For days I’ve been searching YouTube for old movie and TV clips to study the transition from bubblegum pop to psychedelic art rock. Now I may be high and drunk enough to sum up my findings to date. What I witnessed was the emergence, not first, but important, of the Beatles. This occurred around 1964, flooding the psyche of the American adolescent and subsequently the consciousness of the world.

Before this, fundamental events had already occurred. Jack Kerouac and the so-called Beat generation had galvanized the dominant culture of advertising and pulp literature into two distinct factions. On the mainstream side there was, surprisingly, rock and roll, the music of rebellious youth. The 1950s (actually the 1940s after World War II) produced both rock and roll and the Brando, Monroe, and Dean method of acting; charismatic vital and realistic, but in an impossible impasse with the conventions and tradition. Music after the swing era continued its swing, swing being a product and form of jazz, jazz conventionally considered a branch of blues, ala Gershwin, et al, and gospel music, of which the blues may perhaps be considered a derivative. That was the mainstream.

Alternatively, the literature had been burdened by a number of poets and writers, most of whom were recalcitrant lifelong alcoholics. Hammett, Faulkner, Hemingway, Crane, Fitzgerald, etc. whose works and aesthetic vision were transferred to the cinema, often with jazz and later rock and roll scores. Through this, or despite this, Kerouac and the Beats emerged. The beats listened to jazz, the beatniks in the movies listened to rock and roll. Interesting transition. Teenagers in movies started listening to rock and roll by emulating the beatniks in movies. This set the dynamics for the next decade, but adding to the cultural mix were Vietnam, the space race, the nuclear arms race, and the CIA.

It was in the CIA laboratories that LSD-25 was first synthesized, conceived as a mind control weapon to be used with enemy soldiers on the battlefield. What were they thinking? Probably something like “We are fighting Asians in Vietnam when we just defeated the Japanese with the atomic bomb and we fought the North Koreans and Chinese to a halt. How can we go on with that and defeat these yellow bastards in the jungle? ” “Of course! Create a weapon whose effects are eerily similar to, you guessed it: opium, heroin, marijuana, cocaine all rolled into one. It would be irresistible and the enemy would demand to be dosed! This psychological napalm was to be sprayed onto the field at the way to sprinkle the crops of napalm and Agent Orange. But instead of setting the enemy’s behind on fire, their brains fry and the bastards would think they were at peace! Mmm ….

That the material would be spread by our own troops seemed to be the operational idea behind the scrapping of the project. However, always ambitious, LSD25 continued to be manufactured. It was thought that it was prudent for the project to ever take off to test what effects it might have on our own people. Therefore, academy scientists, philosophers, and artists were recruited to conduct controlled experiments with low doses of the experimental weapon. This was done in the late 1950s and early 1960s primarily in San Francisco, California, ironically the center of the largest Asian population in the country. The music at this time was serious and confident. Jazz had become incomprehensible be-bop; Broadway musicals were actively turned into blockbuster films with choreography derived from ballet and scores derived from classical music. Jazz was often incorporated in the manner of early 20th century composers Satie, Dvorak, Debussy, Rimsky Korsakoff, Ravel, and Gershwin, et al. sometimes known collectively in impressionists.

The beats were enthusiastic marijuana smokers, and the hippest of hippies were also heroin addicts. Now consider that many in the older generation were driven into alcoholism by the rebellion of their own generation. With this in mind, we have alcoholics who had been through adolescence. Therefore, teenagers replaced housewives as a target audience for advertising, “designer” products are still years away) listening, kissing and growing up to the music of Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee, some of the fashionable elders turned to Woody Guthrie, who played regularly on the radio with his band the Weavers.

Kids smoked marijuana because that’s what real beats do. In movies they were more often portrayed as alcoholics for some reason, and occasionally a drug addict was portrayed as a hipster or vice versa (notably, the movies “Phantom Lady” and “The Man with the Golden Arm”, one of them a pulp novel, the other ‘serious’ literature, so to speak). Older, inevitably business-minded men who had inherited their position, power, and education from an earlier generation of serious alcoholic womanizers, saw young men grow their hair out and generally go astray. So when some of the young people formed rock and roll bands in the vein of the pioneers of the fifties, it was seen as a logical continuation of the youth trend and therefore ready for business investment.

This is how the Beatles appeared, followed by the so-called British invasion. Later, American gangs began to emerge that were modeled after what was seen and was now accepted as the perceived commercial template. Many of these bands were from California; many also had access to LSD and some really good weed. Bands that played confident and happy choruses with screaming and giggling girl guitar music and rhymes began to play what they saw and heard in their minds. The sound became psychedelic and the lyrics philosophical and surreal. The girls were also stoned and dug.

Thus, what was soft, confident music that derived from Broadway, jazz, and primitive rock and roll was carried over with the hyper-imagined cliches of pristine versus rebellious youth (say “Gidget” versus “Rebel Without a Cause”). turned into something out of Burroughs’s William S Naked Lunch, Ginsberg’s Howl and Kerouac’s On The Road; a junkie swirl of hip noise that would merge at a later date into heavy metal and Glitter Rock, which as byproducts of the psychedelic movement later progressed into art rock and punk rock.

But before all that, the psychedelic movement infiltrated the mainstream culture to such an extent that long-haired psychedelic gangs appeared regularly on primetime television and soon even appeared on children’s shows and cartoons (along with what had become clichés of prototypical rhythms). is shown, apparently aimed at those younger than teenagers who take on a decidedly psychedelic feel. Late-night sitcoms aimed at adults but watched by entire families pursued this cultural turn and, in a final irony, the musicals Hair and Godspell (a psychedelic interpretation of the Gospel of St. Matthew) brought the psychedelic movement to Broadway by becoming the source of various main streams. pop songs.

Once again, it could be said that it was the Beatles who legitimized this adoption of an induced fantasy so obviously drugged by the commercial media. But the Beatles did not create the psychedelic movement nor did it end them. They were simply its most prominent cultural defenders. We have moved on.

Note: The Mexican-American psychedelic band? & The Mysterians, heavily influenced by surf music, are often cited as the first punk band.