IMO, the Psych rock scene starts a little earlier than the Byrds.

I used to play with the rhythm section of the 13th floor elevators, and a couple of folks claim that they were one of the first bands that was doing a lot of psychedelic drugs as part of the shows.

That may be an exaggeration, but it was certainly interesting to hear their stories from when they were kiddos.

However, it's hard to find video representations of that scene... like, you've got a bunch of teenagers tripping at concerts, but that's not even something that registers enough for the larger culture so instead you get normal teeny-bopper representations of them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c6gDKsPQDM

If you go back to, say, Dali or Luis Buñuel then you'll find plenty of psychadelia in early film, though inflected a bit differently.

I think the "official" history is that the Elevators and Jefferson Airplane independently and simultaneously invented psychedelic rock. I'm impressed you played with (a couple of) the Elevators.

So where do the Grateful Dead fit in? There's audio from their Acid Tests with Ken Kesey in 1966 [0] - a lot of the music they are playing is more blues/country based but with a definite "psychedelic feel" to it. My understanding is that the Dead and JA worked pretty closely together at this time, along with other lesser known, or now forgotten bands, like Quicksilver Messenger Service (John Cippolina) and Big Brother and the Holding Company (Janis Joplin).

I can honestly say I never heard of the Elevators though so I wasn't sure how far back in the 60's you and the parent are talking with regards to them.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6H7maZ1das

Well, I dunno how well forgotten QMS. or BB are... to me, all these folks were playing some version of the blues but ran through the filter of young folks on acid. And they are all about obscure with folks these days.

My understanding is that Tommy Hall claims to have invented the term "psych rock", but as the wiki points out, folks like the Holy Modal Rounders might have already been using it.

According to my buddy from the elevators (who was, like, 72 when I started playing with him), the Dead an JA really (really) sucked and mostly got traction because they could make drugs show up.

He was saying they were literally doing free shows and handing out pot. As for JA, my buddy was claiming that they were pretty bad, to the point of not understanding how to tune their instruments.

I personally really like the dead, though I never saw them in person, and I am pretty sure there is some amount of sour grapes. But still, they were out there in SF off and on during that time, so I'm just reporting what he said.

Given the nature of this music, I feel that the innovation is what drugs folks were taking at the show... so it doesn't seem odd to me that there are strange mixes of pop, blues, country, bluegrass, etc.

I will say that the elevators might also reasonably be termed Texas Garage rock, which some folks consider a specific genera, and which has a lot pop-ier connotations to me. Those same kids were really into the blues. Moving Sidewalks, for instance, was influenced by the elevators but became ZZ Top rather than something more psychedelic, and there were a whole scene of kids a few years younger in Ft. Worth who skipped the psych and played the blues (Bug Henderson, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and Marc Benno, another weirdo in Kerrville I was playing with for a bit).

Joplin also came out of Texas at that time (she came out of Port A), and as far as I could tell a lot of these folks knew each other and had been playing shows with similar groups in the 65 and early 66.

To your question, I think that the dead really took the psych banner and ran with it. Surely someone would if not them, cause it's fun to drop acid and listen to music. They seemed to have a much, much better head for business than any of these other groups, and so they built a much more recognizable and main stream enterprise out of touring and lighting folks up.

That's a lot of really interesting stuff, thank you for the long reply.

I did see the Dead, a lot, although I only saw JA once and it was after Starship and it wasn't great. Just a cheesy reunion at some protest in DC IIRC.

Now when I started seeing the Dead and following them around it was the 80's so maybe they learned to play by then? But seriously, I don't know how anyone can say with a straight face that the Dead "sucked". They played a LOT of shows over the years, sometimes over 175 in a year. There were bound to be good and bad days. But even going back to 1965 I can find examples of their music that sounds quite polished, rehearsed and professional to me.

With regards to JA again, as far as I'm concerned Jorma Kaukonen is one of the most talented guitar players I've ever had the pleasure to see. I once watched him play by himself in front of small crowd. I was like five feet from him on a street in Baltimore City and he played a 12 song set on a 12 string... It was great and just watching his hands let you know how intricate what he was doing was. Then the rest of his band at the time, Hot Tuna, came out and jammed for another couple hours.

I admit, there were drugs involved back then but I gave all that up over 30 years ago and I still listen to the Dead, Jorma, Tuna, those "obscure" bands we mentioned and, yes even JA. Maybe it's a niche taste these days but I feel their music stands up to the test of time. At least a lot of the music by the Dead especially.

But as Jack Black likes to say, it's all very subjective and my opinions are pretty meaningless in the whole scheme of things; but still fun to talk about and take a trip down memory lane (no pun intended). So thanks again.

Well, keep in mind that Jerry Garcia was, what, 24 in 1965? And I've heard some pretty iffy tapes of what they were doing at that time, but I've also heard quite polished things, too. 20 years of 150-shows-a-year might have improved them.

And as I said, there might be a fair amount of sour grapes going on there, too. A lot of folks have really funky egos. One of the other old dudes I used to play with in Kerrville, TX was Marc Benno... I read a rolling stone interview with him where he claims not to have known who the Doors were when he got hired to play on the LA Woman sessions... I dunno if I believe that, but either way it seems like an easy way to characterize a lot of the almost-famous folks I've played with.

I perform dead tunes pretty routinely (I've been working up Dire Wolf on pedal steel and ac. guit lately)... I feel pretty strongly about the music. You don't have to sell me on the goodness of it.

I'm just reporting what old dudes told me.

Thanks for the Norman Greenbaum link. I'm familiar with the song, but the video's new to me.

First psychedelic song I can think of (and I'm a big fan of the genre) is See My Friends by the Kinks (1965): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ugr0pgUo1c (the video is just of the Kinks performing the song, though).

There are plenty of videos used for psychedelic songs, but it's usually hard to tell whether the video was made specifically for the song, and most are either recent or montages of videos from the late 1960s.

Some contemporary videos (all from 1967) for psychedelic songs which are more than the just the group performing:

Strawberry Fields Forever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtUH9z_Oey8

A Day in the Life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usNsCeOV4GM

Arnold Layne: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3DGpINHX5Q

See Emily Play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c0EDM-Yu9o

Paper Sun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cp_3NEWTzU

That Paper Sun example is really good. I like how they're shaking the camera to make the masks look like they're breathing.

And the Strawberry Fields Forever example is also super interesting because the parts with the piano are more surrealist, but the closeup shots of their faces are more early psychedelia.

In 2001:A Space Odyssey, the "star gate" sequence is quite psychedelic; and this was 1967.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DNbkKBW0K8

I like to imagine lots of people tripping and going to this movie because of the light show they heard about, but the part that really blows their mind being the whole sequence with HAL 9000.

I was 8 years old when I saw it -- no movie has influenced me like that one. At that age, the star gate scene was kind of scary; but, yes, the HAL 9000 had a _huge_ impact on me. One of the best films, ever.

Having only seen in on TV (multiple times) I saw the 70mm version at a local cinema recently. Amazing experience, and it holds up remarkably well IMHO.

Great example! It was 1968 actually, I saw it at the theater when I was 7 years old.

The final sequence in the 1943 (yes, 1943!) movie musical The Gang's All Here ("let's throw a party to encourage people to buy war bonds!") is seriously psychedelic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJHfApfdWW0

It's Busby Berkeley, of course, but unlike most of his work, in Technicolor.

The short film The Beatles made for Strawberry Fields in 1966 was an early "music video" with psychedelic overtones

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtUH9z_Oey8

Unfortunately the ‘video’ didn’t really exist in the form that we know it today and often it was just the band playing with a light show:

Pink Floyd on the BBC in 67:

https://youtu.be/uTfDUyUkVYE

My dad remembers having seen Pink Floyd live while at university, which i think would be 1963 - 1967. He said they had a similar light show live, based on a sort of lava lamp projector device, like this modern one:

https://www.mathmos.com/mathmos-space-projector-light-with-l...

For some of that period, they were living in Mike Leonard's house. Leonard was a lecturer at Hornsey Art College, specializing in light shows. To some extent, Pink Floyd's early career was an offshoot of his need for a musical component to his multimedia shows. Here's a (sadly monochrome) indication of the sort of thing they got up to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUjrxxYBsi4&t=278s

The "tripping" scene from "Easy Rider" comes to mind — same era though (NSFW, isn't Tony Basil in this scene? https://youtu.be/W2x20CV0EbI).

Also, this clip (NSFW) from "Altered States" is just as trippy: https://youtu.be/E1ZGEvJPQ6A

The complete Roger Corman film "The Trip" (1967) referenced in the article is on YT in the U.S.: https://youtu.be/FmZCwcGu_2I

Psychedelic music evolved out of the Space Age Pop easy listening genre from the 40s-60s (e.g. Joe Meek's I Hear A New World) and minimalist classical music (e.g. La Monte Young). Psychedelic sequences in film evolved from non-narrative abstract experimental films from the same era (e.g. Stan Brakhage)

The entire 1968 Yellow Submarine movie from The Beatles is a good example, particularly the Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds scene.