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Psychedelia: 101 Iconic Underground Rock Albums 1966–1970
The most colorful, detailed, and authoritative guide to the psychedelic albums of the 1960s ever published.
As the 1960s progressed, a socially conscious counterculture emerged—one defined by rock and roll. Artists began to explore trippy new sounds, musicianship reached unsurpassable levels, and for a brief, glorious moment, audiences embraced the genuinely experimental. Never before or since were so many classic albums made in such a short time. From Cream’s Disraeli Gears to the Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle , Psychedelia examines 101 of the era’s most groundbreaking records. Contemporary reviews, rare photographs, new interviews, and a plethora of iconic images and reproductions of cover artwork make this a treasure no music fan should be without.
The artists
The Beatles * The Byrds * Country Joe & the Fish * David Bowie * Donovan * The Doors * Fairport Convention * The Grateful Dead * Jefferson Airplane * The Jimi Hendrix Experience * Love * The Mothers of Invention * Pink Floyd * Quicksilver Messenger Service * The Rolling Stones * Small Faces * Traffic * The Yardbirds * and more!
As the 1960s progressed, a socially conscious counterculture emerged—one defined by rock and roll. Artists began to explore trippy new sounds, musicianship reached unsurpassable levels, and for a brief, glorious moment, audiences embraced the genuinely experimental. Never before or since were so many classic albums made in such a short time. From Cream’s Disraeli Gears to the Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle , Psychedelia examines 101 of the era’s most groundbreaking records. Contemporary reviews, rare photographs, new interviews, and a plethora of iconic images and reproductions of cover artwork make this a treasure no music fan should be without.
The artists
The Beatles * The Byrds * Country Joe & the Fish * David Bowie * Donovan * The Doors * Fairport Convention * The Grateful Dead * Jefferson Airplane * The Jimi Hendrix Experience * Love * The Mothers of Invention * Pink Floyd * Quicksilver Messenger Service * The Rolling Stones * Small Faces * Traffic * The Yardbirds * and more!
- GenresMusicNonfiction
256 pages, Hardcover
Published May 2, 2017
6 people are currently reading
79 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 29, 2017
I suppose this might be called a coffee table book. The pictures of the album covers are very well done. I was interested in the music of this period as I was a teenager then so I have heard most of these albums and indeed I actually own about half of them. I am not sure I would call all of them psychedelic nor, given that the author has limited each artist to one album, that I would have picked the same albums as he did. Basically you get two pages per album with one page being a picture of the album cover. There are also some articles dealing with LSD, publications, festivals, singles and films. I enjoyed reading it and I am sure I will browse through it again from time to time. I will certainly try to hear some of the albums with which I am not familiar.
June 7, 2017
A beautiful coffetable sized book that's well researched. Unfortunately, it will probably only attract people that's already familiar with most of the albums listed. But even though I didn't find anything "new" to check out it was an enjoyable read!
March 6, 2018
Irresistible, especially if you're a kook for pop-psych from the 60s, like I am. A minor quibble: I wish he had listed the songs on each album.
December 18, 2017
This is a lavish, but somewhat cumbersome coffee table book that is just a really great introduction for someone who is relatively new to psychedelic music. I had heard 7-8 of these albums before, and thanks to YouTube, was able to get up to about 40 of them in the time I've read the book alone. Not all of the albums are available on YouTube, of course, Sgt. Pepper, probably the earliest psychedelia I own certainly isn't, nor is Blonde on Blonde or Electric Music for Mind and Body. Even Mad River is only partially available there.
I started becoming a fan of progressive rock via the films of Dario Argento with their scores by Goblin and Keith Emerson, and most of what I had read about progressive rock had treated it as an outgrowth of psychedelic music. Some of the albums I had heard before reading this book were Wake Up... It's Tomorrow, The Trip, David Bowie, The United States of America, The Notorious Byrd Brothers, and S.F. Sorrow (other psychedelia I like include Nirvana (UK), which doesn't get a mention (although producer Chris Blackwell does), and Mark Wirtz, who is covered in the Tomorrow section (about half of A Teenage Opera is by Tomorrow or Keith West, so I've heard much of this album, too, but not in its entirety)) and many of the covers were familiar from browsing record stores or from listening to some of these albums online.
Each album is accorded two page, but the print is small enough and the page is large enough to be a solid introduction to the album, and often to the act (Sgt. Pepper, Blonde on Blonde, Their Satanic Majesties Request and some of the better known albums eschew backstory that would easily be available elsewhere to focus tightly on the album).
Although the book looks about the size of a vinyl album (it's somewhat smaller), rarely does the cover image take up the entire page--usually there is a huge margin and a large print quote.
There are also sections on psychedelic films (including Psych-Out and The Trip, which were two of my introductions to the genre. I was born after the book ends (only the last two albums were released in 1970, and in January, at that) and the fact that Jack kept himself to one album per band allowed for a great diversity of artists I might never have encountered otherwise.
Jack asks forgiveness for any errors that one may find in the book. I found only two glaring errors in terms of the writing, as opposed the fact checking. There's no apostrophe in Queens, New York (in the Morgen entry), and the Moby Grape entry says "amed" where it should say "named." It seems strange that the entry for Ill Wind never mentions how country the band sounds.
The worst aspect of this book is the lack of effort put into the index. There are several mentions of Wavy Gravy, who is not in the index under either W or G, and there is a mention of Chris Boettcher before the entry on The Millennium's Begin, so an index would have been helpful. It generally just has bands and band members listed, and what page the entry is on, making it little more than an alphabetical version of the table of contents.
The albums are presented in chronological order so it's more than just a browser (although I inadvertently skipped over the Cheap Thrills section, possibly Freudian from never having liked Janis Joplin's voice but more likely because static often made it easy to turn more than one page by mistake), but it's definitely a valuable reference book. I wish I owned it and had it handy for reference rather than living in a homeless shelter and lugging it around with me (and no, despite the appeal of this music to me, I'm no druggie--I guess I'd be more like the members of Mighty Baby by reading esoteric literature, or the several acts who eschewed drugs for meditation).
The book has additional sections on other aspects of psychedelia including LSD itself, psychedelic films, music publications and festivals, and bands that never cut an album. Since the albums are all on the back cover, I'll mention the acts covered by the singles section: (UK) The Misunderstood, Caleb Quaye, Dantalion's Chariot, The Accent, Tintern Abbey, Tickle, One in a Million, Boeing Duveen & The Beautiful Soup, Factory, Mandrake Paddle Steamer; (US) The Oxford Circle, The Blue Things, The Mystic Tide, The Baroques, The Third Bardo, The Beautiful Daze, Damon, Dirty Filthy Mud, John Wonderling, Peacepipe; (Continental Europe) Adjéèf the Poet (Ad Visser), Young Flowers, Members Blues Band, Baby Grandmothers, Sound of Imker, Novak's Kapelle, Dragonfly (Netherlands--the US act is one of the 101 albums), The Petards, Doc'Daïl (led by Ticky Holgado, a regular in the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet), and Les Goths.
Oddly, the public library didn't put it under music books but under music bibliographies in the 000s, which is odd, particularly since he strictly limits the personnel to band members and not guest musicians or other crew.
When I clicked Richard Morton Jack's name on Goodreads, I saw that he had written books about rock music with Stan Denski, who was my college speech teacher. He always seemed like a cool guy, but I didn't know he was THAT cool.
I started becoming a fan of progressive rock via the films of Dario Argento with their scores by Goblin and Keith Emerson, and most of what I had read about progressive rock had treated it as an outgrowth of psychedelic music. Some of the albums I had heard before reading this book were Wake Up... It's Tomorrow, The Trip, David Bowie, The United States of America, The Notorious Byrd Brothers, and S.F. Sorrow (other psychedelia I like include Nirvana (UK), which doesn't get a mention (although producer Chris Blackwell does), and Mark Wirtz, who is covered in the Tomorrow section (about half of A Teenage Opera is by Tomorrow or Keith West, so I've heard much of this album, too, but not in its entirety)) and many of the covers were familiar from browsing record stores or from listening to some of these albums online.
Each album is accorded two page, but the print is small enough and the page is large enough to be a solid introduction to the album, and often to the act (Sgt. Pepper, Blonde on Blonde, Their Satanic Majesties Request and some of the better known albums eschew backstory that would easily be available elsewhere to focus tightly on the album).
Although the book looks about the size of a vinyl album (it's somewhat smaller), rarely does the cover image take up the entire page--usually there is a huge margin and a large print quote.
There are also sections on psychedelic films (including Psych-Out and The Trip, which were two of my introductions to the genre. I was born after the book ends (only the last two albums were released in 1970, and in January, at that) and the fact that Jack kept himself to one album per band allowed for a great diversity of artists I might never have encountered otherwise.
Jack asks forgiveness for any errors that one may find in the book. I found only two glaring errors in terms of the writing, as opposed the fact checking. There's no apostrophe in Queens, New York (in the Morgen entry), and the Moby Grape entry says "amed" where it should say "named." It seems strange that the entry for Ill Wind never mentions how country the band sounds.
The worst aspect of this book is the lack of effort put into the index. There are several mentions of Wavy Gravy, who is not in the index under either W or G, and there is a mention of Chris Boettcher before the entry on The Millennium's Begin, so an index would have been helpful. It generally just has bands and band members listed, and what page the entry is on, making it little more than an alphabetical version of the table of contents.
The albums are presented in chronological order so it's more than just a browser (although I inadvertently skipped over the Cheap Thrills section, possibly Freudian from never having liked Janis Joplin's voice but more likely because static often made it easy to turn more than one page by mistake), but it's definitely a valuable reference book. I wish I owned it and had it handy for reference rather than living in a homeless shelter and lugging it around with me (and no, despite the appeal of this music to me, I'm no druggie--I guess I'd be more like the members of Mighty Baby by reading esoteric literature, or the several acts who eschewed drugs for meditation).
The book has additional sections on other aspects of psychedelia including LSD itself, psychedelic films, music publications and festivals, and bands that never cut an album. Since the albums are all on the back cover, I'll mention the acts covered by the singles section: (UK) The Misunderstood, Caleb Quaye, Dantalion's Chariot, The Accent, Tintern Abbey, Tickle, One in a Million, Boeing Duveen & The Beautiful Soup, Factory, Mandrake Paddle Steamer; (US) The Oxford Circle, The Blue Things, The Mystic Tide, The Baroques, The Third Bardo, The Beautiful Daze, Damon, Dirty Filthy Mud, John Wonderling, Peacepipe; (Continental Europe) Adjéèf the Poet (Ad Visser), Young Flowers, Members Blues Band, Baby Grandmothers, Sound of Imker, Novak's Kapelle, Dragonfly (Netherlands--the US act is one of the 101 albums), The Petards, Doc'Daïl (led by Ticky Holgado, a regular in the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet), and Les Goths.
Oddly, the public library didn't put it under music books but under music bibliographies in the 000s, which is odd, particularly since he strictly limits the personnel to band members and not guest musicians or other crew.
When I clicked Richard Morton Jack's name on Goodreads, I saw that he had written books about rock music with Stan Denski, who was my college speech teacher. He always seemed like a cool guy, but I didn't know he was THAT cool.
February 18, 2019
Beautiful layout, insightful descriptions. I'm now on a mission to get those albums I don't have!
December 4, 2022
This is a beautiful coffee table book, but it's also much more than that.
I usually don't care much for coffee table books, but this one is actually very useful, because it contains large, high-quality reproductions of most original covers of the albums it discusses. Short of owning the original vinyls, this is a unique opportunity to appreciate the often striking psychedelic art of the period. Thanks to this book, I discovered some unexpected, delightful details of covers of albums I only own on CD or in digital format.
However, as I said, this is not just a coffee table book, as it contains well-written, informative entries about 101 classic rock albums issued between mid 1966 and early 1970. The selection is outstanding in many respects. First, it includes both big classics of the psychedelic era (the Beatles, Love, the Byrds...) and a large number of obscure records (The Mandrake Memorial, anybody?). In this way, it can serve both as a general introduction to psychedelic rock for people that are just getting into the genre, but also as a roadmap for fans that have already covered the basics, and need advice on where to start navigating the hundreds of obscure reissues that are flooding the market nowadays. The selection is relatively balanced between the US and the UK (with a slight bias in favor of the former), and it also features a few entries from outside the English-speaking world. Morton-Jack usefully covers different kinds of psychedelia, ranging from wild freak-outs to quirky pop, with a few excursions into acid folk, psychedelic soul and other sub-genres. At the same time, the scope is reasonably delimited, so that you really get an introduction to psychedelia, and not a generic survey of late-sixties rock. He picks one album per artist, which forces some arbitrary choices, but guarantees broader coverage.
The entries follow the same template. They start with a brief history of the band up to the point when the chosen album was recorded. This is typically followed by some information about the recording session, often including a curious anecdote or two. Morton-Jack then provides a very short review, giving you a feel for what you'll hear on the record, and a sense of what he liked about it. This is followed by samples from reviews from the era, which I found very interesting, as they were often already nailing down the good and bad sides of contemporary albums pretty accurately. The entry ends with a short summary of what happened next in the history of the band. Album information is limited to release date (usefully, down to the month of publication), line-up and country of issue, which is fine by me (clearly, this is not a publication aimed at specialized record collectors). It's nice that the entries are in chronological order, as you get a sense of how the psychedelia landscape evolved over time.
In-between the entries, there are a number of short inserts on various related topics. The ones I found more useful were a brief history of very early psychedelia, with some great recommendations of very obscure bands, and commented lists of (again, mostly obscure) US, UK and European singles.
Of course, as with any publication of the sort, I could quibble forever about what Morton-Jack decided to include and exclude. A more serious flaw is that he only gives super-short personal insights on what makes these albums great, focusing perhaps too much on an "objective" account of the records. There are a few inaccuracies and typos, but it's minor stuff in a generally very well-edited, beautiful edition.
Overall, as I said, I would strongly recommend this book to both people who want to get into psychedelic rock, and to those that already know the classics (and more), and want to explore the field more in depth.
I usually don't care much for coffee table books, but this one is actually very useful, because it contains large, high-quality reproductions of most original covers of the albums it discusses. Short of owning the original vinyls, this is a unique opportunity to appreciate the often striking psychedelic art of the period. Thanks to this book, I discovered some unexpected, delightful details of covers of albums I only own on CD or in digital format.
However, as I said, this is not just a coffee table book, as it contains well-written, informative entries about 101 classic rock albums issued between mid 1966 and early 1970. The selection is outstanding in many respects. First, it includes both big classics of the psychedelic era (the Beatles, Love, the Byrds...) and a large number of obscure records (The Mandrake Memorial, anybody?). In this way, it can serve both as a general introduction to psychedelic rock for people that are just getting into the genre, but also as a roadmap for fans that have already covered the basics, and need advice on where to start navigating the hundreds of obscure reissues that are flooding the market nowadays. The selection is relatively balanced between the US and the UK (with a slight bias in favor of the former), and it also features a few entries from outside the English-speaking world. Morton-Jack usefully covers different kinds of psychedelia, ranging from wild freak-outs to quirky pop, with a few excursions into acid folk, psychedelic soul and other sub-genres. At the same time, the scope is reasonably delimited, so that you really get an introduction to psychedelia, and not a generic survey of late-sixties rock. He picks one album per artist, which forces some arbitrary choices, but guarantees broader coverage.
The entries follow the same template. They start with a brief history of the band up to the point when the chosen album was recorded. This is typically followed by some information about the recording session, often including a curious anecdote or two. Morton-Jack then provides a very short review, giving you a feel for what you'll hear on the record, and a sense of what he liked about it. This is followed by samples from reviews from the era, which I found very interesting, as they were often already nailing down the good and bad sides of contemporary albums pretty accurately. The entry ends with a short summary of what happened next in the history of the band. Album information is limited to release date (usefully, down to the month of publication), line-up and country of issue, which is fine by me (clearly, this is not a publication aimed at specialized record collectors). It's nice that the entries are in chronological order, as you get a sense of how the psychedelia landscape evolved over time.
In-between the entries, there are a number of short inserts on various related topics. The ones I found more useful were a brief history of very early psychedelia, with some great recommendations of very obscure bands, and commented lists of (again, mostly obscure) US, UK and European singles.
Of course, as with any publication of the sort, I could quibble forever about what Morton-Jack decided to include and exclude. A more serious flaw is that he only gives super-short personal insights on what makes these albums great, focusing perhaps too much on an "objective" account of the records. There are a few inaccuracies and typos, but it's minor stuff in a generally very well-edited, beautiful edition.
Overall, as I said, I would strongly recommend this book to both people who want to get into psychedelic rock, and to those that already know the classics (and more), and want to explore the field more in depth.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews