"Turn on, tune in, drop out"
Acid Rock is a form of Rock’n’Roll music that was developed in the U.S.A. during the 1960’s. It can be characterised by a few distinctive characteristics. Although containing a large Folk influence, it featured a loud, malleable, and experimental sound. Acid Rock was heavily amplified, drenched in effects, and manipulated with brazen production, included eclectic performance techniques, and swam in copious amounts of mind-altering substances. Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead thought of it as “a sensory overload….it’s very loud.” (Szatmary, 1987).
Germinating in San Francisco and coaxed into maturity by the increasing flow of marijuana, the psychedelic drug L.S.D. (lysergic acid diethylamide), and mescaline, Acid Rock bands favoured extended guitar improvisations, distorted guitar effects, and created a unique style which combined folk music with a liberal helping of blues riffs, ripples of country-western, and trace elements of exotic ingredients including Indian ragas.
Other significant features of Acid Rock include an unusually strong spirit of community that was spurred along by a social movement of the time that became known as the ‘Counter-Culture’. Burgeoning alongside, and in parts intertwined with, the ‘hippie movement’, the Counter-Culture was a rejection of the traditional taboos and constraints of mainstream America. A polyglot of dissent connected by the thread of a common enemy, the creators of the Counter-Culture came from varied backgrounds and socio-economic classes, yet, were fused together by the shared agreement that this new generation were going to create and define a revolutionary period in American history. The Grateful Dead were to become one of the bands providing the soundtrack to this war against ‘The Man’, and their psychedelic sound pulsated to the rhythm of a country in the midst of a splendorous turmoil.
The core partnership of the Grateful Dead, lyricist Robert Christie Burns (known as Robert Hunter), and lead-guitarist Jerry Garcia, first met after (suitably) being discharged from the army. Based in Palo Alto, the site of Stanford University, they began to work as a two-guitar duo in 1961 (Buckley, 2003). While part of the nascent band, Garcia participated in a U.S. government research programme held at Stanford to assess the effects of hallucinogenic drugs, and during the experiments befriended a young novelist who was to help shape the future for the Grateful Dead, Acid Rock, and a whole generation of Americans. His name was Ken Kesey.
Ken Kesey formed ‘the Merry Pranksters’, a busload of psychotropic improvisers, kind of like a beat generation ‘Chaser’ on acid. Private Prankster parties at La Honda, California expanded into the Acid Tests – experimentation with L.S.D. in a group setting. (Garafolo, 1997). These Acid Tests (which would later be chronicled by Tom Wolfe in ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’), needed a party atmosphere. Cue the Grateful Dead, who were at the time known as ‘The Warlocks’. Although they continued to play at Acid-Tests and other venues, the band were soon forced to change their name due to another group performing under the same moniker.
The band, smoking the psychoactive D.M.T. (dimethyltryptamine) at the time, decided upon a name that would become indelibly inked into rock history: the Grateful Dead (Troy, 1995).
Just like the names, the sounds that Rock bands of the time were making were largely channelled through the altered states provided by the popular drugs of the time, such as D.M.T. and L.S.D. Acid Rock was particularly impacted by L.S.D., due to its immense potency and potential to alter the perception of the user. Timothy Leary, known as the godfather of the L.S.D. surge, describes the effects of L.S.D. below:
“...The organ of the corti your inner-ear becomes a trembling membrane seething with tattoos of soundwaves. The vibrations seem to penetrate deep inside you, swell and burst there...You not only hear but see the music emerging from the speaker system like dancing particles, like squirming curls of toothpaste.” (Szatmary, 1987)
L.S.D., as a result of its consciousness expanding high, affected the performance and visual aspects of Rock; designers attempted to evoke the visuals of the psychedelic experience by developing a new kind of ‘swirling’ concert poster, and stage shows were enhanced by light shows as a way of incorporating the vibrant colours and movement of a trip, all melded together as an integral part of the music the bands were playing. Many San Francisco Rock bands also referenced psychedelic drugs in their songs. The Jefferson Airplane hit the airwaves with the anthem, “White Rabbit”, a song that wears its influence with pride:
“One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small,
And the ones that mother gave you don’t do anything at all,
Go ask Alice when she’s ten-feet tall” (Garofalo, 1997).
Nothing exemplifies the impact that L.S.D. had on Acid Rock in a more matter-of-fact way than the means by which the Grateful Dead afforded to record their 1968 work, “Anthem of the Sun”. A man by the name of Augustus Owsley Stanley III underwrote the band’s finances during the recording process. Otherwise known as ‘The Bear’, Stanley III was also the country’s biggest L.S.D. magnate, and handed out so much acid that he is regarded by some as one the main facilitators of 1967’s ‘Summer of Love’, a significant cultural turning-point for Acid Rock, the Counter-Culture, and the U.S.A. in general.
The final word on the impact of L.S.D. on Rock music during the late 1960’s is best left to the late Jerry Garcia;
“Along came L.S.D. and that was the end of that world. The world just went kablooey...It changed everything, you know, it was just – ah, first of all, for me personally it freed me, you know, the effect was that it freed me because I suddenly realised that my little attempt at having a straight life and doing that was really a fiction...it just wasn’t going to work out”.
Jerome John "Jerry" Garcia (August 1, 1942 – August 9, 1995)
