Psychedelia and Other Colours by Rob Chapman

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My mother thought well enough of The Beatles in the 1960s to buy two of their albums—Beatles For Sale and Help!—and she continued to enjoy the Fab Four’s songs up to the point when (in her words) “they went funny”, by which she meant the period after Rubber Soul when they dropped the beat stylings, picked up sitars and took to recording drums and guitars in reverse. They were also taking drugs, of course, hence the funniness, and this rapid evolution—from loveable moptops to freaked-out weirdos in a matter of months—is the subject of Rob Chapman’s huge study of psychedelia as a cultural phenomenon, the period from around mid-1965 to late 1969 when Western youth “went funny” en masse.

This isn’t an undocumented era but Chapman’s book provides an overdue counterweight to the American focus of earlier studies such as Jay Stevens’ Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (1987). Psychedelic art evolved in San Francisco but it’s an irony of the form that many of the wildest, most typically psychedelic concert posters were promoting acts that were only marginally psychedelic in their sound or, in the case of the older jazz, soul and blues acts, weren’t psychedelic at all. Chapman is more interested in the multi-media light shows than the poster art, and he reaches back in his early chapters to the origin of the San Francisco light shows in the avant-garde art of the Modernist era (especially László Moholy-Nagy’s Light-Space Modulator of the 1920s) and the art schools of the 1950s; he also traces the familiar journey of LSD from the Sandoz laboratories in Switzerland and the clinics of America to the front pages of newspapers and magazines. One of the most remarkable and unlikely aspects of psychedelia was the way in which a short-lived poly-cultural phenomenon maintained an aura of danger and illegality late into the 1960s even while psychedelic aesthetics were filtering into every facet of mainstream life: films, fashion, decor, advertising, even children’s television—all bloomed briefly with vivid colours and melting typography.

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Playboy gets hip to the trip, December 1967. Art by Wes Wilson.

Chapman touches on all of this but the bulk of his study is concerned with the music which was always the core of psychedelic culture, even if many of the artists involved were only following a trend (or, to be less charitable, jumping on a bandwagon). American groups are given their due, and Chapman has some smart things to say about the often neglected surf boom of the early 60s; as noted here last month, the first piece of popular music to use “LSD” in its title was LSD-25 (1960), a surf instrumental by The Gamblers. Surf bands and garage bands mutated into psychedelic groups but there was often little change in the overall sound beyond adding an effect or two to the instrumentation. Adulterated or processed sound is what I usually look for in psychedelic music, the psychedelic experience being one of distorted or exaggerated perception. Adulteration (or lack of it) is the most obvious factor that differentiates American psych from its British equivalent: White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane is a great song (its final line is fixed to every page of this blog) but is psychedelic only as a result of its lyrical context. Musically, the song is a simple rock bolero next to which Strawberry Fields Forever sounds like a broadcast from another planet.

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The art of Marijke Koger

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Love Life (1966).

A slight return to The Fool, and specifically the work of Marijke Koger. Since The Fool was a collective it can be difficult separating out the work of individuals but all of these examples are credited as hers in Norman Hathaway & Dan Nadel’s excellent Electrical Banana (2011) book. The nature of the collective also tends to downplay the contribution of women to psychedelic art, with Koger tending to receive less individual credit than Bonnie MacLean does for her US concert posters. Koger’s Love Life design is very advanced for 1966, and could easily have been created at almost any time in the next decade. The Bob Dylan poster below is the most florid representation of Mr Zimmerman I’ve seen, an image that fits the times more than Dylan’s persona which remained resolutely untouched by acid culture.

It’s no surprise with this subject that Sweet Jane has already looked at the work of The Fool. There’s more photos and designs to be found at A Dandy in Aspic (many of them from the Electrical Banana book) while Bang The Drum All Day has some of the graphics produced for Brian Epstein’s Sunday Night at the Saville concerts.

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Fashion drawing (1966).

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Lucy (1966).

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Love Bob Dylan (1967).

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Tiger Man (1970).

Previously on { feuilleton }
The Fool album covers
Through the Wonderwall

Weekend links 157

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Elektrik Karousel, a new release on the Ghost Box label by The Focus Group. “For a clue to its moods, think Czech animation, Italian Giallo, early Radiophonics, HP Lovecraft stories, 1960s underground cinema, Lewis Carroll and baroque psych.” Julian House’s package design is “heavily inspired by 1960s underground press and conceived as a kind of mind altering DIY board game”.

Joseph Stannard of The Outer Church compiles a mix for Kit Records, and talks about rural psychedelia and malevolent lighthouses, among other things.

• At Sci-Fi-O-Rama: a sampling of Dan Nadel & Norman Hathaway’s Electrical Banana – Masters of Psychedelic Art (2012).

Stranger than Paradise: Tilda Swinton photographed by Tim Walker in the Surrealist Wonderland of Las Pozas, Mexico.

Whistler in Limehouse & Wapping: stunning etchings by the 25-year-old artist when he was newly arrived in London.

• The complete catalogue of Sunn O))) recordings is now on Bandcamp for preview and purchase.

La Danza de la Realidad: Alejandro Jodorowsky returns to his childhood in Tocopilla, Chile.

• Enjoy The Silence: Jude Rogers talks to Michael Rother about joy of quiet.

Dressing the Air, “the Bureau of Sensory Intelligence”, had a relaunch.

Fast forward – and press play again: Cassettes are back

The Lovecraft Expert: An Interview with S.T. Joshi

Book Graphics: an illustration blog.

Paint Box (1967) by Pink Floyd | Beat Box (1984) by Art of Noise | Glory Box (1994) by Portishead

Weekend links 97

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Illustration by Ermanno Iaia. Hard to believe that Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) is only now appearing on DVD in the UK. Arrow Films release a dual-format edition at the end of this month.

• The week in perfume: Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin & Tania Sanchez is reviewed by Emily Gould (“this is a golden age of perfume criticism”) and prompts a meditation on the art and process of scent from Rishidev Chaudhuri.

Electrical Banana by Norman Hathaway & Dan Nadel is “the first definitive examination of the international language of psychedelia, focusing on the most important practitioners in their respective fields”.

Sacred Monsters is a forthcoming collection of essays and criticism by Edmund White. Related: Colm Tóibín from 1999 reviewing A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition by Gregory Woods.

Medium, a video by Clayton Welham and Sam Williams for Emptyset whose imminent release (also entitled Medium) I’ve designed. Related: Dave Maier on music versus noise.

• Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy: the face of US presidential contender Rick Santorum rendered as a collage of (mostly) gay porn. More provocation: All Dead Mormons Are Now Gay.

• Coilhouse discovered a rough copy of Bells of Atlantis (1952), an experimental film which features Anaïs Nin, input from Len Lye and an electronic score by Louis & Bebe Barron.

• “The idea that we should have but two options when it comes to our gender presentation, male or female, has always felt ludicrous to me,” says LaJohn Joseph.

Bely paints “a universe of strange manifestations” which drifts across Apollonovich’s consciousness every night before he falls asleep. We are even shown congeries of images that are shards of events which took place that day for the senator: “all the earlier inarticulacies, rustlings, crystallographic figures, the golden, chrysanthemum-like stars racing through the darkness on rays that resembled myriapods”

Malcom Forbes on Andrei Bely’s masterwork, Petersburg (1916).

RIP Barney Rosset, publisher of Grove Press books and the Evergreen Review.

The Brothers Quay will be at work in Leeds city centre this May. Lucky Leeds.

Warm Leatherette, a short film by Analogue Solutions.

Cormac McCarthy, Quantum Copy Editor.

The importance of being axonometric.

Always Crashing In The Same Car (1977) by David Bowie | Crash (1980) by Tuxedomoon | Crash Dance (1983) by Yello.