Overview
Objectives
- Identify three different intersections of psychedelic rock with other genres of music
- Recall how Jefferson Airplane created a radio-friendly hybrid of folk rock and psychedelic rock
- Recall how Cream integrated psychedelic effects into their blues revival style
- Examine how Jimi Hendrix combined psychedelia, blues, and experimental techniques and effects in his recordings and in his live performances
Conclusion
Psychedelic rock affected recording artists and their music in very different ways during the 1960s. As we saw in this lesson, bands such as Jefferson Airplane augmented their folk rock song with psychedelic themes, but they maintained a radio-friendly song length and format. Eric Clapton and the members of Cream introduced psychedelic effects such as distortion and the wah-wah pedal into their blues-inspired performances. Jimi Hendrix, also steeped in the blues tradition, incorporated psychedelic themes, guitar effects, distortion, and a sense of showmanship in his music. In the next lesson, we will consider other artists from the late 1960s who were also affected by psychedelic rock and the countercultural movement, but their music was very different from the examples we studied in this lesson.
Jimi Hendrix "was entirely self-taught on guitar. He could not read music, instead he communicated his musical visions through colors: "Some feelings make you think of different colors, jealousy is purple; I'm purple with rage or purple with anger, and green with envy...""
