acid rock

The tradition & historical record

Acid rock is a loosely defined type of rock music that evolved out of the mid-1960s garage punk movement and helped launch the psychedelic subculture. While the term has sometimes been used interchangeably with "psychedelic rock", acid rock also specifically refers to a more musically intense, rawer, or heavier subgenre or sibling of psychedelic rock. Named after lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), the style is generally defined by heavy, distorted guitars, wah-wah and fuzztone pedals, while often containing lyrics with drug references and long improvised jams. Compared to other forms of psychedelic rock, acid rock features a harder, louder, heavier, or rawer sound. Much of the style overlaps with 1960s garage rock, proto-metal, and early heavy, blues-based hard rock. It developed mainly from the American West Coast, where groups did not focus on the novelty recording effects and whimsy of British psychedelia or San Francisco's psychedelic folk rock groups; instead, the subgenre emphasized the heavier aspects of West Coast blues rock. As the movement progressed into the late 1960s and 1970s, elements of acid rock split into two directions, with hard rock and heavy metal on one side and progressive rock on the other. In the 1990s, the stoner metal genre combined acid rock with other hard rock styles such as grunge and doom metal, updating the heavy riffs and long jams found in acid rock and psychedelic-influenced metal. ¹

"Acid rock" is loosely defined. In 1969, as the genre was still solidifying, rock journalist Nik Cohn called it a "fairly meaningless phrase that got applied to any group, no matter what its style". The term was originally used to describe the background music for acid trips in underground parties in the 1960s (e.g. the Merry Pranksters' "Acid Tests") and as a catchall term for the more eclectic Haight-Ashbury bands in San Francisco. The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia believed that acid rock is music you listen to while under the influence of acid, further stating that there is no real "psychedelic rock" and that it is Indian classical music and some Tibetan music "designed to expand consciousness". ¹

The term has often been deployed interchangeably with "psychedelic rock" or "psychedelia", particularly during the genre's nascence. However, the distinction between the heavier "acid rock" and the more general or inclusive genre of "psychedelic rock" has been well established. According to Per Elias Drabløs, "acid rock is generally considered a subgenre of psychedelic rock", while Steve and Alan Freeman state the two terms are more or less synonymous, and that "what is usually referred to as acid rock is generally the more extreme end of [the psychedelic rock genre]". This would mean psychedelic rock that is heavier, louder, or harder. Additionally, music critics later retroactively labelled the bridge between acid rock, hard rock and early heavy metal acts as "heavy psych". ¹

When defined specifically as a hard rock variant of psychedelia, acid rock is distinguished as having evolved from the 1960s garage punk movement, with many of its bands eventually transforming into heavy metal acts. ¹

Many bands associated with acid rock aimed to create a youth movement based on love and peace, as an alternative to workaholic capitalist society. David P. Szatmary states, "a legion of rock bands, playing what became known as 'acid rock,' stood in the vanguard of the movement for cultural change." Szatmary also quotes from the San Francisco Oracle, an underground newspaper published between 1966 and 1968, to explain how rock music was perceived at that time and how the acid rock movement emerged: "Rock music is a regenerative and revolutionary art, offering us our first real hope for the future (indeed, for the present)." When played live at dance clubs, performances were accompanied by psychedelic-themed light shows in order to replicate the visual effects of the acid experience. According to Kevin T. McEneaney, the Grateful Dead "invented" acid rock in front of a crowd of concertgoers in San Jose, California on December 4, 1965, the date of the second Acid Test held by author Ken Kesey. Their stage performance involved the use of strobe lights to reproduce LSD's "surrealistic fragmenting" or "vivid isolating of caught moments". The Acid Test experiments subsequently launched the psychedelic subculture. Author Steve Turner recognises the Beatles' success in conveying an LSD-inspired worldview on their 1966 album Revolver, especially with the track "Tomorrow Never Knows", as having "opened the doors" to acid rock. Former Atlantic Records executive Phillip Rauls recalls: "I was in the music business at the time, and my very first recognition of acid rock... was, of all people, the Beach Boys and the song 'Good Vibrations'... ¹

Originating in the early 1960s, garage rock was a mainly-American movement that involved R&B-inspired garage bands powered by electric guitars and organs. It was mainly the domain of untrained teenagers fixated on sonic effects, such as wah-wah and fuzz tone, and relied heavily on riffs. The music later blurred into psychedelia. American garage bands retained the rawness and energy of garage rock, while incorporating its use of heavy distortion, feedback, and layered sonic effects into their versions of psychedelic music, which spawned early examples of "acid rock". Bisport and Puterbaugh, who defined acid rock as an intense or raw form of psychedelia, include "garagey" psychedelia under the label of "acid rock" due in part to its "energy and intimation of psychic overload". Exemplary garage-psych acts include Blues Magoos, the Electric Prunes, and the Music Machine. ¹

The earliest known use of the terms "garage punk" or "garage rock" appeared in Lenny Kaye's track-by-track liner notes for the 1972 anthology compilation Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968, to describe a song by the Shadows of Knight, as "classic garage punk". At the time, the term "punk rock" referred to the garage rock of the 1960s, with the compilation's liner notes containing one of the earliest known uses of the term. Musicologist Simon Frith cites Nuggets, as a showcase for the garage psychedelia of the 1960s, with the compilation epitomizing an overlap between 1960s garage rock and early psychedelia. In 1984, English music journalist Phil Smee coined the term "freakbeat" when compiling reissues of obscure mid-1960s records for the Rubble series, which featured heavily distorted mod music derived from British beat that used psychedelic studio experimentation. ¹

Acid rock often encompasses the more extreme side of the psychedelic rock genre, frequently containing a loud, improvised, and guitar-centered sound. Alan Bisbort and Parke Puterbaugh write that acid rock "can best be described as psychedelia at its rawest and most intense... ¹

Heavy metal evolved from psychedelic music and acid rock and added psychedelic/acid rock to the basic structure of blues rock. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Acid rock”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

acid rock is subgenre of psychedelic rock music, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 9 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²