'60s Psychedelic

They say if you can remember the ’60s, you weren’t there, but whether you lived through ’em and had brain fade or missed ’em the first time around, we’ve got a pile of pop psychedelicacies that you’ll never forget. With his Marshall stacks cranked to infinity and a Stratocaster he sometimes played with his teeth, guitar god Jimi Hendrix still blows minds with the audio Panzer assault of “Purple Haze.” In the haunting, altered-state dream of “White Rabbit,” the Jefferson Airplane burrow into the weird, slightly terrifying world of Alice In Wonderland. And the era’s undisputed spirit guides, the Grateful Dead, find their defining moment right where you’d expect it — outer space — in rock’s answer to John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” the mystical, magical “Dark Star.”

In Next Steps, we’ll find that even British Invaders were ditching their Beatle boots for Birkenstocks and expanding their, um, musical consciousness.

As the going got freakier, so did the British Invasioneers, who had previously been engaged in such mundane pursuits as getting satisfaction and not wanting to be misunderstood. With a tinkly Nicky Hopkins piano riff ripped straight out of an Edwardian drawing room, the Rolling Stones temper their trippiness with a bit of the Baroque in “She's a Rainbow.” The Animals, on the other hand, weave back and forth between a leather-lunged blues and a narco-brained haze in “A Girl Named Sandoz.” (Sandoz, incidentally, was the name of the company that invented LSD.) And the Who carpet bomb “Armenia City In the Sky” with a megawatt barrage of buzzing fuzz, feedback, backwards loops, and psycho-gumbo pyrotechnics.

In Deep Cuts, we’re going to grab the black-light paint, and try to catch some of the more — literally — colorful songs of the psychedelic era.

With its Day-Glo posters and brain-searing light shows, the’60s psychedelic scene was all about the colors, a fact that wasn’t lost on its savviest pop practitioners. Scotsman-turned-spaceman Donovan may have been the era’s patchouli-scented potentate of all things Flower Power, but even the scene-making superhero of acid-edged psychedelia, Arthur Lee, had a mellower side, as you can hear in his band Love’s daydream-y “Orange Skies.” Answering the musical question “How do you get a double-tracked guitar to sound like a krummhorn on acid?,” Traffic jumps into the gap between free jazz and prog fantasy in “Coloured Rain.” And former straight-edgers Tommy James & The Shondells step out of the hippie closet, trading their AM-friendly hanky-panky pop for something a little more hallucinogenic in the sonic freak-out of “I'm a Tangerine.”

Light shows, fuzz bombs, turn-ons, and love-ins; everything everybody says about the ’60s is true — it was one big kandy-kolored, granny-glassed psychedelic party, a pedal-to-the-floorboard VW microbus trip to hippie enlightenment, with an 8-track soundtrack unlike any other in pop history before or since. The British Invasion was losing its grip on the pop charts (and smarter Brit bands, like the Rolling Stones and the Animals, changed their image as a result), as all eyes were laser-focused on the corner of Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco, ground zero for the new pop world order. From the Animals to the Zombies, from the Strawberry Alarm Clock to Moby Grape, we’ve got all the swirly, consciousness-raising, mind-bending sounds that made the ’60s the decade that rewrote rock’s rulebook in big, bold, life-altering hues.