When asked what his favorite music was, Duke Ellington said: “There are only two kinds of music. The good and the bad. I like the good.” That pretty much covers it. So when I started up a pair of online radio stations for psychedelic music, I included the Duke’s “Caravan.” Huh?
Yeah, and I didn’t include the so-called psychedelic classic “My Green Tambourine.” Or “If You’re Going to San Francisco.” Or any other of the nehru-jacket songs that cashed in on the hippie-music craze. Sun Ra sits next to Pink Floyd on this magic bus.
To me, psychedelic music at its best transports listeners to another place, another state of mind. Alternate states, via sounds. “Discorporate and come with me,” Frank Zappa invited us in a song. (“Discorporate means to leave your body.”) Zappa wasn’t a drug guy, but he made his share of psychedelic music.
Psychedelic Sight revolves around two works in progress: A list of the 50 greatest psychedelic albums, and one of the top 100 psychedelic songs.
Of course, “best psychedelic albums” would seem to be working a limited field, since psychedelic rock as a genre lasted for so short a time, basically 1966-1971. But using the criteria for this project, psychedelic music actually stretches backward and forward for decades. Today, a new generation of artists are adopting the label — we’ll see how they do.
If the music blows your mind and fries the circuits of commercial radio, the door is open.
While the album list will cast a wide net, the top songs focus on psychedelic nuggets from the hippie era.
Meanwhile, readers contribute their favorite psychedelic songs and albums.
I hear from time to time from psychedelic music purists who say that to qualify the music must seek to re-create the LSD experience. I get it, but to me, that’s like saying all rock ‘n’ roll songs had to replicate the experience of having sex (since that’s where that term originated). A list of vintage music seeking to express the LSD experience would be short and populated by a lot of unlistenable stuff (certainly there are some mind-blowing exceptions).
This site focuses on the underground music of the 1960s and a bit of what came after. (Broadly speaking, stretching from early weird garage rock to the psychedelic revival of the mid-1980s.) You know it when you hear it.
This site has nothing to do with drugs, outside of the mind-altering stuff’s influence on much of the music. The Psychedelic Sight hive has long graduated from dope and booze, preferring to get high on acid rock, not acid. “Music is your only friend … until the end,” as the man sang.
The home page is the place to read news from the ever-evolving world of psychedelia. In addition to record and concert reviews, the site also covers movies from the psychedelic era, hippie art, books — all the alternative-media paraphernalia that fits. We also look back at vintage set lists.
Work began on the website in the summer of 2007 under the name Porpoise Mouth. PsychSight’s site was redesigned in 2012 and 2020.
Ideas, freakouts and memories always are welcome. Please join the community of commenters that’s developed over the years.
I had something else to say, it seems, but it’s clearly time to discorporate.
About time! What took you so long putting this together? Someone needed to do it and who better then you.
I am so excited I found this website. My love for psychedelia has been growing for about a year now, and has helped me mentally. I have Autism, and one of the reasons why I love this genre (and all that sounds like it) feels attuned to the condition, with its far out sounds, weird sensations, and thinking through a more colored lens. What I am trying to say is that this genre has helped me discover more of myself.
I also agree with your philosophy on what is considered “Psychedelia” doesn’t strictly need to be an exact sound, but a deeper connection one feels with the music. I also agree that it doesn’t even need to recreate the LSD effect, I found psychedelia to be lovely listen before I started to doing psychedelic drug (I use it for therapeutic and religious’ purposes) and that it is a rainbow that is not bound. Thank you for this website.