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FLYING HIGH

Words: Min ChenImages: Hedi Slimane, courtesy of Saint Laurent

Transcending space, defying time and expandingconsciousness, psych rock is more than a reverb-drenched extended solo. Here’s to its altered andelevated state of mind

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Lee Blackwell, Night Beats, Mecca, CA, April 25th 2014

A curious thing happened in the music made in the mid-‘60s. Into the era’s leading folk, pop and rock crept reverb, raga accents, drones and instrumental solos, with whimsy and surrealism aiding lyrical content, and harpischords and theremins occupying studio space. It was a phenomenon that produced artifacts like The Yardbirds’ “Shapes of Things”, The Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”, Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” and The Beatles’ Rubber Soul, while emboldening the Grateful Dead to keep on jamming in California. But it wasn’t until the tail-end of 1966 that all of it came properly christened.

The Psychedelic Sounds of The 13th Floor Elevators, the full-length debut of the titular Austin, Texan

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outfit, was the first instance of the word “psychedelic” being applied to rock music, where it very much stuck. Defining a pattern, a state of mind, a style and above all, an experience, psychedelia first slipped into the world with help from West Coast figures like Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary, who advocated the use of chemical enhancements in the name of Raising Awareness. Transmuted into music, it brought the same consciousness expansion to bear upon the sounds of the ‘60s, and duly bathed the first Summer of Love in the good vibrations and purple haze of every long, strange trip. Better yet, leave it to Roky Erickson, frontman of The 13th Floor Elevators, to supply psychedelia’s penultimate position, in reference to an American dollar bill: “It’s where the pyramid meets the eye.”

Thus infused, the ‘60s flourished with psych rock, pop, soul and folk practitioners. Besides the usual suspects of Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane, Sly & The Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix, Beach Boys and Cream, even the most unlikely of

bands, when suitably enlightened, could be found bounding down the next strawberry field with sitar in hand (see: Their Satanic Majesties Request by The Rolling Stones). So rich was psychedelia’s influence that even the rising amount of acid casualties and punk’s arrival did nothing to wash away its tie-dyed effects. Not for nothing have the following decades been littered with styles like shoegaze, space rock, acid house, kosmiche musik and new rave, all of which wield the tools of the psychedelic trade to further its specialty of experiential musical highs.

Of the above, though, it is psych rock that seems to have best weathered and survived any number of permutations to still retain its mystic and synaesthetic groove. Thriving in both underground channels and overground charts, psych rock has, since the ‘80s, been of interest to acts like The Stone Roses, The Flaming Lips and early Primal Scream, as well as other Paisley Underground outfits. Its revival in the ‘90s came

largely down to Brian Jonestown Massacre (Their Satanic Majesties’ Second Request) and the company the San Franciscan band kept, which consisted of the likes of The Dandy Warhols and The Warlocks. While extended jams and exotic instrumentation thrived in this scene, the bands were also authentic right down to their flowery shirts and technicoloured album sleeves.

These days, the West Coast continues to be a hotbed for psych sounds. California can count the lo-fi likes of Ty Segall and the sun-dappled Mystic Braves in its company, while San Francisco flies the flag with bands like Thee Oh Sees and Sleepy Sun. The former stands tall with a prolific output that powers through garage and punk without losing sight of a psychedelic edge. John Dwyer’s songwriting has spanned thrashers like “Toe Cutter – Thumb Buster”, Syd Barrett-esque folk stylings as on “Minotaur” and spaced-out numbers like “Putrifiers II”, though ridden throughout is an uninhibited, reverb-drenched

Kevin Parker, Coachella. CA, April 14th 2013

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experience. Where Thee Oh Sees offer a wild phantasmagoria of absurdity and weirdness, Sleepy Sun hews closer to its ’67 psychedelic predecessors with its hypnotic sweep of sparkling atmospherics and fuzzed-out psych-blues. 2010’s Fever is particularly swell. And though the quintet professes to simply wanting to “play pedals that sound good”, frontman Bret Constantino will admit to an attempt to “provoke mind expansion in our listeners”. “One’s exposure to any such art that bears the soul of its creator,” he’s said, “may lead to a profound experience in the upper state of consciousness”.

Constantino’s “rebellion of conventional standards” in reference to contemporary psych rock will also sit well with Kevin Parker. The man who’s largely responsible for the psych revival in Perth, Australia via his Tame Impala, has this to say about his work: “I never think my own music is druggy at all. If you need drugs to get to that bar in the first place, that’s not right. People’s imaginations and dreams are more

screwed up than drugs; it’s just the sound of music in my head.” Rejecting the hallucinogenic aid that’s guided everyone from John Lennon to Jason Pierce to psychedelic awakenings, Parker’s woozy and heady psych swirl is a trip all of its own. Tame Impala’s 2012 masterwork Lonerism was a fantastic weave of atmosphere and wild texture (and that bass line on “Elephant”) that, besides putting in a good word for neo-psychedelia, planted the seeds for Australia’s now-blossoming psych rock scene. This was, after all, the place from which Coloured Balls emerged with the 1972 psych jam that was “Working Man’s Boogie” and now, in a post-Lonerism world, plays host to bands like Pond, John Steel Singers and Blank Realm.

Meanwhile, back in Austin, Texas, the birthplace of The 13th Floor Elevators and their Psychedelic Sounds, the Austin Psych Fest is in its eighth year. Now newly renamed Levitation (in a nod to the city’s psych pioneers; “Levitation” is a kaleidoscopic jangle of a track off the Elevators’ first album), the festival has been

bringing psych rock bands from all over the world to Carson Creek Ranch for three days’ worth of collective consciousness expansion and mind manifestation.

And Levitation is not the only psychedelic notch on Austin’s belt today, for the city also boasts a haul of tripped-out warriors on the scene. Amongst them, The Black Angels stand tall: the band’s the mastermind behind the Austin Psych Fest and the Reverberation Appreciation Society record label, has backed Roky Erickson in concert, and can lay claim to five LPs of fuzzy, spacey, heavy-deavy freak-outs that change colours as gracefully as they change moods. Less concerned with style, though, The Black Angels place its emphasis on the “spirit of psychedelia”, an undying thread that’s also drawn in other Texan newcomers like Indian Jewelry and Night Beats. Lee Blackwell, one of the founding members of Night Beats, may have relocated to Seattle, but his band’s feral and lo-fi brand of acid rock still carries traces of, in his words, “the freedom heard in a lot of Texas psych”, in its bloodstream.

This year’s Levitation line-up comes primed with psych experiences great and small, from The Flaming Lips to Fuzz, Primal Scream to Jesus & Mary Chain, Tame Impala to yes, The 13th Floor Elevators. And it’s fitting that it’s a roster curated by The Black Angels, whose insistence on “spirit” means that psychedelia, even when not demonstrated in style, still shows up here as a state of mind and being. In that way, psych rock endures, as it has from Jimi Hendrix asking “Are You Experienced?” in ’67 to Spiritualized’s float into space in ‘92 to Pond’s belief in its “Psychedelic Mango Vision”, which “transcends space and time / To your mind if you just open wide”. Now and then, it’s a search for and the anticipation of the next moment where the pyramid meets the eye.

Shane Butler, Quilt, Austin. Texas, May 3rd 2014