The father of psychedelia.

I have always given credit to Roky Erickson for creating psychedelic rock, but honestly, I've never really looked into it.

So who was the first to play psychedelic rock music?

 

Hmmm, I read the 1st band was The Charlatains.

 

I've always assumed that the 13th floor elevators were the first psychedelic rock band..so yeah Roky all the way

 

Weren't 13th floor elevators from Texas or something like that?

 

I also think it was the charlatans...

soulrebel, you might want to check out this site:
http://www.lysergia.com/LamaWorkshop/lamaEarlyPsychedelia.htm

 

3 of us w/Syd sigs hehehe

 

yeah the 13th floor elevators are from texas, roky lives in austin and makes a few public appearances every year. classic

 

Thanks a lot.

 

not the fathers of psych but i think that Gong were the masters of the genre.

 

skelter I was just on that link and found out about Alan Watts' This Is It. I read one of his books (The Book) in philosophy this past semester. In the review it's funny, they say the record can't be accounted for in any of his biographies.

 

I would have to say the Grandfather's father of psych would be:

Owsley Stanley III
AKA "Bear"


Jan 19, 1935 -


Owsley Stanley was the first underground chemist to mass produced high-quality LSD in the 1960s. Born Augustus Owsley Stanley III, but known to most simply as Owsley or Bear. He served 18 months in the Air Force during the 50s. In 1963 he began attended U.C. Berkeley where he tried his first psychoactive and decided to produce methedrine. Police eventually raided his lab in 1965 but found only precursors.

Owsley moved to L.A. to pursue the production of LSD. He used his methedrine proceeds to buy bulk lysergic acid and produced somewhere between 100,000 and 10 million doses of LSD. Once finished, he returned to the bay area where he supplied LSD to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters for their acid tests. Through them he also met the Grateful Dead in 1966 and began supporting them both financially and as a sound man.

Owsley soon hooked up with Tim Skully and together they continued to produce LSD as well as STP (DOM). Their product, known by a variety of names, including "Owsley Acid" and "Orange Sunshine", was produced in large batches and either pressed into tablets or encapsulated. In 1967, Owsley's lab was raided and he was eventually sentenced to 3 years in prison. The same year, he officially shortened his name to "Owsley Stanley".

Owsley Stanley went on to do more sound work for the Grateful Dead after he was released from prison. He now lives in Australia.

As far as music goes, George Hunter, founding memeber of the Charlatans. George designed the first psychedelic rock poster, "The Seed".

 

I did not know this either

Thanks for the info

 

well, let's just call it the parents of psychedelia

Nobody has mentioned this one yet....



Or to be more specific, Roger (Jim) McGuinn and David Crosby.
I think the Byrds were right up there with the Charlatans and the 13thFloorElevators (although definitely not as "underground"). As I've seen it put in I Want to Take You Higher: "The Byrds recorded some of the best examples of the psychedelic genre before there even was one."

In my opinion, they were indeed some of the founding fathers of psychedelia.

 

Owsley Stanley III (acording to his lab notes) took the first LSD trip at 4:20pm, (this did not start the 4:20 tradition so don;t spread that around) but what are the odds seriously?

 

why dont you people just say albert hoffman was the father of psychedelic rock, since he invented acid....

 

does no-one think it was Syd Barrett?? i just finished reading Nick Masons personal history of Pink Floyd, and its fascinating...

 

It couldn'tve been Syd, I don't think... Psychedelia got big in San Fran and then made its why over to The UK afterwards, or so my brain says...

 

Personally I don't think you can really pin something like this down to any one person, something like this came about because of changes in circumstances, social, political, popular culture, art, lifestyle etc etc and the like affecting what a whole bunch of mid-60's musicians were doing, just because some got more famous than others doesn't mean they were responsible for it

 

i dunno... there was a club in London in the very early 60's called UFO (pronounced You-Fo) which stood for Underground Freak Out, the Floyd played at this from very early on under the name "the tea set" - at the time the Psychadelic Rock scene was growing in london at a phenomanal rate, with the floyd at the top, hence the reason why they became so big early on.

 

The UFO club opened on the 23rd Dec 1966, with Pink Floyd being the very first act to play. There were psychedelic happenings in London clubs before UFO, PF being part of that scene. For example the nascent Pink Floyd were in the audience when American garage psych band The Misunderstood (the first band to release a psychedelic 45 in the UK incidentally) played what some consider to be the first psych gigs in the UK in London in mid-66