(Credits: Far Out / Press)
Sat 27 September 2025 22:00, UK
The psychedelic movement in America might appear like an innovative time in music, and while it was, the likes of Pink Floyd and various other bands likely wouldn’t have been given a platform were it not for political unrest.
Towards the back end of the ‘60s, politics were all over the place, and the differing opinions in different generations were apparent. Following the assassinations of multiple political leaders, growing tension surrounding the Vietnam War, and gaps in society persistently widening, it was hard for bands to release music without it being deemed political.
Record labels wanted to try and appeal to as many listeners as they could, which meant moving away from music which could be deemed as political, and instead embracing the new experimental style that was being put forward by psychedelic bands. While this worked well for record labels, it was also representative of a questionable time for a lot of psychedelic music, as it was still finding its feet as a genre.
Jimi Hendrix admitted that he wasn’t exactly a fucking fan of Pink Floyd because he felt they were all style over substance. His comments are reminiscent of a lot of people when exposed to psychedelic music for the first time.
“Here’s one thing I hate, man,” said Hendrix. “When these cats say, ‘Look at the band. They’re playing psychedelic music!’ All they’re doing is flashing lights on them and playing ‘Johnny B. Goode’ with the wrong chords. It’s terrible.” When speaking specifically about Pink Floyd, Hendrix said, “I’ve heard they have beautiful lights, but they don’t sound like nothing.”
While some Pink Floyd fans might disagree with this assessment, Roger Waters also said that he wasn’t a fan of Piper At The Gates Dawn because he felt that the band were trying to be goddamn experimental for the sake of being experimental. “I don’t want to go back to those times at all,” he said while discussing Piper at the Gates of Dawn and how there wasn’t much of an idea behind what the band were making. “There wasn’t anything ‘grand’ about it’. We were laughable. We were useless. We couldn’t play at all, so we had to do something stupid and ‘experimental’.”
When John Fogerty was talking about the psychedelic bands he liked listening to, he criticised some because he felt they were too fucking self-indulgent. Once again, this all plays into the idea that a lot of bands were trying too hard to sound out there and experimental rather than actually keeping the quality of the song at the goddamn heart of what they did.
Fogerty always wanted to focus on making good songs and focus on the hits, which he didn’t think a lot of psychedelic bands did. “A young James Brown would come out and play 14 hits in a row, all while dancing and creating mayhem,” he said. “I thought that was the way to go.”
There was one psychedelic jam band which he was a big fan of, though, and that was the Allman Brothers. “That seems honest to me,” he concluded. “I know that in listening to psychedelic music, there were times that I felt that the attention had wandered off somewhere, and that did not happen in the Allman Brothers’ music. I’m a big fan.”
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