When we “turn off our minds, relax, and float” back to the late 1960s, our mental timeline is filled with vibrant colour and sound. Although many cultural figures represent this optimistic epoch, I always envisage the bold album artwork that The Beatles created for their quintessential psychedelic rock release, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Indeed, The Beatles are the biggest band of all time and the leading proponents of psychedelic rock. But did they start the movement?
Depending on whom you ask, the emergence of psychedelic rock is attributed to different musicians. By some definitions, The Byrds’ March 1966 single ‘Eight Miles High’ was the first psych-rock song. Others trace the genre back two months earlier to ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’, the debut single of Texas band The 13th Floor Elevators. These are valid suggestions, but were these bands not inspired by The Beatles’ work of the previous year?
The Beatles’ 1965 album Rubber Soul inspired both The Byrds and The 13th Floor Elevators. The album was a revolutionary work in the band’s discography as an embrace of folk-rock and contained traces of substances that would later define the psychedelic rock wave. Specifically, many musicologists consider ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’ to be the very first psychedelic rock song. However, Bob Dylan, who claimed John Lennon ripped off his style in the song, would claim otherwise.
Whatever your opinion, it is impossible to disregard The Beatles’ hand in shaping psychedelic rock. When the subgenre reached its peak in 1967 and ’68, scores of artists across the Western Hemisphere followed in the Fab Four’s footsteps, using Eastern and orchestral instrumentation and progressive production methods to elevate their music. Below, we list the five best psychedelic anthems by The Beatles.
The best Beatles psychedelic anthems:
‘Tomorrow Never Knows’
“Turn off your mind / Relax, and float downstream / It is not dying,” John Lennon wrote at the beginning of his first truly psychedelic masterpiece. Flecks of psychedelic rock appeared in Rubber Soul in 1965, but The Beatles’ first psych-rock record was the following year’s Revolver. While other songs on the album are obscure and transcendent, this innovative closer revolutionised rock music.
The song features Indian-inspired modal backing of tambura and sitar drone and some cutting-edge tape loop effects to boot. If that wasn’t enough to earn this song a spot on this list, in the lyrics, Lennon drew inspiration from his recent first-hand experiences with LDS and the famous 1964 book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’
The Beatles were admirably open about their LSD use in an age when such antics alienated cast portions of the Western demographic. Although Lennon admitted to the acid references in ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, he always vehemently denied that ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ connoted the LSD initialism in its titular refrain. “It never was [about LSD], and no one believes me,” Lennon said during his televised interview with Dick Cavett.
Fans are dubious about Lennon’s statement because the song is packed with bizarre, dreamlike imagery and contains the line, “A girl with kaleidoscope eyes.” Lennon insisted that the song was inspired by a drawing his son, Julian, once handed him of a girl called Lucy flying in the sky with diamonds surrounding her. Either way, the song has since become one of the most famous LSD anthems of the hippie era.
‘Strawberry Fields Forever’
‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, another song primarily attributed to Lennon, arrived as a single in February 1967. By this point, the psychedelic rock wave was well underway, and artists like Jimi Hendrix and Eric were poised to make their mark. In this beautiful song, Lennon returns to a place from his childhood in a warping dreamscape as he sings, “Nothing is real.” Instrumentally, it benefits pivotally from McCartney’s mellotron contributions and some inspired orchestration from George Martin.
The Beatles and The Beach Boys engaged in a friendly rivalry throughout the psychedelic era. Lennon and McCartney considered Pet Sounds a major threat, but Brian Wilson appeared to surrender with the arrival of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ in 1967. “I was on one of those pills, downers, and I was really relaxed, and when ‘Strawberry Fields’ came on the radio, I locked in with it,” Wilson once recalled. “I had to pull over in my car to the side, and I said, ‘I’ve never heard anything like this in my life.’”
‘A Day in the Life’
Arriving at the very end of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, ‘A Day in the Life’ is not only one of The Beatle’s finest psychedelic era songs but also a strong competitor for their best overall song. The five-and-a-half-minute track is a compositional marvel patched together using songwriting ideas from both Lennon and McCartney, both exhibiting the nuances of their associative styles perfectly.
In his sections, including the introductory chapter, Lennon used newspaper articles to inspire his confounding, Beat Generation-tinged narrative. Some claimed that his line, “I’d love to turn you on,” was a reference to drugs, which resulted in the song’s ban from the BBC airwaves. After the famous orchestral crescendo, McCarrtney’s section is notably more optimistic and energetic as he recalls his daily routine as a young man.
‘I Am the Walrus’
If The Beatles’ more conservative fans were a little unsure about the band’s early psychedelic musings when they heard the lyrics from ‘I Am the Walrus’, they may have called for Lennon to be sectioned. Though the lyrics are mostly symbolic, Lennon admitted to writing the song to intentionally confound his listeners. After all, isn’t that what psychedelia is all about?
While the lyrics were somewhat tongue-in-cheek, The Beatles and producer George Martin took no half-measures. ‘I Am the Walrus’ is yet another compositional masterpiece, with double-tracked vocals, unconventional chord progressions, string orchestration and tape recordings from a BBC radio airing of William Shakespeare’s King Lear.
