What qualifies as “psychedelic music?”
This is a loaded and subjective question. Right?
When I was sixteen, I fell deeply in love with psychedelic music. However, if I am honest, I often felt that what was labeled or considered a classic psychedelic band or album never quite lived up to my expectations.
Even with their legendary status and a fleeting moment of psychedelic brilliance in 1968 and 1969, The Grateful Dead never resonated with me as a true psychedelic band. While I like the early works of Quicksilver Messenger Service, they too seemed more aligned with a jam-oriented bluesy style. Country Joe & The Fish, whom I previously discussed in an earlier article, produced two of the most notable lysergic albums to emerge from the Bay Area in the 1960s. I would also include Jefferson Airplane’s ‘After Bathing at Baxter’s’ in this discussion.
England was home to Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, The Pretty Things, July, and some standout singles from bands such as Tintern Abbey and Caleb. There was a quintessentially British, and whimsical approach to some of these bands, but also a level of creativity that took many of them beyond the usual American approach of an extended, feedback-drenched blues jam.
As the '70s rolled in, Hawkwind, who was “In Search of Space,” took their listeners on a cosmic, psychedelic adventure. I could mention countless other bands, musicians, and albums across continents, but even back then, I still felt there was a treasure trove of obscure, hidden gems that I was constantly digging for in hopes of one day unearthing.
Lenny Kaye’s original Nuggets compilation album was revolutionary, but aside from The Magic Mushrooms electrifying 'It's-A-Happening' and a couple of other songs I already knew, most of the album sounded more garage rock than psychedelic to me.
As a teen and well into my thirties, I continued to dig through the bins in used record stores, always searching for a true psychedelic holy grail. I also began tape trading with fellow collectors I had contacted through the classified pages of DISCoveries and Goldmine magazines.
Ultimately, I finally started to uncover music made in the highest realm of the cosmos.
I also learned along the way that there is something in the water down in Texas that I can’t put my finger on.
Then again, maybe I don’t want to put my finger on it.
After all, it was Texan psychedelic explorers, 13th Floor Elevators who once sang…
If your limbs begin dissolving
In the water that you tread
All surroundings are evolving
In the stream that clears your head
The combination of the conservative religious right and secessionist sentiments, along with the inhospitable desert heat, frequent tornadoes, and hurricanes—Texas is not a place where I would personally feel at home. Yet, this same environment gave rise to some of the most authentic and raw psychedelic music to come out of America.
In the 1960s, rebellious teens sought to break free from the suffocating, conservative, and religious norms of Texas. They were also pushing creative boundaries and embracing a level of weirdness that was unhinged and unmatched. Musically, they were echoing ideas the Surrealists were exploring in the 1920s and 1930s but doing so with the aid of a liberal amount of psychedelics. A comparable movement to the freakiest Texan psych bands could arguably be Free Jazz. It, too, aimed to break free from conventional logic and earthly limitations, allowing its musical astral travelers to ascend into the highest levels of the cosmic universe.
In 1924 Surrealists, André Breton defined Surrealism in the First Surrealist Manifesto:
Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.1
“Automatism,” in art, is where the artist draws unconsciously and doesn’t allow any conscious thought to enter the art-making process. The idea was to eliminate all logical reasoning such as philosophy, religion, science, and mathematics in a search for truth, found only in the unconscious mind of dreams, fantasies, and the irrational.
Psychedelic music also sought to break free from conventional reasoning and embrace a sense of automatism in its creation. Heavily inspired by psychedelic drugs, artists adopted a very similar automatism or stream-of-consciousness style, aiming to produce sounds that evoked synesthesia and a hallucinatory experience. For some bands, it wasn't just about getting high and making music. The psychedelic experience eventually became a profound spiritual journey, where the interplay of chemistry and natural psychedelics served as a portal, and music transformed into a sacred language through which they connected and communicated with god.
The 13th Floor Elevators stand out as the most iconic psychedelic band to emerge from Texas. I rank them among my all-time favorite rock bands, and I can discuss their music endlessly. However, while the Elevators were on a quest to connect with the divine through a steady stream of psychedelics as powerful as the mighty Rio Grande, I soon found out they were not alone in their journey.
But this post isn't about the Elevators because I can't think of what else I could add to their legacy that hasn't already been said.
My love of music has never been about the collection. It’s always been driven by a desire and curiosity to unearth new sounds I have yet to hear. The one thing I have noticed in vinyl’s resurgence is the amount of overblown, adjective-laden hype written on album cover stickers of obscure bands from the past. Most of the words are there to convince the buyer they just discovered an unknown holy grail. However, in reality, very few of these albums ever meet the lofty promises made on those stickers.
In the ‘80s and ‘90s, finding rare and obscure psych was significantly more difficult than it is today. While a handful of labels were reissuing these gems, many of the releases were unlicensed bootlegs, often cut using an original album, regardless of condition, as the master source.2
At some point in the ‘90s, a well-known collector from Seattle sent me a 60-minute Maxell XLII cassette featuring a band I had never heard of. The spine, written in Sharpie, simply said:
“Cold Sun”
The letter he enclosed said something to the effect of “From Texas. Similar to the Elevators, but more far out.” As soon as I put it on, I was immediately intrigued by the strange sounds that followed.
Cold Sun was a short-lived band from Austin, Texas, who seemed to change their band name as often as the Elevators dropped acid. Although younger than the Elevators, they emerged from the same scene, and at one point Elevators drummer John Ike Walton was in the band. By 1968, however, the scene was changing dramatically, and the Elevators were dissolving into a mess of hard drugs, arrests, mental illness, psychiatric hospitalization, and electroshock treatment therapy.
Cold Sun eventually recorded tracks for Sonobeat Records between 1970 and 1971, but they were never released. This resulted in them fading off into the forgotten land of unheard obscurity. It wasn't until the late 1980s that Rich Haupt, a New Yorker living in Dallas and the founder of Rockadelic Records, first heard a three-track acetate cut from these sessions and was blown away. Learning there was more music beyond the acetate, he contacted the band leader, Billy Miller. After some persuasion, Miller eventually consented to let Rich release the music through his label, Rockadelic.
With an original press run of only 300 copies, Cold Sun-’Dark Shadows’ was released in 1990. Two decades after the original recording, the world was finally introduced to the eerie, atmospheric, and occasionally twisted soundscapes created by Billy Miller, Tom McGarrigle, Mike Waugh, and Hugh Patton. The record quickly gained a cult following and has since been reissued at least twice. Original copies of the Rockadelic album are now fetching hundreds of dollars, and a test pressing is currently listed on Discogs just shy of $1000.
Even though the tracklist of the original Rockadelic album was altered from what was written on the tapes, this is the version I first heard and instantly fell in love with.3
Kicking off with the intensely hallucinogenic track ‘Ra-Ma,’ the album launches into a rhythmic drumbeat, soon accompanied by Billy Miller’s haunting autoharp and dissonant guitar riffs by Tom McGarrigle. Miller’s vocals eventually emerge, intentionally off-key and warbling, as he sings about “desecrating angels,” “crocodiles that line the banks” and the “King of the Sun.” A minute and a half in, the music erupts like a Concorde taking flight, plunging into a chaotic, disorienting soundscape steeped in mescaline and peyote, reminiscent of Breton’s groundbreaking Surrealist manifesto. The composition defies conventional logic, featuring a jarring structure and lyrics that are utterly nonsensical, brimming with a blend of mescaline-induced spirituality and absurdity. Even now, it stands as one of the most mind-bending musical experiences to emerge from America during that era.
Interestingly, the opening track was not originally inspired by the Hindu god Rama; rather, it draws from the notions of Mu and Lemuria.
In 1926, James Churchwood published a book exploring the concept of a lost continent in the Pacific known as Mu (or Lemuria). Before the scientific community accepted the theory of continental drift, this mythical land was often linked to Atlantis. It was also thought to explain how lemurs came to inhabit the island of Madagascar.
The song doesn't directly address any of this, however; rather, it weaves a kaleidoscopic tapestry that makes the paintings of Salvador Dalí look tame in comparison. Lyrics sing about tortoises observing the arrival of sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer de Gama in India. A “seed from a tree” is placed in the singer's hand, where “a tortoise is born.” Meanwhile, “three sultans with a hookah soar past on a flying carpet, heading west”, and “infant visions elevate us higher than pilots have flown.“
This is wild shit!
The album features other metaphysical and phantasmic tracks, such as ‘South Texas,’ which drifts through harrowing peyote and ayahuasca-soaked desert landscapes, with Miller’s autoharp providing what sounds like an eerie bassline. The tripped-out lyrics paint a paranoid image of a gecko's eye gazing through a crack in the wall, whispering warnings about the arrival of human robots. As the song continues, we are greeted by a swarm of dragons roaming the ceiling in what we soon learn is “Spider City.”
A soothing voice then gently urges…
Seeing it out now in this time.
This is not a good trip that one feels they want to “see out.”
In the album’s most 13th Floor Elevators’esque track, ‘Fall,’ Miller not only sounds vaguely like Roky Erickson but throughout the song, there are lyrical compositions that wouldn’t feel out of place on the legendary Elevators album, ‘Easter Everywhere.’
Once I was a drunken mass of men.
At the garden wall
Now I'm a dancing Prince of Light.
Who knows nothing at all?
I'll never go to war.
I've been there before.
Napoleon is standing fast.
On the battleground
Bullets, cannons roaring past
Yet he does not hear a sound.
Oh, all these doctors of the mind
Playing a game with time
Stockbrokers of all the thwarted lives
Long on causes, short on cures
Cat-like creeping spy in the night
Who is your patron saint?
Eventually, one of the most striking and hallucinatory lyrics burst out of Miller’s tormented and anguished vocals with the urgency of a lizard molting its skin…
Willow binds like steel.
From your lotus wheel
In ‘For Ever,’ amidst a haze of dark fuzz and feedback that flashes with vivid colors, McGarrigle's guitar swirls, billows, and unfurls like thick smoke, as Miller ultimately reveals to us…
You cannot get to this place until you are safe and free.
Yet, throughout the album, there is never a feeling of safety; this absence of not knowing where you are and what may come next is also one of its charms and sticks with the listener long after the album finishes. The album carves out a haunting and disquieting soundscape of dystopia and paranoia. The guitar weaves a tapestry of discordant tones, filled with echoing, warped, and distorted feedback, while the autoharp introduces an eerie and unusual atmosphere. Layered over this are lyrics that feel utterly random, conjuring a nightmarish vision that brings to mind the surreal horror art of Zdzisław Beksiński.
Despite its unsettling nature, ‘Dark Shadows’ captures everything I sought in my quest to discover truly psychedelic music.
The connection with the Elevators doesn’t end with the album and its esoteric lyrics. Miller would later become essential in helping Roky revive his career following his time at Rusk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Roky’s work in the mid-70s, first as Bleib Alien and then as Roky Erickson & the Aliens, was essentially Cold Sun, with Erickson replacing McGarrigle.
In the final lyrics of ‘For Ever,’ Miller repeatedly asks...
Where does she come from?
With every listen, I ask myself…
Where the hell did this album come from?
I knew only owning a tape wasn’t sufficient; I had to find a copy of the original Rockadelic album. The album was now long out of print, and by the early 2000s, the prices on eBay were skyrocketing, far exceeding what I was willing to spend.
In 2001, I was writing record reviews for a website focused purely on psychedelia and had made some significantly deeper contacts in the psych collector community. Fate perhaps eventually connected Rich Haupt and me, leading to regular correspondence with one another. In one of our conversations, we began talking about Cold Sun, and Rich graciously offered me the last remaining test pressing of the Cold Sun album he had in his possession. Without hesitation, I said yes; we agreed to a fair price, and within a week, it was in my hands. This album holds a special place in my heart as it is arguably the finest and most authentic American psychedelic album ever recorded.
After listening to the album countless times over the past three decades, I continue to discover new insights within its intricate, yet bizarre layers. It never fails to elevate my consciousness into some unknown realm. While it may not be an entirely comfortable listen, I can’t resist entering and exploring further.
This is precisely what psychedelic music should be.
Tread Carefully.
Breton, André, 1896-1966. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972.
These bootlegs were called “needle drops” as they used an original LP as the master source. You could often hear the original needle dropping down on the record at the start of these bootleg record.
Subsequent reissues (including what is available on Spotify and the YouTube link above) have since corrected the tracklisting to its original order.
I remember the first time I heard this record. I was blown away by how much heavier it felt than 13th Floor, Golden Dawn, Bubble Puppy or Fever Tree, who were the Texas psych bands of that era I knew best. They played Levitation / Psych Fest one year but I wasn't in town, heard great thing about it. For some reason, I haven't listened to this album in years; I'm very excited to sit down and give it an overdue revisit. And what a great score on your part—I love how special a record gets when you've had to earn it.
Also, I don't know what it is about Texas. Everyone likes to joke about there being something in the water down here, and there's certainly something to it besides the peyote and dirt weed. Texas is a weird place and breeds wild people. It's also hot as hell and the sun has probably cooked all our brains. But really, that psychedelic streak comes out in so many genres of Texas music to this day.