A Note On Psychedelic Music

It’s common to peg a certain genre of ‘60s music, arising out of the first British Invasion and modern American folk rock, as “psychedelic music” or “drug music.” Like most charged terms, they do obscure artistic merit or demerit. To put the point in a nutshell, Louis Armstrong’s “What A Wonderful World” and the Beatles’ “I Need You” were both marijuana-influenced songs, but they are quite different otherwise. After all, Louis Armstrong was Louis Armstrong before smoking his first reefer, and so were the Beatles. (This realization does staunch any potentiality for such songs to be credible “drug ads.”)

There’s another aspect to this issue. It is possible to have a pseudo-psychedelic experience through certain stressful activities, most notably through sensory deprivation. Thus, it is possible to get grist for a full psychedelic song through using no drugs at all. Similarly, it’s possible for a drug experience to be grist for a song that has no psychedelic elements at all. With art, you never quite know.

Formally, Jakes Holmes’ early music is considered to be part psychedelic, even if his and his band’s forays into the genre were confined to “raga rock” and were not influenced by the then-prestigious atonal music movement. (Other, more technique-oriented bands like Jefferson Airplane were; John Cage also had an influence on them.) The bulk of it, though, is straight folk, of the small-town kind. Holmes’ uses of psychedelic melodies in his songs, when used at all, tend to be used for one of three atmospheric effects: fear, morosity or mockery. Occasionally, they're used to connote pain.