Introduction — Global Psychedelia and Counterculture

When we first talked about the idea of a special issue of Rock Music Studies on the topic of “Global Psychedelia and Counterculture,” the journal’s editors advised maintaining reasonable expectations about potential levels of interest, given the distance of the subject matter from the usual beaten paths of popular music research. As it turns out, we’ve found ourselves with a full slate of contents from a variety of scholarly backgrounds, about fascinating topics from all corners of the globe – the southern Pacific and South America to the Middle East and behind the Iron Curtain. The point was well-taken though; I think it’s fair to say that when most people (including most scholars of the era) think about anything “psychedelic” or “countercultural” from the 1960s and 1970s, the images in their mind look like Haight Street or Carnaby Street, Woodstock or the Isle of Wight, more so than any of the regions mentioned above.

I can actually remember when it first dawned on me that psychedelia may have been an international phenomenon, and I even recall the specific source that provided the charge for the metaphorical light bulb that lit up over my head.

The occasion for the realization was a pair of reissued albums by a late 1960s/ early 1970s Peruvian rock group called Traffic Sound.¹ I was already a fan of music from that era, and a stint working in record stores (remember those?) had given me the opportunity to come across some genuine obscurities. Those Traffic Sound discs, though, they were something else. The music’s appeal was obvious – tight, well-played acid rock with overtly psychedelic intent, memorable and unusually structured songs, lush arrangements that integrated horns and Latin percussion into a rock-band setup (and vice versa), and copious amounts of studio-effects freakery. On one hand, the influences seemed familiar enough (earlier bonus tracks on one of the CDs even included Latin-ized cover versions of Cream and Jimi Hendrix songs); but where the group took those influences, and where they ended up, was somewhere very different, and nowhere I had been before. Nowhere better heard than on the song “Meshkalina,” which featured hard-charging percussion, wicked use of wah pedal as rhythm instrument, dueling fuzz guitar/trumpet solos, and chanted lyrics (in heavily accented English) that seemed to cast fifteenth-century Inca ruler Yáhuar Huácac as the original psychedelic warlord (literally).

As a music fan and neophyte record collector, I immediately wondered how much more of this stuff there was, and how I could get my hands on it as quickly as possible. When I put on my “junior academic” hat (taking care not to bump it on the light bulb suspended up there), I had even more questions: What inspired this music? How was it made, where was it made, who was listening to it, how far did it reach? Surely something so fully realized couldn’t have existed in a vacuum; so, what was the context, the situation in which the music was created? And what did it “mean” or signify there? And more broadly, was Peru alone in this, or had people all over the world been playing psychedelic rock music, and I (and apparently nearly every other fan of psychedelia) had just never heard about it?

Maybe not surprisingly, answering those questions at that point proved a bit of a challenge. With some digging through rare record lists and collector’s catalogs, I was able to confirm that yes, in fact, there was more of this stuff. Bands such as Laghonia, Pax, El Álamo, Gerardo Manuel & El Humo, El Polen, and We All Together (among others) apparently shared with Traffic Sound both concert stages and opprobrium from the country’s military government; not to mention that a few years earlier Peru seemed to have had a burgeoning garage and surf rock scene – so there was even more to this than I had imagined. I also realized that tracking it down would depend either on reissue record labels, or the search for rare and highly collectible originals – the purchase of which, if found, would likely require an inheritance from some long-lost wealthy relative.² My curiosity as to whether the Peruvian scene was just a one-off was answered more quickly, in the form of a reissue program of late 60s Brazilian Tropicália that started to trickle into the U.S.A. soon afterward; at which point it became clear that something was indeed going on there – and, apparently, lots of other “theres.”³

Answers to my scholarly hatted questions were even more elusive. According to standard music histories, as well as the literature from musicology, popular culture, and elsewhere, there appeared to be no record of Peruvian psychedelia having existed at all. To some extent that was understandable; though the music was quite popular at the time, it had been out of print for years and was genuinely hard to find outside of its home country (and apparently quite scarce even there). In a sense, the record collectors were out ahead of the scholars and historians. I’ve written previously about record collecting as a kind of cultural anthropology (see Moist), finding, gathering, and preserving the materials needed to document and develop a modern popular music history in the first place (which would be true of other kinds of popular culture collectors as well). In large part that remains the case, as information about many of those scenes can be more readily found in discographical compendia aimed at collectors⁴ than from official sources either popular or academic – which have often remained stuck in myopic Anglo-American versions of “rock history” that really should be called into question by the very existence of something like acid rock in Peru.

When I started researching and writing about the counterculture around that same time, much of the available scholarly literature seemed equally limited in a different way, weighted toward political and protest subject matter, and generally pretty polarized in both tone and argument. “The Sixties” was often presented as a “Thing” one had to be either “For” or “Against,” and the counterculture (and its creative output) either dismissed or denigrated for its lack of commitment to some particular political project.⁵ (Fortunately, in the following decades, psychedelia and other countercultural manifestations began to receive more serious attention; see for example Braunstein and Doyle; Grunenberg; and Auther and Lerner; and the trend has continued since). Embarked as I was on a project about San Francisco rock concert posters, the academic record’s skewed focus was in many ways both unhelpful and perplexing, especially since it seemed to me that there was much more of a spectrum of countercultural activity that overlapped both psychedelia and the politics of culture.

I gradually discovered that more balanced and non-polarized assessments of the counterculture did exist in the literature, though it sometimes took a bit of digging to find them. One of the most enlightening was actually one of the earliest – a 1969 essay titled “The Hippies: An American ‘Moment,’” written by a scholar from the UK named Stuart Hall (best known for his pioneering later work as part of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies).⁶

Rather than condemning the rebellious youth from the heights of his ivory tower, or linking elbows with his comrades to storm the barricades, Hall set himself a seemingly more modest goal – to try to understand the counterculture on its own terms, to “catch, describe, and interpret the symbolic modes of life” of the movement “from the point of view of the subjective meaning [it] seems to have for its participants” (170). Much of the essay takes the form of a thoughtful examination of central countercultural ideas and values – mysticism, pastoralism, voluntary poverty, “Love” (of various kinds), the unlocking of the doors of perception, the apparent-but-illusory conflict between individualism and communal living. He saw the counterculture’s activities as working parallel to those of the protestors, an “expressive” pole of the revolution that was a necessary complement to its “activist” wing, trying to “explore, live through and act out in fragmented, broken forms the outer limits/inner spaces” of the countercultural project (200). He described the counterculture as “some of the first enlisted troops in a new kind of politics of post-modern post-industrial society: the politics of cultural rebellion” (196).

Jumping forward four decades, historian Michael J. Kramer ascribes similar proto-postmodern qualities to the counterculture in his excellent 2013 book The Republic of Rock. Kramer discusses psychedelic rock music and the counterculture it represented as fundamentally “hybrid and syncretic” – a pluralistic collage of ideas and expressions drawn from various places and times, in an ongoing process of recombination into new forms. Of course, rock and roll itself was already a hybrid musical style, growing out of blues, country, rockabilly, and rhythm & blues. But the music of the psychedelic era took that to a whole different level – blues songs featuring Indian sitars, folk music crossed with avant-garde electronics, jazz-inspired improvisations on a theme by the Beatles, and so on.

There’s nothing inherently subversive about any genre or type of music; meaning is always going to be contextual. But it’s also true that, at the time, the sounds of Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Pink Floyd, and so many others were widely understood as representing and embodying a countercultural attitude toward the world. Music scholar Sheila Whiteley discusses a process she calls “psychedelic coding,” referring to the ways that certain sounds – fuzztone electric guitar, delay and phasing and other effects, as well as those musical and stylistic juxtapositions – were semiotically coded to call up and even recreate the psychedelic experience, and by extension via chains of connotation to indicate a wider set of countercultural values and ideas that went along with them (2–5). Michael Hicks makes a similar point in describing particular techniques used by musicians to embody and signify the effects of psychedelic drugs (63–74). Hall wrote in 1969 that “psychedelic art” – including related forms such as concert posters and light shows along with acid rock – “is best understood as a way of reproducing, or re-creating through music and the new art forms the multi-media, multi-dimensional” nature of the psychedelic experience (188).

Hall also observed with interest the extent to which countercultural art and ideas managed to travel from place to place – despite the fact that the hippies obviously had little direct control over major mass media systems – allowing for the development of a “technologically-based tribalism” not limited by standard national or cultural borders. Citing (favorably) the work of media theorist Marshall McLuan, Hall described the counterculture as “heirs of the mass media revolution,” and observed that they had managed to create a “quite complex substructure of communications networks” – including underground newspapers, little magazines, and especially music and radio broadcasts – that allowed ideas to “travel by means of this ‘modern bush-telegraph’ from one Hippie community to another, both across the country and between continents” (180–1). Some of those elements were effectively operating within the channels of traditional mass media networks, as the popularity of psychedelic rock music provided it with a reach that would not have been possible otherwise; while others were early efforts to use available media technologies in an independent or “alternative” fashion.

It’s worth keeping in mind that Hall’s countercultural bush-telegraph was in action well before “world music” had been invented as either concept or marketing category (see Feld). World music scholar Jocelyne Guilbault writes that the genre, as it came to be established in the 1980s, was a product of globalization, characterized by “transnational movements of musics and artists and the new alliances, both social and musical,” that they established (191). However, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, those networks were still in the process of formation, and the movement of music and popular culture was still largely in one direction. Young people in Peru were certainly hearing the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, because that music was promoted there by international media companies, played on the radio, and so on; however, those artists’ Peruvian counterparts hardly received a similar amount of broadcast and promotion in the UK. Regional rock music was at times recorded and released by branches of those international record companies (EMI, Philips, RCA, and others all had outposts around the world), though just as often by enterprising local independent labels; in either case, it was generally marketed mostly within its country of origin. As a result, the psychedelic music that developed usually remained limited to a national or regional reach.

Academics who study media have long been concerned (often with reason) that the global spread of popular culture from the West might drown out or supplant local traditions and styles, either intentionally or unintentionally functioning as a type of cultural imperialism. However, Motti Regev points out that, at least with regards to rock music, that viewpoint has been less common on the ground. More often, he writes, “rock music is used to declare a ‘new’ – modern, contemporary, young, often critical-oppositional – sense of local identity, as opposed to older, traditional, conservative forms of that identity” (418). Néstor García Canclini describes this kind of process as “the cultural reorganization of power,” as internal social patterns and hierarchies are intersected by new influences from other sources, and societies shift “from a vertical and bipolar conception of sociopolitical relations to one that is decentered and multidetermined” (258). In the 1960s in particular, the embrace of rock music by young people was perceived as a statement of generational identity and the ability to stay current with international trends. As such, it was initially tolerated and even encouraged by local authorities, at least to the extent that such modernization was seen as a desirable goal, which was definitely not always the case.

Regev points out that the music arising out of such new interactions can take a myriad of different forms in different places, though he identifies three “ideal” categories of the process by which rock music becomes incorporated into local cultures. The first of these is the popularity of “Anglo/American pop/rock as such,” usually seen as a sign of the openness of the local context to an engagement with currents of international culture. In situations where such connections are frowned upon by local authorities, “within conservative contexts or totalitarian regimes, attempts to prevent or just control the dissemination of Anglo-American rock, invoke the use of this music as a means to construct a local sense of autonomous identity” (419).

Regev’s second category is “imitation,” in which local musicians take up instruments and create their own versions of international styles, often as sung in local languages. This step, he says, often accompanies the “emergence of a bohemian-oppositional ‘counter-culture’ which considers itself to be an avant-garde;” this is especially common “under totalitarian regimes, where the local rock scene declared itself to be a site for the preservation of national artistic freedom” – the “subversive” international music style becoming a rallying point for local resistance (420).

The third category involves musical and cultural “hybridity,” as “rock elements are selectively adapted and mixed with traditional-local styles to produce” new musical forms and new cultural identities. Combining Western rock instrumentation and textures (fuzz, distortion, loud volume) “with traditional instruments, vocal styles and ‘ethnic’ rhythms, they create musics that sound as much ‘rock’ as planted in the local culture” (422). Regev recommends against seeing the three categories as stages in a linear process (i.e., from imports to imitation to hybrid, in sequence); there are places where that did occur, but probably even more in which the three have coexisted and even competed among themselves for popularity.

In the 1960s, as psychedelic music and its countercultural meanings dispersed like spores across the world, many of the places they landed and took root were quite different from the U.S.A. and UK in terms of both cultural background and contemporary politics. Being a longhaired hippie playing rebellious rock music meant one kind of thing in San Francisco or London (though even those are perhaps not so identical as consensus accounts have assumed), but something quite different in Tokyo, Lagos, or Buenos Aires. Not a few of those countries were also going through serious social and political upheaval at the time, in some cases even under authoritarian rule. García Canclini points out that, in such situations, repressive governments will often attempt to limit access to potentially “subversive” outside materials, while trying to impose an idealized and simplified “official” version of national culture, such that “heterodox ways of speaking the language, making music, or interpreting the traditions are rejected” (xxiii). Artists and musicians, on the other hand, tend to lean into processes of cultural hybridization. García Canclini says that, “For many artists, recognizing cultural hybridization, and working experimentally with it, serve to deconstruct the perceptions of society and the language that represents it,” as those outside influences become symbolic resources that can be adapted and mobilized for cultural and political purposes (246n).

Simon Frith argues that popular music is always about more than just entertainment; “what music offers people,” he writes, “is access to a social world, a part in some sort of social narrative” (90). Music provides resources for identity, “gives us a way of being in the world, a way of making sense of it: musical response is, by its nature, a process of musical identification; aesthetic response is, by its nature, an ethical agreement” (272). Michael J. Kramer suggests that the role of psychedelic rock music in the counterculture had both cultural and political implications, “because as it offered spaces of aesthetic interaction in the realm of leisure and entertainment, it also connected individuals to larger structures of power” (11). People’s experience of the music was as an arena for countercultural expressiveness, as well as a way of “critically confronting the present” – while on the one hand “it served as the setting for starting to live as if the revolution had already arrived, rock also provided a medium in which to work through the conundrums of the moment” (21). Kramer refers to this as the “countercultural imaginary … the visions, desires, and wishes that people used rock [music] to express about their lives” (23).

The articles assembled in this special issue of Rock Music Studies take up various points of that countercultural and psychedelic imaginary. I have intentionally avoided attempting to lay out too specific of a narrative or process in this introductory overview; as Scott Montgomery notes in his essay, the variety and complexity of the results suggest that we should perhaps be talking about psychedelias and countercultures, plural rather than singular. The examples discussed by the authors took very different forms and drew on different elements both musically and culturally, often not following the same timeline, chronology, or lines of development assumed in the standard unitary Western-centric rock histories mentioned above. The work collected here is not so much an attack on those consensus accounts as a de facto illustration of their partial and limited status.

Some places where one might have expected Western musical trends to take hold (for instance, a comfortably Anglo setting such as New Zealand) instead found themselves constrained by culture and circumstance; while others that might initially seem less likely spots for a psychedelic uprising (say, Turkey) had thriving countercultural scenes that lasted through the 1970s. The approaches taken by the authors are equally varied, with interdisciplinary backgrounds ranging from musicological to sociological to cultural. Some of the examples (Italy, Brazil) have received a bit of previous scholarly attention – though the analyses here show how much is yet to be learned about even those – while others (Poland, the Philippines) have received almost no attention in either popular or academic settings.

The work gathered in this issue is hardly the final word about global psychedelia(s) – in fact, it’s more along the lines of an initial exploratory expedition. There’s nothing here about psychedelic music in, say, Chile, Indonesia, South Africa, Uruguay, Zambia, South Korea, Sweden, Nigeria, Japan… you get the idea. Many parts of the countercultural map remain obscure, and many lands are yet to be explored. But, as Lao Tzu says, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a step, and the examples here represent six trips that are well worth taking.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kevin M. Moist

Kevin M. Moist is an Associate Professor of Communications and head of the Communications program at Penn State Altoona, where he teaches courses that focus on media technology, journalism, media history, and popular culture. His research interests include the 1960s counterculture (particularly psychedelic rock music and concert posters), collecting as a cultural practice (especially record collecting), and independent and alternative media. He is currently the research area chair for The Sixties area of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, and is on the editorial board of several scholarly journals, including the Journal of Popular Culture.

Notes

1. The two albums were/are Virgin, from 1969, the group’s second LP, and their self-titled 1970 LP (sometimes called by the name of its first track “Tibet’s Suzettes”). Both have been reissued multiple times, and are currently available in official remastered versions from Peru.

2. Unfortunately the inheritance never arrived, but reissue labels have been increasingly busy and influential over the intervening years. It’s worth mentioning that, especially early on, in some cases those took the form of “unofficial” or pirated releases that existed in a legal and ethical grey area (for both the label and, in a different way, the consumer). Fortunately, over the last decade or so the tide has turned somewhat, and at this point the standard leans more toward official releases – licensed, compensated, remastered, etc. – though their shadier counterparts are still out there.

3. Music scholar Will Straw has argued that enthusiasm for such “lost” musics is driven primarily by the search for novelty, “nourished partly by the thrill with which they seem scandalously counter-canonical”; at the same time though, he does note that listeners’ embrace of them can have the effect of inverting typical patterns of cultural respect, as those instances may seem to “offer more interesting cross-fertilisations of influence than the original, canonical versions” (Straw 2001). The first part of that quotation has always seemed a bit condescending to me, as though expanding musical history and broadening cultural awareness were primarily motivated by scoring “cool points” in some imaginary hipness contest. As for the second part, I understand what he’s getting at, though I’m not sure that’s necessarily the most accurate way to characterize it. The process of wrapping my head around the music of Traffic Sound didn’t lead me to like the Beatles or Santana any less; if anything, it probably helped me to appreciate all three of them even more, through seeing (well, hearing) how similar musical motivations could be channeled and expressed differently in different contexts – more of a transvaluation than a simple inversion.

4. I’m thinking here of the tomes written by author Vernon Joynson, such as A Melange of Musical Pipedreams and Pandemonium, which covers 1960s/1970s rock music from Africa, the Middle East, and the Antipodes, and A Potpourri of Melodies and Mayhem, which includes Latin America and Canada (both published 2017). Those and other similar books have often been the only formal sources to provide any documentation whatsoever both of obscure music scenes within the US and UK, and the many developments outside those centers. The Internet has helped with that situation somewhat, though not as much as one might hope, as websites and blogs often end up recirculating the same unreliable information.

5. As an example, Todd Gitlin’s The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage is both a fascinating first-person-academic account of the decade, and fairly typical of what I’m talking about here.

6. Hall’s essay has been more or less out of circulation since its 1969 book publication (there is an earlier and much shorter “occasional paper” that can be found in incomplete form online as a PDF file, but the 1969 revision is the one to read), which is a shame for a bunch of reasons. For those familiar with Hall’s later work, it is interesting to see a number of his key ideas in more nascent form; for scholars of the 1960s, his analyses of the various threads of countercultural thought remain insightful; and in general the whole piece is just chock full of fascinating observations and enlightening connections. An example, chosen more or less at random: “Instead of taking society from in front, like the campus militants, or burning it, baby, to the ground, like the black ghetto militants, [Hippies] mean to unravel it from within, destroying the rationale, undermining the legitimacy, the social ethic which is the moral cement which holds the whole fabric together” (196). Or this one:1969)

“Thus, much as McLuhan prophesies that through the new electronic media we shall ‘return’ (or go forward?) to the more primitive/more advanced consciousness of the ‘global village’, so Hippies in their own way seek, through drugs and other ‘media’, to go backwards and forwards in consciousness, recovering there worlds lost to technological civilization since industrial capitalism banished the so-called ‘primitive mind’ to the reservations” (188-89).