Well, we've spent a lot of time talking about Psychedelia in San Francisco, and London. And to listen to me talk up to this point, you'd think these are the only two places where psychedelia really occurred. It is true that since we're talking about subcultures, those are the two places where the subcultures really were the most adult and really the most important. But during this time, that is, as the 60s progressed from the early 60s, mid 60s, and the late 60s the music business was increasing moving toward Los Angeles. There were all kinds of very good reasons why the music business should sort of migrate from New York to Los Angeles. one of them being that Los Angeles and Hollywood had such developed facilities that had come from from the movie industry. Television was increasingly moving to Los Angeles and so there were a lot of opportunities for record companies to tie in with television and movie. the movie industry if they were right there on the scene, or at least has a branch office that was out there. So a lot of musicians are moving from the East Coast to the West Coast. Labels are starting to move in that direction, so something is starting to happen in LA in 1965, 1966 into 1967. We talked about, a little bit about that a couple of weeks ago, when we talked about the American response. The first important group that we should talk about, may be the primary group when we talk about Los Angeles and psychedelia is The Doors. What was different about The Doors from some of the other psychedelic groups is where, Generally psychedelia embraces a kind of utopian flower power, very sort of positive kind of attitude. So the idea of the most idealistic argument in favor of LSD is that it leads to higher consciousness and that's a happy thing, right? It's, it's something that one would aspire toward. Again, I'm not endorsing LSD use, I'm just saying this would be the argument But it's like Jim Morrison came along and said, you know, if you have, if you break on through to this other side there could be heavens there and there could be hells. So I'll let the other people talk about the heavens, I'm going to think about the hell. So in many ways, Jim Morrison's vision of psychedelia was much darker. It dealt with some of the kind of things that exist in the psyche that we don't talk about so much. his lyrics were also extremely literate. Jim Morrison could, as a singer, could not play an instrument, he could not play a chord on a guitar or anything like that. He would, he would hear songs in his head and he would, he would sing the melodies. But it would be up to the other guys in the group to figure out what he was doing, what the notes were, what the chords were that should go with it, to figure out what the rhythm should be and that kind of thing. so in many ways it was the, the, The Doors were a very democratic group, because they decided that they would share songwriting royalties equally among all four of them, most of the time that's the way it went. Their first album, The Doors, was released in January of 1967, so that is before Sgt Pepper. That is actually before Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields. And so when we think about what they were doing, the kind of conceptual approach to what they were doing. It was really fairly advanced and relatively independent of what was happening with groups like The Beatles and, and The Beach Boys and some of the others. The Doors were a little bit older than some of the groups that followed them. The Doors were almost the same age as The Beatles and The Stones themselves. their roots were really more in late 50s rock and roll and early 60s, maybe jazz. then than some of the other groups they were, maybe a little bit less affected by The Beatles on the British Invasion. Their vision was you've got Morrison, this poet guy who's, you know, gotta college degree and seems to have read an awful lot of literature. And the other musicians, Ray Manzarek, who was a bit older than the others and had a lot of club experience, and Robert Krieger, who was a pretty talented songwriter, John Densmore, a very jazz oriented drummer. And they put this group together calling it The Doors, taking it from the Aldous Huxley book about mescaline use called The Doors of Perception. Aldous Huxley had taken that idea from a William Blake poem, which mentions the Doors of perception. So we see the connection all the way back to 19th Century literature and spiritualism. so The Doors first album on the first side of The Doors is called "Break On Through (To The Other Side)". How much more explicit can this idea of the doors of perception breaking through to the other site, but what's on the other side is maybe not such a happy thing. Now, the first the first single released out of that album was "Break On Through", it didn't do so well. So they went for Robby Krieger song called "Light My Fire", which was initially seven minutes long or so. They cut the whole solos out of the center, re-released it as an AM single, and that went to number one. And it really The Doors into an important act, having a number one single like that. And the, the label that they were with, Electra Records, was the biggest hit they'd ever had. So in many ways, they really sort of started to make make Electra Records as well. but the dark thing, you can really hear at the end of the album, a track called The End. Which is where Jim Morrison goes into this almost, sort of, tribal narration thing. almost about is, it's almost about a, kind of, a, well, it's very threatening. And he's walking through the house at late at night and he comes to the father and he says to the father, "I'd like to kill you" and to the mother he says: "I'd like to, well, engage you in a romantic liaison,". That's the most, the most polite way to put it, but it's not very polite in a way that he says it. It's a very edible kind of complex about about marrying the mother kind of thing and it's a very dark scary kind of thing. When they would do a buy, he would shock people. Jim Morrison was about shocking people out of their complacency, by confronting them with this darkness. So a very dark psychedelic vision. The group puts out six studio albums. The last of which is L.A woman. which goes to number nine in 1971. Ironically, it was thought of as The Doors comeback album. I say ironic because Jim Morrison died of heart failure in Paris in July of 1971, becoming the third such uh,death in rock behind Jimmy Hendricks and Janis Joplin. So but The Doors sort of stand as the LA version of psychedelia, but they were not the only group in LA. We've mentioned a couple times, Arthur Lee and the group Love. In fact, Love was a group that was signing with Elektra Records before The Doors. They should of had the success that The Doors had, but Arthur Lee would not get on an airplane, which meant the guys could not tour. And without being able to tour that music, you really can't get it out of the LA area. I mean, in LA, they were big, big, big. The Doors were very small compared to them. They were lucky to get a gig opening for Love, but Arthur Lee thought they were pretty good. Recommended them to Jack Holzman, he ends up signing Elektra. It's The Doors that break out and Love not so much. They had a hit a moderate hit number 52 in 1966 with My Little Red Book which we talked about before with regard to the Pink Floyd. their third album from 1967, Forever Changes is always listed in rock critics sort of like great, overlooked, psychedelic album. So you might want to try it Love's "Forever Changes" from 1967, see if you think it's in fact a neglected classic. Other groups coming of the West Coast: Iron Butterfly, Talk about heavy, heavy, duty, duty, these guys coming out of San Diego. The big album for them was probably their second one which called In-A Gadda-Da-Vida from summer of 1968 of course the song had originally been called In the Garden of Eden. They got the idea to call it In-A Gadda-Da-Vida and if you know the Simpsons episode it once again becomes in the Garden of Eden, Google, Simpsons, In-A Gadda Da-Vida, it's a fantastic little vignette there. Anyway, the title track of that In-A Gadda Da-Vida, 17 minute long track in which everybody gets a solo. It's a heavy tune, all kinds of soloing this is very much sort of in the virtuosic, sort of psychedelic a thing that we've been talking about. Another group we should mention The Vanilla Fudge, coming off coming out of the the East Coast and, and something that we might call "the psychedelic-symphonic cover version". They sort of specialized in this idea of taking a short little song and turning into kind of a psychedelic trip. And so the most famous of those, is a track called "You Keep Me Hangin' On" from 1967, which the year earlier had been a two minute hit, a two minute song for The Supremes written by Holland Dozier Hollar, Holl, Holland. it originally had been two minutes but by the time The Vanilla Fudge got done with it. It was now a five minute tune complete with like sort of references to Indian sitars and all, the first couple minutes of the tune, I usually challenge my students to say can you tell what this song is going to be. And mostly they can't. This idea of taking a small song and turning into this big psychedelic, symphonic kind of composition is something that The Vanilla Fudge really specialized in. They had an album from 1968 called The Beat Goes On. And, it was produced by their, the producer for that was a guy by the name of Shadow Martin who had, had roots that go all the way back to the brill building and the girl groups. The band was not so happy with this album, but the way the album turned out is they used the Sonny and Cher song "The beat goes on" as a kind of motive that returns again and again throughout the album. And the songs that they do, basically sort of go through the History of music, start with the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century, the twentieth century, they cover some Beatles' tune. It's an extremely ambitious kind of concept album. The Vanilla Fudge, I think should be given a lot more credit in terms of what would later become the progressive rock movement, which was essentially taking short songs and turning them into big, long songs. Well, as we talk about this period, we probably should say something about upstate New York and Bob Dylan. After his motorcycle crash in 1966, Dylan retreated to Woodstock, New York, which if you don't know where it is, is just a couple of hours North of of New York City. But really it's sort of considered upstate, very sort of rural and rustic up there recorded with a group called, it came to be called The Band. They started out as the Hawks, backing Canadian singer, Ronnie Hawks. Most of the guys in the group except Levon Helm are Canadian. They toured with Dylan through '65 and through '66 when he did his world tour, so they'd already worked together. So Dylan retreats out there, and does tune after tune after tune recording with these guys, that was later released as the Basement Tapes in 1975, so you can hear what they were working on. during that time, two big albums come out, one from Dylan and one from the band that really sort of helped define not only the kind of Americana movement, but also are important to the emergence later of country rock. And that would be in 1960, both of these in 1968, Dylan's. John Wesley Harding, which was a number two album, and The Band's Music From Big Pink, which was a number 30 album, but has since come to be thought of as an extremely influential record. Well, that sort of concludes our discussion of what was happening in Los Angeles and elsewhere. And the last lecture of of, of this week, let's turn to festivals and the idea of what it means to have a hippy nation, after music, after psychedelia breaks on the national scene in the summer of 1967. That's what we'll talk about in the last video for this week.
