'60s

If you were a teenager in the ‘80s (as I was), you could be forgiven for thinking the ‘60s were lame. Between yuppies dancing around to Motown milestones in The Big Chill to classic rock radio’s ossification of a couple dozen hippie-era hits (whose ubiquity proved that familiarity does indeed breed contempt), any right-thinking young person was bound to eschew the Aquarian age in search of greener pastures. Most likely, you gravitated toward the bright, gleaming light beckoning from the New Wave/post-punk realm, where everything seemed fresh and vibrant.But as I discovered pretty quickly into my obsession with college radio—and contemporary chronicles like Trouser Press, New York Rocker, and Creem—punk’s tabula rasa/year zero ideal didn’t hold much ground when you got into the nitty-gritty of what followed it. The flood of ‘80s acts who arrived in punk’s wake, for all their bold new moves, still sported a slew of influences from the ‘60s—sometimes overtly in the form of cover tunes, and sometimes more subtly in the influences they’d assimilated.The more I viewed the music of the ‘60s through the filter of ‘80s bands who were breathing new life into the airwaves and record stores again, the more attractive that bygone era seemed. Sometimes a cover version could put you on a direct route to the original artist’s oeuvre: For instance, ‘60s L.A. psych underdogs Love, who would be posthumously deified a couple of decades later, were more popular than ever as an underground phenomenon in the ‘80s. The Damned’s cover of their “Alone Again Or” made it easy to find your way to the seminal Forever Changes; and once you were there, the spelunking was endlessly rewarding.Even on the less obvious end of the spectrum, it didn’t take a cultural anthropologist to trace the links from, say, the power chords of The Jam and Secret Affair to mod OGs like The Who and Small Faces. Nor was it too tough to determine that the chiming guitar riffs of R.E.M. and The Cleaners From Venus led straight back to first-gen jangle kings The Byrds.It wasn’t just ‘60s rock that revealed itself to me in this manner. The ‘80s synth-pop bands may not have had much of a musical investment in psychedelia and such, but the pop, R&B, and girl group sounds of the ’60s were another story. It was easy to follow the paths of the likes of Naked Eyes to the glittering legacy of singers like Dionne Warwick, who previously might have seemed like a middle-of-the-road musician from another generation to my amateurish ears. And while New Orleans R&B wasn’t especially accessible to an ‘80s kid growing up in The Bronx, Devo’s mechanized take on the Allen Toussaint-penned Lee Dorsey classic “Working In the Coal Mine” illuminated a whole new world to be explored.Of course, in a pre-Internet world, these explorations of the past were far more difficult than they are for teens, or anybody else, today. But the thrill of the chase was as much a part of the fun as the end result.

It was in the summertime half a century ago that the world first met one of the great American bands, a group that would reach sky-high success while retaining a resolutely rootsy, earthbound sound. Creedence Clearwater Revivals 1968 debut album introduced guitar-playing brothers John and Tom Fogerty, drummer Doug Clifford, and bassist Stu Cook, four young men out of El Cerrito in the San Francisco Bay Area. But while they emerged in a place and time where trippy psychedelic visions where the order of the day, CCR bucked the trends and instead tapped into a rich, traditional seam of American music that connected to blues, country, rockabilly, gospel, folk, and R&B.When their contemporaries were unfurling mind-bending musical excursions with elaborate productions that included everything but the proverbial kitchen sink, Creedence crashed into the upper rungs of the album and singles charts with songs that wasted nary a note or word, overflowing with raw soul and unbridled energy. They cranked out 10 Top 40 singles, six Platinum albums, and one Gold in just four intensely prolific years, all powered by John Fogertys gut-level growl, with the rest of the band providing just the right kind of gritty, in-the-pocket punch to propel CCRs vision.

Over the past two years, there’s been such a remarkable abundance of great music by female artists in the overlapping territories of alt-country, roots, and Americana that it could fill this playlist many times over. From the folky, sepulchral sounds of Pieta Brown, to the Kitty Wells-style honky-tonk throwbacks of Rachel Brooke, to the raw and tender country blues of Adia Victoria (pictured), it’s a boom time all round.That said, trying to fit a disparate group of artists into a tidy category that’s based in part on their gender can’t help but feel unfairly reductive. Hell, it may even perpetuate the kind of backward sexual politics that persist in the worst of American country music and that many artists understandably buck against. Back in 2014, the duo Maddie & Tae scored a surprise smash with “Girl In A Country Song,” a bouncy piece of C&W pop that doubled as an unusually acerbic satire of the ways women are typically represented by Nashville. “We used to get a little respect,” goes the chorus. “Now we’re lucky if we even get to climb up in your truck/ Keep our mouths shut and ride along/ And be the girl in a country song.” Three years later, with “bro-country” acts like Florida Georgia Line, Luke Bryan, and Chase Rice doubling down on innuendo-laden tailgate-party anthems and yet more videos with models in bikinis, mainstream country needs that kind of skewering even more.Lest all this just serve as another reason for alt-country hipsters to feel smug about their superior tastes, even they ought to admit that there ain’t much gender parity when it comes to the artists who generally cross over from the No Depression crowd and gain wider renown and success. After all, there are many more female acts who’ve been just as willing as Chris Stapleton and Sturgill Simpson to pursue a richer, more adventurous kind of artistry than Nashville generally tolerates. They too deserve to garner audiences beyond the flannel-clad roots-music devotees who already recognize the virtues of Rhiannon Giddens’ revamps of old-time spirituals, savor the gilded harmonies of The Trishas, or tremble at the sound of Tift Merritt’s warble.This bounty of talent ranges from newbies like Kacy & Clayton (a Canadian duo who’ve become protégés of Jeff Tweedy) and Molly Burch (an Austinite blessed with a voice whose chilly beauty evokes Patsy Cline and Karen Dalton at their most desolate) to Shelby Lynne and Alison Moorer, sisters and alt-country vets who demonstrate their own dexterity by combining covers of Townes Van Zandt and Nirvana on their new album Not Dark Yet. These are the alt-country women you need to hear if you haven’t been so lucky already. Big-hatted bros best take heed.

This post is part of our Psych 101 program, an in-depth, 14-part series that looks at the impact of psychedelia on modern music. Want to sign up to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. Theyll thank you. We thank you.Be advised: You’re about to encounter a bumper crop of bad vibes. The CliffsNotes version of rock history would have you believe that the ‘60s was just a wall-to-wall Age of Aquarius packed to the gills with peace, love, and paisley. But a closer look reveals a darker side to the hippie dream. The same counterculture that made all those sunshine daydreams possible also encompassed some seriously shadowy elements. Psychosis, sexual perversion, misanthropy, morbidity, social decay, the downside of psychedelics—all of these were a potent part of the scene. Whether you’ve got a well known band like The Velvet Underground delivering an ode to sadomasochism on “Venus in Furs” or a more obscure outfit like St. John Green serving up a song for the “Goddess of Death,” take a tumble into the creepier side of the ‘60s.

This post is part of our Psych 101 program, an in-depth, 14-part series that looks at the impact of psychedelia on modern music. Want to sign up to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. Theyll thank you. We thank you.Since its release on June 1, 1967, The Beatles Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band has been so overrated, its practically underrated. The albums reputation doesnt so much precede it as supersede it: Like the monoloth that periodically appears in 2001: A Space Odyssey to mark the crucial turning points in the evolution of human civilization, Sgt. Pepper has come to represent this massive, immovable talisman that looms untouchably over the course of modern pop history. Its emblematic of so many Big Events—the Summer of Love, the elevation of rock n roll into art, the embrace of the studio-as-instrument, Chris Martins more dubious wardrobe choices—that its easy to forget its a relatively compact, 39-minute record comprising 13 pop songs, only two of which go beyond four minutes, and some of which are pretty goofy.Sgt. Peppers oft-cited standing as rocks first concept album is somewhat overstated—its more like the blueprint for one, establishing the template (the opening vignettes, the scene-setting sound effects, the character role-play, the reprises, the grandest of finales) that contemporaries like The Pretty Things and The Who would later flesh out with proper narratives on S.F. Sorrow and Tommy, respectively. And for an album thats considered a watershed moment in psychedelic rock, Sgt. Pepper can be a stridently buttoned-up, old-fashioned record—for one, if its opening lyric is to be believed, its an album pining for the glory days of 1947. Many of its signature sounds—from the orchestral crescendos and harpsichord flourishes to the sitar drones and tabla grooves—were produced by instruments that have existed for hundreds of years. It’s an album full of loving odes to police officers, the eldery, and circus sideshows. Its most pointed examination of teenage rebellion—“She’s Leaving Home”—is sung from the perspective of the weeping parents who’ve suddenly turned into empty nesters.But Sgt. Peppers great achievement is how it made such quaint sources and subject matter sound utterly surreal. It’s a postcard portrait of a bygone England as rendered by Dali. And thanks to its cinematic 360-degree sound design, it was the closest you could get in 1967 to strapping on a VR headset. While Sgt. Pepper may have presented The Beatles as a surrogate band—granting successors like David Bowie and Elton John the license to create their ownalter-egos—the album didn’t so much teach other artists how to step into character as how to step outside their prescribed roles and processes. It showed rock bands they could still exist as rock bands even after they got bored of making rock music.And yet, for all the fundamental sea changes that Sgt. Pepper’s represents, it’s an album that has been perpetually plundered for simple musical ideas as much as grand philosophical ones. It’s actually the rare record that was already influential before it was even completed: While making their debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, down the hall at Abbey Road, the members of Pink Floyd listened in as The Beatles recorded “Lovely Rita” and imported some of its sonic techniques to “Pow R. Toc H,” which plays like an abstract instrumental remix. Following Sgt. Peppers release, pretty much every ’60s rock band of note was hiring an orchestra, polishing off a trumpet, or learning the sitar to embellish their own magnum opus. Soul singers like Otis Redding and Stevie Wonder were inspired to leave traditional R&B behind to explore more musically expansive and emotionally introspective songwriting. And outsider acts like The United States of America were pushing Sgt. Pepper’s sound-collage ethos into more avant-garde terrain.By the early ‘70s, Sgt. Pepper’s ornamental essence could be felt in the theatrical prog of Genesis, the avant-glam of Brian Eno and Sparks, and the chamber-pop detours of iconoclasts like John Cale and Big Star’s Alex Chilton. And though punk momentarily put a moratorium on lavish rock records, Sgt. Pepper’s ideas would be imported into the alternative-rock arena through art-pop eccentrics like the Soft Boys and XTC. In the ’90s, Sgt. Pepper spawned the most bloated of Britpop anthems, gave lo-fi dreamers like The Olivia Tremor Control the confidence to go widescreen on a Super-8 budget, and led grunge stalwarts like Soundgarden and Stone Temple Pilots on a yellow-bricked path to the pop charts. And around the turn of the millennium, Sgt. Pepper’s heady textures and lockstep Ringo rhythms began seeping into the dance tent thanks to artists like the Chemical Brothers, The Avalanches, and Caribou.At this point, it’s hard to even think of Sgt. Pepper as a Beatles album. It’s a readymade toolkit for any band that’s attempting to go “serious,” whether it’s the New Kids on the Block hot-stepping around trilling trumpets on “Tonight” or Panic! At the Disco outfitting their arena-sized emo with bouncing-ball piano lines on “Nine in the Afternoon.” But Sgt. Pepper is so overflowing with ear candy that its tiniest details have been spun into songs by artists who aren’t even attempting to make their own Sgt. Pepper. While the lift-off section of Bowie’s “Space Oddity” is clearly modeled after the symphonic tornado of “A Day in the Life,” Elliott Smith’s “Colorbars” keyed in on the windswept, shuffling piano chords that The Beatles used to lure us into the storm. The clipped one-note guitar stabs of “Getting Better” power Sloan’s “Everything You’ve Done Wrong” and Ween’s “Even If You Don’t,” while the same song’s droning fuzz-chord finale reverberates through both the pristine power pop of Badfinger’s “No Matter What” and the mouldy-basement murk of Guided by Voices’ “2nd Moves to Twin.” Even songs coming from completely different worlds gradually reveal their debt—Nine Inch Nails’ “Disappointed” may begin as tense minimal techno, but it eventually opens up to accommodate wondrous string-section sweeps that harken back to George Harrison’s sitar-spun Sgt. Pepper centerpiece “Within You, Without You.”Fifty years on from Sgt. Peppers release, its nigh impossible to imagine another rock album ever being so central to the pop-cultural conversation again. And in the 21st century, the standard for masterpiece records has shifted away from Sgt. Peppers studio-sculpted perfection to sonically chaotic, emotionally fraught albums—be it Kid A or To Pimp a Butterfly—that grapple with the anxieties of modern life rather than provide a fantastical escape from them. But while the impact of Sgt. Peppers glorious collision of rock n roll, classical, psychedelia, Indian music, barnyard sounds, and proto-Pro Tools tape-splice construction is felt less acutely today, it nonetheless continues to reverberate out into distant realms. This playlist reveals at least 50 ways that Sgt. Pepper taught bands to play, riding the ebb and flow of its influence from the late-60s to today.

Notice I included many songs written before 1965, years too often slighted by compilers.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

Classic rock, cook-outs, and flag-waving patriotism aren’t only for right-wing yahoos who keep a copy of Cat Scratch Fever tucked next to their Beanfield Sniper Remington Sendero SF II. I know it feels that way in an age when the Nuge and Kid Rock are snapping selfies in the Oval Office. But trust me: There’s plenty of us on the left who jump at the chance to blast big, shaggy riffs and slather grub in barbecue sauce (even if the grub being slathered is veggie burgers). And it’s for you, my fellow classic-rock lefties—like the proud American down my street with the “End the War on the Middle Class” sign in his window and a pickup truck covered in union stickers—that I’ve put together what, in my humble opinion, is one hell of a Fourth of July playlist stuffed with songs fighting the good fight.A lot of the tunes you know and love, like Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (though maybe not everybody has cracked open the howling, wall-of-guitars rendition from 1975’s Rolling Thunder Revue) and Jefferson Airplane’s muddy-ass, piano-banging, Woodstock anthem “Volunteers.” (“Hey, I’m dancing down the streets! Got a revolution!!!”). And as should be expected of any patriotic playlist worth its salt, you’re bound to find some Springsteen (whose original, acoustic version of “Born in the U.S.A.” is a bloody, brooding anti-war cry that sounds more like the dread-stained “State Trooper” than the high-gloss “Dancing in the Dark”) and Seger. (If you know only the Night Moves era—which isn’t bad, mind you—then his 1969 anti-Vietnam War psych-raver “2 +2 =?” will have you burning flags by its second verse.)But listeners will also run into a bunch of obscure nuggets. Detroit’s megaton demolition of The Velvet Underground’s “Rock ’n’ Roll,” from 1971, should’ve been a massive hit for lead singer and perpetual underdog Mitch Ryder, who around the time of its recording had joined the fight to release White Panther revolutionary and all-around awesome guy John Sinclair from prison. Ditto for Relatively Clean Rivers’ “Easy Ride,” a smoothly rolling evocation of rural hippie ethos that will totally appeal to those pro-legalization types in love with Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty.There’s also a ton of soul and funk to be heard, and that’s because all true lefty rock fans don’t see any difference between rock ’n’ roll and R&B. It’s all righteous people making righteous groove music to battle the forces of oppression and tyranny that now, more than ever, are bearing down on our beloved United States. On the deliriously punchy, horn-stabbing “You Haven’t Done Nothin’,” Stevie Wonder rails against Tricky Dick, but it may as well be 45. Aretha Franklin’s “Spirit in the Dark” isn’t overtly political but rather serves as a gorgeous and uplifting example of the sublimely redemptive vibrations emanating from African-American spiritual music. Another powerhouse is the proto-disco “I Want to Take You Higher” recorded at Woodstock. For just shy of seven minutes, Sly & the Family Stone make good on the American dream: full equality and integration riding some of the most ecstatic funk ever laid down.So, this Fourth of July, crank these jams, eat a ton of great food, maybe even set of some explosives. But come Wednesday morning, let these songs inspire you to crawl into the trenches to fight all the anti-union, anti-universal healthcare, anti-Black Lives Matter, anti-LGBTQ, anti-climate change, anti-public education, anti-abortion, pro-corporate, pro-war, pro-Koch forces hijacking our country.

"Strange days have found us, and through their strange hours we linger alone" – Jim Morrison"Beauty always has an element of strangeness" – Charles BaudelaireThere was always something dangerous about The Doors. From the very beginning it was blindingly obvious that they stood far apart from the rest of the 60s Sunset Strip scene, not to mention the entire rock world. Sophistication? Sure. Darkness? Undoubtedly. Sensuality? You bet. Blend all of the above with a generous dose of transgression and you start to zero in on The Doors magic mixture. Not coincidentally, that same confluence of elements is pretty much the definition of 19th century Frances Symbolist poetry movement, as epitomized by Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud. It was an influence that is obvious to any fan of both The Doors and the French Symbolist, but it’s also an influence that Morrison spoke to when he mailed French literature expert and Duke professor Wallace Fowlie, thanking him for producing a translation of Rimbuad’s complete poems, and relaying, "I dont read French that easily. . . . I am a rock singer and your book travels around with me."If course, Morrison was hardly the only singer of that era to be influenced by poetry. The second half of the 60s saw a giant evolutionary leap for rock n roll lyrics, one that inspired fans to append the "poetry" label to rock for the first time. Bob Dylan got that ball rolling, followed closely by The Beatles, but the arrival of The Doors gave the rock-as-poetry concept an even bigger boost of an entirely different kind. Jim Morrison was rocks first real poetic enfant terrible, an heir at last to the moody mien of poetrys original dark princes, Baudelaire and Rimbaud. It was all right there in The Doors very first introduction to the world at large. The first line of their first single, "Break on Through (To the Other Side)," which was also the opening cut on their debut album, immediately served notice of Morrisons intentions. "You know the day destroys the night, night divides the day" was both a world away from what was coming out of most rock singers mouths and an entirely different kind of enhanced lyricism than that of Dylan or John Lennon.Dylan and Lennon dazzled their disciples with phantasmagorical, LSD-aided imagery perfectly in tune with the psychedelically stimulated times. But while acid undeniably acted as a launching pad for some of Morrisons lyrics, The Doors werent wowing fans with "tangerine trees and marmalade skies" or gently calling to Mr. Tambourine Man in search of a "jingle-jangle morning." Sure, Morrison was a lyricist who liked to paint vivid, sometimes psychedelic pictures with words. But he was also a libertine who loved nothing better than to line up taboos and, well, break on through to the other side. In all of these things, he was blazing his own trail on a path begun a century earlier by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and company. Like The Doors singer, the French Symbolist poets were iconoclastic hedonists for whom nothing was more important than the derangement of the senses in the service of experiencing lifes absurd carnival to its fullest and finding an artful way to describe it. The bad boys of their eras literary scene, they might have been rock stars if the possibility existed at the time. But their visions burned as deeply and brightly as anything to emerge since. Morrison drew as much from these transgressive poets as he did from John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. He was an avowed admirer of their dark visions, from Baudelaires deliriously decadent Flowers of Evil to Rimbauds daring A Season in Hell. There was even a book dedicated solely to the topic of Morrisons relation to Rimbaud. But if you want to pick up on the connection all you need to do is listen.Its not so far a leap, for instance, from The Doors "End of the Night" to Baudelaires "Death of the Poor." The former finds Morrison crooning:

Realms of bliss, realms of lightSome are born to sweet delightSome are born to sweet delightSome are born to the endless night

In the latter, Baudelaire declares:

It is death who gives us life in excitationIt is the end of life, the one hope, the one delightThat, divine elixir, is our IntoxicationAnd which gives us the heart to follow the endless night

Parallels between Morrison and Rimbaud arent tough to spot either. Take the opening of the latters legendary A Season in Hell:

Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.One evening I seated Beauty on my knees. And I founder bitter. And I cursed her.I armed myself against justice.I fled. O Witches, Misery, Hate, to you has my treasure been entrusted!

It doesnt require a great contortion of sensibility to draw a line between that and "The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)," where Morrison cries:Listen to this, Ill tell you about the heartacheIll tell you about the heartache and the loss of GodIll tell you about the hopeless nightThe meager food for souls forgotIll tell you about the maiden with wrought iron soulMorrison never seemed to be aping his influences, but its certainly possible to imagine that he and the poets he admired were reporting from the same spiritual/psychological precipice. Of course, Morrison wasnt content to be considered merely a "rock poet" either; he published two books of his own verse, eventually combined as The Lords and The New Creatures. But The Doors singular mix of music and imagery remains the most intoxicating indication of the Symbolists sway over Morrison.

Psychedelic culture stands at the cusp of mainstream acceptance. This may sound odd given the fact that the United States still includes LSD, psilocybin, and numerous other hallucinogens on the list of Schedule I substances, but there are many signs. Academia is in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance, with Johns Hopkins University leading the way in exploring the therapeutic benefits, while tales abound of California techies microdosing. And though marijuana is not an hallucinogen, per se, it is culturally linked to psychedelics, and it’s legal in 30 states and counting. Then there’s the recent publication of How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. The book, written by celebrated author and journalist Michael Pollan, cracked the Top 10 of Amazon’s books charts and is sure to further accelerate the field’s growing respectability.Such developments were unthinkable in the mid-’60s when psychedelics, helping fuel the counterculture’s alienation from mainstream American culture and politics, were pushed underground through prohibition. Having been booted out of Harvard University in 1963, outlaw psychonaut Timothy Leary (in)famously exhorted America’s youth to “turn on, tune in, drop out”; Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, meanwhile, kickstarted the hippie movement with their Bay Area Acid Tests. Rock ’n’ roll played a central role in the spreading of this psychedelic gospel. As musicians themselves experimented with hallucinogens, they in turn penned anthems charting their consciousness-expanding adventures.The first wave of anthems, probably more inspired by cannabis than hallucinogens, sound rather innocuous, even goofy in hindsight. Bob Dylan’s double entendre-laced “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” wraps early “head” humor inside a marching band sing-along, and The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Daydream” sways with childlike innocence as John Sebastian croons the slyly suggestive lines, “And you can be sure that if you’re feeling right/ A day dream will last long into the night.”In 1966, however, the folksy playfulness of these tunes gave way to noggin-blurring proselytizing. The Beatles—whom Leary, in one of his typically hyperbolic bursts of cosmic thought, described as being “endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species”—led the charge. The group dropped both “Tomorrow Never Knows,” perhaps the first rock song to truly drone, and “She Said She Said,” a cryptic reference to an acid trip with Easy Rider actor Peter Fonda, into the sonically phantasmagoric Revolver. The Byrds kept apace, unleashing “Eight Miles High,” which certainly matched “Tomorrow Never Knows” in its ability to express the acid experience through mystical lyricism and raga-flavored music.The following year, 1967, saw the Jefferson Airplane and The Doors up the ante with “White Rabbit” and “Break On Through (To the Other Side),” respectively. Both are stirring—though radically different—evocations of West Coast’s exploding psychedelic movement. Where “White Rabbit” is a whimsical call to action drenched in Alice in Wonderland imagery, “Break On Through” comes on like a freight train threatening to jump the tracks. Its expression of a consciousness freed is reckless and unnerving (but also utterly thrilling).It’s important to remember that The Doors, named for Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, a chronicle of the author’s experiences with mescaline, weren’t flower-picking hippies; they were art-school bohemians whose music charted the shadowy side of psychedelia, especially the sense of loss and disconnect that comes with untethering the mind from reality. As Patrick Lundborg points out in his 2012 book Psychedelia: An Ancient Culture, A Modern Way of Life, “In that tumultuous era, as acidhead musicians directed their creativity towards reflecting their psychedelic experiences, the looming threat and occasional reality of dark, terrifying trips unavoidably came to influence the music.”This ominousness courses through The 13th Floor Elevators’ “Slip Inside This House” and Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive,” two of the era’s most emotionally complex anthems. The former, swirling into vortices of reverb, creates a profoundly esoteric vision, over the course of which the promise of spiritual enlightenment and the dangers of ego death coil around one another like snakes. Pink Floyd’s early anthem, on the other hand, is a cold, paranoid, and atonal portrayal of an acid trip as a rocket ride into the black expanse of space. Needless to say, both walk the existential edge, a fact that should come as no surprise considering both the Elevators’ Roky Erickson and Floyd’s Syd Barrett embodied the excesses of the psychedelic era: psychonauts who wound up venturing too far out, damaging themselves in the process.In the United States and United Kingdom, the golden era of the psychedelic anthem didn’t last all that long, roughly 1966 to 1969. By the time Woodstock went down, more and more musicians were eschewing cosmic exploration for earthbound rock heavily accented with country, soul, and blues. The visionary utopianism so profoundly linked to altered states of consciousness simply couldn’t weather the harsh realities of a war in Vietnam that seemingly had no end in sight, the ascendency of Richard M. Nixon and his Silent Majority to the Oval Office, and the brutal Civil Rights unrest of 1968. Hippies, reeling from these bitter developments, embraced more personal forms of enlightenment: yoga, meditation, and health food, to name a few. Or, they bolted for the country.Exceptions did pop up, like Funkadelic’s moodily sublime “Maggot Brain,” not an anthem in the strictest sense yet certainly a powerful expression of mind-smashing lysergia. There also were late-to-evolve psychedelic scenes in central Europe and Japan, where hippiedom didn’t take hold until the early ’70s. A perfect reflection of this is the Switzerland-based Brainticket, whose 1971 epic “Brainticket (Part Two)” really is one of the most over-the-top anthems of the era. It’s tough to imagine anything better capturing the wild, transgressive spirit of the times than when vocalist Dawn Muir moans the line “An army of thoughts retreating towards oblivion/ A square of light, a circle of thought, a triangle of nothing!!!” as though she’s descending her entire being into an LSD-fueled orgy from which there is no return.As with most of the expansive pieces on this playlist, it’s safe to say the researchers at Johns Hopkins don’t play a whole lot of Brianticket around the lab!

“Break On Through (To the Other Side)” is both a feral howl of desire and dislocation and a sleek, supple creature that darts and pounces in a manner at once sinuous and sinewy. The Doors’ 1967 debut single, urging a shattering of society’s constrictions, served notice that there was something new happening, the likes of which no one had seen before. Its simultaneously explosive and seductive power embedded it irreversibly not only in the mood of the moment but also in the very fabric of American culture forever after. We recently reached out to Doors guitarist Robby Kreiger about the songs origins and heres what he told us:“We were working up “Break on Through” in rehearsal. John came up with this bossa nova beat. I didnt think it would work, but he said it would, and he was right. I had the idea to use the type of riff that Paul Butterfield used on Shake your Moneymaker. I wouldn’t say I stole it, just borrowed it. With Ray’s vox organ, it was sounding good! The lyrics were some of Jim’s best. As we played it at more and more gigs it got better and better. The only regret i had was that we let them cut out the word high from ‘she gets high’ on the single version. I guess that was too controversial for the AM radio, but we made up for that on the Ed Sullivan show (by singing), ‘get much higher.’ LOL”While its origins are relatively modest, its impact is far-reaching. Below, we’ll look at how the song changed The Doors and rock ‘n’ roll forever.Arrival of the Rock Gods"Break On Through" was The Doors introduction to the world—their first single as well as the first track on their debut album. It was the opening salvo of a four-man rock n roll revolution that would fill the collective cultural consciousness with a heady brew of sex, poetry, anger, beauty, and indelible tunes. The songs urgent entry into the publics ears marked the auspicious arrival of a group that would remain real-deal rock deities even decades after disbanding.The Real Start of the 60sThe Doors anthem of social sedition, fueled in part by Jim Morrisons use of LSD as a mind-expanding tool, arrived at the start of 1967, the year the 60s really became the sixties. The blend of gritty garage-rock tonalities and lithe, bossa nova-influenced grooves that rippled through “Break On Through” framed an invitation to abandon the cage of convention and leap headfirst into a bold, burgeoning countercultural realm. In that sense, for many it heralded the onset of the Aquarian age.Rock n Roll PoetryArriving ahead of game-changers like Sgt. Peppers and Songs of Leonard Cohen, "Break On Through" brought the world a brand of rock poetry that had nothing to do with Dylan. From its very first lines—"You know the day destroys the night/ Night divides the day"—it gave a glimpse of the possibilities still in store for rock n roll lyrics, possibilities Morrison fearlessly explored for the rest of his tragically short life.Trail of TributesIts a sure sign of a songs staying power when it appears in all sorts of disparate circumstances generations after its release. Any tune that can be covered by metal supergroup Adrenaline Mob, grunge gurus Stone Temple Pilots, power-pop heroes The Knack, and avant-garde guitar god Marc Ribot, as well as being sampled by hip-hop stoners Cypress Hill and Danish neo-garage rockers The Raveonettes, has got some serious shelf life.The Ultimate HonorIt would be absurdly easy to unfurl a laundry list of the countless times “Break On Through” has been used in movies, TV shows, and video games. And do you really need to know much beyond the fact that it was belted out on The Simpsons by Krusty the Clown himself, clad in Morrison-esque attire and writhing on the floor à la The Lizard King?