The Best Psychedelic Rock Albums of the '60s

The first sessions went so badly — the band strung out, nobody rehearsed — that Elektra sent for the Wrecking Crew, and Hal Blaine and Carol Kaye played 'Andmoreagain' and 'The Daily Planet' instead. The humiliation apparently worked. David Angel wrote the string charts from melodies Arthur Lee hummed at him. 'Alone Again Or' is Bryan MacLean's song, mixed with Lee's harmony on top, a grievance MacLean carried for life.

Four days in April 1966 at Scepter Studios, a half-derelict building with holes in the floor, on Andy Warhol's money. Warhol produced it in the sense that he paid and told nobody to change anything. Maureen Tucker drummed standing up with mallets; John Cale strung his viola with guitar strings and played 'Venus In Furs' like a drone from a much older century. It peaked at 171.

Down one corridor the Beatles were making Sgt. Pepper; down the other, Norman Smith — their old engineer — was recording eleven Syd Barrett songs. Peter Jenner recited planet names through a megaphone. The studio 'Interstellar Overdrive' is a compressed edit of something that ran far longer at the UFO Club. Within a year Barrett was out of the band he had almost single-handedly written.

Chas Chandler quit partway through, worn down by the retakes and the crowd Hendrix let into the control room, so Hendrix produced it himself. Steve Winwood played organ and Jack Casady played bass on 'Voodoo Chile', a fifteen-minute first take cut after a night at the Scene club. Track Records wrapped the UK sleeve in nineteen nude women. Hendrix hated it and had no say.

The Zombies had already broken up by the time this appeared in April 1968, and they had paid for the stereo mix themselves after CBS refused. Terry Quirk misspelled the title on the sleeve and the band claimed afterwards it was a pun. 'Care Of Cell 44' is a love song to a woman getting out of prison, sung over Abbey Road's house Mellotron.

Tommy Hall played electric jug — vocalised notes blown across a ceramic jug into a microphone — and wrote most of the lyrics as a straight argument that LSD could rebuild a mind permanently. 'Slip Inside This House' runs eight minutes and refuses a chorus. No clean copy survives: this edition suffixes every title 'QFPS Version' and Spotify dates it 2024. Roky Erickson was in a state hospital within two years.

Phil May wrote a short story about a man called Sebastian F. Sorrow, and the band spent a year at Abbey Road turning it into what usually gets called the first rock opera. Norman Smith produced, again. 'Baron Saturday' is the hallucination at the centre of it. The American release was held up until 1969, by which point Tommy was out and nobody cared who got there first.

The original sleeve was a circular gatefold made to look like a tin of Ogden's Nut-brown Flake tobacco, and it rolled straight off record-shop shelves. Side two is a fairy tale narrated by Professor Stanley Unwin in his own invented English. 'Lazy Sunday' was pulled as a single against the band's wishes and recast Steve Marriott as a music-hall cockney, which he never forgave.

Grace Slick joined and brought two hit singles with her from her previous band as a sort of joining fee — her brother-in-law had written one of them. 'White Rabbit' is built on a bolero she says came from playing Sketches of Spain over and over. Jerry Garcia is credited on the sleeve as musical and spiritual adviser. Streaming appends six bonus tracks; stop at eleven.

Two men, no guitar, no bass, no keyboard anyone would recognise. Simeon Coxe played a stack of war-surplus audio oscillators worked with hands, feet and elbows, having never learned a piano keyboard; Danny Taylor drummed. 'Oscillations' gets cited as an ancestor of krautrock and techno, which is a lot to hang on a record that reached 193. Avoid the eighteen-track editions — those graft on the follow-up.

São Paulo, 1968, under a military dictatorship: Rogério Duprat arranged, Cláudio Baptista built the effects by hand, and Rita Lee played an aerosol can of bug spray on one track. 'A Minha Menina' is a Jorge Ben song. The band were booed offstage at a national song festival for backing Caetano Veloso, which is roughly where Tropicália stopped being a music-press category.

No guitars anywhere on this record, which in 1968 was close to unthinkable. Joseph Byrd could not afford a Moog — twenty thousand dollars, he said — so he had Richard Durrett build oscillators and ring modulators instead and ran everything through them. It reached 181 and the band dissolved. 'The American Metaphysical Circus' opens it, and Byrd reused the title for his next project.

Sunset Sound gave the Doors an eight-track machine and Bruce Botnick summed up the approach as no holds barred: keyboards run backwards, tape speeds dragged by hand, and one of the earliest Moogs on a rock record with Morrison's voice pushed through it. 'When the Music's Over' closes the thing. The cover shows hired street performers in a Manhattan mews; the band are absent.

Five days at Atlantic Studios in May 1967, and Tom Dowd remembered it taking three and a half because the band's visas were running out. Martin Sharp, who lived in Clapton's building, painted the day-glo sleeve and wrote the words to 'Tales Of Brave Ulysses'. The title came from a roadie mangling 'derailleur gears'. It ends with the three of them round a piano singing music hall.

A rented cottage in Berkshire, four musicians, and the start of a decade of British bands getting it together in the country. Steve Winwood was nineteen and had just walked out of the Spencer Davis Group; Dave Mason left before the record even came out. 'Dear Mr. Fantasy' is the one everybody knows. Streaming stacks the mono LP and two singles behind the stereo album — stop at ten.

Six songs separated by six passages of noise made by roughly fifty friends the band called The Familiar Ugly. Mayo Thompson called them free pieces; the producer renamed them freak-outs because he wanted an advertising slogan. Roky Erickson plays organ on 'Hurricane Fighter Plane', so far gone that a bandmate had to call the chord changes to him. Their drummer became the novelist Rick Barthelme.

Berkeley, February 1967, one week on four-track machines, made by a band who came out of the local protest scene rather than the ballrooms. 'Section 43' is the centrepiece, an instrumental McDonald built from John Fahey and Grieg and then edited together from three separate takes. 'Super Bird' is a flat satire of Lyndon Johnson. The closer is about Grace Slick, whom he wanted to write better songs for.

Bob Markley was an Oklahoma oil heir, a former DJ, considerably older than everyone else, and the reason a group this strange got a Reprise contract at all. Despite the title, it was their second album. They cover Zappa's 'Help, I'm a Rock' and run the whole thing in under twenty-eight minutes. 'I Won't Hurt You' found a second life in Isle of Dogs.