The culture of dropping out of mainstream American society had originated in the 1950s with the Beat movement, a group of alternative prose writers and poets centred on San Francisco, whose work rejected the formal principles of classical literature in favour of an aesthetic of free-flowing spontaneity.

The autobiographical novels of Jack Kerouac and the dissident, often highly confessional, poetry of Allen Ginsberg and others set new literary standards, as did the lives of the writers themselves. Kerouac in particular devoted a large part of his life to aimless travel, emphasising the spiritual freedom implicit in a life of permanent rootlessness, much of it informed by Westernised interpretations of Eastern religions such as Zen Buddhism.

By the 1960s, the Beat movement had metamorphosed – much to Kerouac’s chagrin – into the hippie ethos. Hippies didn’t necessarily want to zigzag across America on some eternal freight train. Self-discovery was now less about going places physically than an inward journey into the self. And what precipitated this inner journey was a whole new class of drugs.

New substances

There had been drugs in the Beat movement – principally marijuana (spliff) and amphetamine (speed) – but in the mid-1960s, a previously unfamiliar substance called LSD became widely available. Lysergic acid diethylamide (soon to be known simply as acid) was a synthetic laboratory drug whose properties had been accidentally discovered by its formulator, Albert Hofmann, at an experimental research clinic in Basel, Switzerland. In 1943, Hofmann unwittingly absorbed some of this material through his fingertips while handling it, and started having the world’s first acid trip while cycling home. At the time, Switzerland was a fragile island of neutrality in the midst of Nazi-occupied Europe, and Hofmann prudently kept quiet about his discovery until after the war.

Interest in mind-altering – as opposed to just mood-altering – drugs had been growing ever since the first encounters by North American scientists in the 1950s with the psychotropic plant drugs used by native peoples in central America. There was the peyote cactus (Lophophora williamsii), source of mescaline, as used by Aldous Huxley in his seminal drug text, The Doors Of Perception (1954). There was the psilocybin mushroom (Stropharia cubensis), and there were numerous other plant-derived preparations that produced the combined effects of hallucinogenic sensory distortion and euphoria.

It took state legislatures several years in the 1960s to catch up with this new generation of substances, meaning that what were for many users the most radical, even life-altering, drug experiences of their lives were perfectly legal.

Within no time at all, the acid trip – an eight-hour-plus journey into complete psychic and sensory anarchy – started influencing the music and lyric-writing of rock and pop performers. Even where there was no direct link in an individual’s personal experience, the artistic mood of the moment was suddenly for surrealistic lyrics and deconstructive musical effects.

Early influences

This acid atmosphere infuses the Rolling Stones album Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967). Pink Floyd’s debut album Piper At The Gates Of Dawn (1967) is awash with it. It represents the difference between the early socially specific protest lyrics of Bob Dylan and the stream-of-consciousness character of the songs on Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde (both 1966).

Among classic albums of the American underground, Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s double album Trout Mask Replica (1969) seems steeped in acid, whereas the Velvet Underground’s debut album, The Velvet Underground And Nico (1967), a product of the much harder-edged New York scene, would have nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Although there are disguised drug references on its predecessor, Revolver (1966), Sgt. Pepper is the Beatles’ first explicitly psychedelic album. There is nothing psychedelic, to be sure, about tracks such as “Lovely Rita” or “When I’m Sixty-Four”, but the record does feature “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”, originally influenced by a dreamlike drawing produced by John Lennon’s young son Julian, but long accepted as being an alternative interpretation of the abbreviation LSD.

Its lyrics are an approximation of the floaty, visionary surreality of the acid state, overlaid with a thick topcoat of English whimsy. Trippy weirdness had, after all, a longer lineage in English letters (reaching back to Alice’s mushroom-nibbling in Wonderland and the nonsense verse of Edward Lear) than it had had in North America. Read more about Alice's Adventures In Wonderland here.

It was reputedly Bob Dylan who turned the Beatles on to psychedelic drugs (marijuana specifically) during one of their visits to America. They seemingly took to it like ducks to water, even though Dylan himself evidently may have regretted the creative direction in which he had uwittingly launched them. (On hearing a track from Sgt. Pepper come on the radio one day, he is said to have snapped, “Turn that crap off!”) Notwithstanding that, the acid mentality put down roots in their work.

Their next album, Magical Mystery Tour (1967), contained “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “I Am The Walrus” and the indestructible Flower Power anthem, “All You Need Is Love”. By the time they recorded The White Album (1968), with tracks including “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?” and “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey”, they had clearly passed the point of no return.

LSD banned

Despite the wilder claims made for LSD by alternative scientists such as RD Laing, who suggested it would make a key medicine in the treatment of schizophrenia, or Peter Stafford and Bonnie Golightly, authors of LSD: The Problem-Solving Psychedelic (1967), in which they suggest a number of therapeutic uses for the drug in the sexual field, “curing” anything from female sexual dysfunction to homosexuality, LSD wasn’t long for the world. It was included in the schedules of the US Controlled Substances Act 1970, and then in Britain’s Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, and has been illegal ever since.

The psychedelic movement in music fizzled out in the early 1970s, when it was gradually elbowed aside first by the workaday denim-clad ethos of heavy metal and then the spangly cross-dressing of Glam Rock. It wasn’t until the arrival of ecstasy in the late 1980s that any revival of psychedelic sensibility returned.