Psychedelia USA

Out there and over here! To accompany our exclusive interview with The Doors, we take a look at the strange and highly collectable world of American psych...

They say one man’s meat is another man’s poison. Well, dip your hand into the huge, swelling vat that is US psychedelic rock, and who knows what you’ll come up with – or whether you’ll like the taste. Britpsych, with its frequently chewy pop flavour, is a fairly safe bet for most who have sampled its delights. But the assorted varieties on the American psych menu each have the potential to either leave one satisfied or, conversely, to deliver a rapid case of the trots.

A comparison of British and American psychedelic genres will always invite generalities, but there is a far wider variance as to what is understood as ‘American’ psych. It’s a bigger and more affluent country, after all, and the US underwent a far more significant generational/cultural shift than the UK during the 1960s, directly informing the music being made.

Therefore, US psych was – and is – an amorphous beast that can mean radically different things, depending on who’s talking. It runs a vast gamut: from a myriad over-modulated garage combos to privately-pressed hippie arcana; from the soft-pop bleatings of The Strawberry Alarm Clock to the sludge-rock interpretations of Vanilla Fudge; from the ‘adult rock’ of San Francisco and Doors/Lovehelmed freakouts of LA to the downer vibe of NYC’s …

by Alec Palao
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