The San Francisco bands like Grateful Dead, the Charlatans, Big Brother and Quicksilver Messenger Service had been creating music to accompany the various acid tests and dance concerts that were happening in 1965 & 1966. These events featured tremendously long drawn out songs that created the prerequisite atmosphere for tripping on LSD. So the idea of long songs became accepted. More in the live arena than on record at this point.

In England, Pink Floyd and Soft Machine picked up the extended song structure by 1967 at clubs such as UFO and at the Spontaneous Underground held at the Marquee on Sunday afternoons.

On both sides of the Atlantic, not only did the songs become longer, but also the collective idealism of the period penetrated the lyrical content and many of the bands on both sides began writing in a more utopian fashion.

If you simply compare the length of recorded songs you see that by 1968, it was quite acceptable to break out of the two and a half minute mold and bands such as Velvet Underground, H.P. Lovecraft, Vanilla Fudge and the ones mentioned above were recording songs that were over five minutes.

More importantly in the case of many of these bands, the songs length allowed them to be more creative musically, as they explored incorporating many new and different genres including folk, blues, raga, East Indian, electronic etc. This not only made the songs more interesting, but it is also the obvious branching out of the whole progressive rock genre.

In The Progressive Rock Files I touched on how psychedelic and progressive rock evolved so differently in America than in Britain. It’s interesting how many of the psychedelic bands in the United States, veered into other genres such as southern rock, hard rock, country rock and pop. While in Britain more than a few psychedelic bands took up the progressive rock mantra. None of the U.S. bands really did in 1968 or 69.

In the book, I Want to Take You Higher, a great overview of the psychedelic era, you’ll find a listing of the Top 50 psychedelic artists from each side of the Atlantic. This list points out what I’m referring to here.

First on the U.K. side among the 50 bands listed you had Pink Floyd, Family, the Yardbirds who evolved into the first version of Renaissance, The Move and Idle Race who melded into the Electric Light Orchestra, The Pretty Things who created one of the first rock operas on disc, Simon Dupree and the Big Sound who metamorphosed into Gentle Giant, Tomorrow’s guitarist Steve Howe would go into Yes, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown created some excellent prog as Kingdom Come and the Nice who turned into Emerson Lake and Palmer.

On the U.S. side there were a few bands who started to do some creative things musically like, Spirit, Love, H.P. Lovecraft, Steve Miller Band, Country Joe and the Fish, The Electric Prunes, however by late 1969 they had either disbanded or reverted back to a more blues-rock style.

It’s clear to me there was something more at work here than just the drugs. There were the other obvious aspects of history and culture that caused more of the British psychedelic bands to look at the new musical opportunities available to them with the progressive rock genre. Progressive Rock music would never have happened if it had not been for the psychedelic sixties, but it’s clear that the impact of the psychedelic scene was assimilated very differently on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

Unfortunately when the psychedelic music scene died in the late sixties and early seventies, the “business” of rock and roll was born. This is something most commentators don’t even talk about anymore. When he was alive, Lester Bangs made plenty of references to how rock and roll had changed, and while he was no lover of progressive rock he saw how the business side of the music scene had completely taken precedence over the musical side. This is even truer today, with artists being prepackaged with the right looks, the right clothes, the right video and so on. It’s all very disheartening to me, but then that’s only because I knew a time when it was different. Most kids today have no idea what they’re missing, and that too makes me sad.

So there are a lot of things about the psychedelic period that I like. There was that sense of collective idealism that drove a whole counter-culture to try and change the world. We’ve lost that. But if things are as cyclical as some people say they are, perhaps I’ll still be around to see it happen again. Now, that might be interesting.

About the Author:
Jerry Lucky is the author of the book The Progressive Rock Files, now entering its 5th edition. Please feel free to send feedback to Jerry at www.jerrylucky.com.