solos.
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND | Venus in Furs (1967)
Whilst most other psychedelic bands were doing the colourful, flowery, Haight-Ashbury thing, somewhere along the East Coast the visionary Velvets were on to something completely unprecedented, offering up a darker, alternative psychedelic programme which explored the recesses of the human mind. Venus in Furs, a five minute ode to the eponymous sadomasochistic novel, is an Indian raga-infused wall of noise produced with detuned guitars and viola and overlaid with a haunting funeral procession style drumbeat.
FUNKADELIC | Free your mind and your ass will follow (1970)
George Clinton takes you on one whacked out trip through space with this track from the eponymous LP which, according to Clinton, was made with the intention of finding out ‘if we can cut a whole album while we're all tripping on acid’. This mind-blowing ten minute masterpiece is laden with religious subversion and offers up some blinding Hendrix-esque guitar freak outs and feedback control courtesy of Eddie Hazel. You can hear the funk being born.
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