Psychedelic Musicians in Rock and Roll In 1967 the Beatles were at Abbey Road Studios putting the finishing touches on their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. At one point Paul McCartney wandered down the hall and heard what was then a new young band called Pink Floyd working on their hypnotic debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. He listened for a moment, then ran back. "Hey guys," he would say, "There's a new band over there and they're going to steal our show." With their mix of blues, music hall influences, references to Lewis Carroll and dissonant experimentation, Pink Floyd were one of the key groups of the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s, a pop culture movement that emerged with American and British rock, before to extend to cinema, literature and the visual arts. The music was largely inspired by hallucinogens, or so-called "mind-expanding" drugs such as marijuana and LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide; "acid"), and attempted to recreate drug-induced states through use of saturated guitar, amplified feedback and buzzing guitar motifs influenced by oriental music. This psychedelic consciousness was sown, in the United States, by counterculture gurus such as Dr. Timothy Leary, a Harvard University professor who began researching LSD as a tool of self-discovery in 1960, and the writer Ken Kesey who with his Merry Pranksters he staged Acid Tests - multimedia "events" accompanied by the music of the Warlocks (later Grateful Dead) and documented by novelist Tom Wolfe in the literary classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) - and they crisscrossed the country during the mid-20th century. 1960s on a kaleidoscopic colored school bus. "Everyone thought the '60s were a turning point. There was the exploration of sexual freedom and [...... middle of paper ...... Control, and Tone Soul Evolution (1997) by the Apples In Stereo. The English group Spiritualized, with Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (1997), explores the fusion of Pink Floyd-style interstellar overdrive with free jazz and gospel music, you ask? , is "manifestation of the soul" - implying a spiritual dimension that is rarely expressed (although it is worth remembering that Brian Wilson spoke of writing "teenage symphonies to God"). with something deeper, deeper and more beautiful. As Grateful Dead guru Jerry Garcia once said, "Rock 'n' roll provides what the church has provided to other generations and no form of rock music attempts." to feed more souls than psychedelia.