Psychedelia and Dylan
Mr Jinx
It is curious but I feel that psychedelia and Dylan never really shook
hands. Dylan played with absurdist and surreal imagery but somehow
never succumbed to the psychedelic ethic.
Of course this begs the question what is psychedelia? A sound? A
movement? An ideal?
A expansion of the the mind is one way of defining psychedelia. Dylan
certainly expanded minds ... but was he truly psychedelic? Or did his
mind-expansion come from somewhere else?
Mr Jinx
crazytimes
> It is curious but I feel that psychedelia and Dylan never really shook
> hands. Dylan played with absurdist and surreal imagery but somehow
> never succumbed to the psychedelic ethic.
Yeah, the great loss from the motorcycle wreck - aside from the
possible loss of recording and footage from Dylan's 1966 Summer US
tour - is the direction Dylan was going and the 1967 (or late 1966)
album that may have resulted out of the tour madness... I'd think
that Dylan would've got sucked into the '67 Summer of Acid vortex
along with everyone else to some degree, sporting a Sgt. Pepper
mustache and wearing psychedelic scarves and sharing drinks with
Hendrix at the Whiskey a Go Go... Dylan would probably have split
time between family man and roving gambler... His music?... Maybe
some recordings might have gotten some extra treatment - a horn
section here and there, a harpsichord section and chimes, Brian Jones
on something or another, and maybe some wah and some more fuzztone...
At that point in Dylan's electric phase, however, the psychedelics was
all in the lyrics, the delivery, and in some of the brain cells...
> A expansion of the the mind is one way of defining psychedelia. Dylan
> certainly expanded minds ... but was he truly psychedelic?
He's a psychedelic music pioneer...
Upbeat & Cheerful Martin
> I'd think
> that Dylan would've got sucked into the '67 Summer of Acid vortex
> along with everyone else to some degree, sporting a Sgt. Pepper
> mustache and wearing psychedelic scarves and sharing drinks with
> Hendrix at the Whiskey a Go Go...
Really? Ugh, what an unpleasant thought. His decision to completely
isolate himself from the Summer Of Love seems completely in keeping
with everything up to that point. I can't imagine things being that
different had the crash not happened. He probably would have crashed
in some way, and still had the hiatus from publicity and change of
direction. I tend to think that his lifestyle and his material in
1965-66 were interdependent, and it could only go on for so long. I
don't think it's an accident that all the Basement Tapes and JWH songs
came in such a short space of time - they're a logical antidote to
songs like Sad Eyed Lady and She's Your Lover Now, which I think he
may have been getting a little weary of even at the time of the crash
really real
was) to psychedelia and he created some damn fine psychedelia. Songs
like The Trip, for instance. Actually, it was back in his folk days when
he created that jazzy masterpiece, Sunny Goodge Street, complete with a
violent hash smoker.
Mr Jinx
Yes, but there isn't a chocolate machine on Goodge Street station.
That was a horrible Donovan psychedelic lie.
Mr Jinx
crazytimes
<martingayf...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> On Nov 7, 12:48 pm, crazytimes <crazytime...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > I'd think
> > that Dylan would've got sucked into the '67 Summer of Acid vortex
> > along with everyone else to some degree, sporting a Sgt. Pepper
> > mustache and wearing psychedelic scarves and sharing drinks with
> > Hendrix at the Whiskey a Go Go...
>
> Really? Ugh, what an unpleasant thought. His decision to completely
> isolate himself from the Summer Of Love seems completely in keeping
> with everything up to that point. I can't imagine things being that
> different had the crash not happened.
You can always go country, but you can't always go a Whiskey go-go
with Jimi (Cafe Au GoGo notwithstanding)...
really real
>
> Yes, but there isn't a chocolate machine on Goodge Street station.
> That was a horrible Donovan psychedelic lie.
There was a chocolate machine there but they never replaced it after it
was attacked by the violent hash smoker
Just Walkin'
I tend to agree. The crash to me seems to be only a pretext to take
himself out of the public eye for awhile. Bob clearly didn't care much
for the direction the culture was heading at that time and didn't want
the blood of innocent kids furtively storming the barricades on his
hands. Hence he recused himself from the proceedings and took a hiatus
in the West Saugerties where he perfected his craft of writing
timeless songs of lasting value rather than the topical songs upon
which he launched his career. I believe HWY61 Revisited and Blonde On
Blonde were his parting shots at the screwed up (and heavily
infiltrated) culture of dehumanization that was emerging at the time
and that JWH and the basement tapes were his first attempts at "new
songs" that would pass beneath everyones' radar, get the man and the
monkey off his back and still communicate to the rest of us the values
he cares about most.
Truth be told, "Delia" needed no "psyche" to get her fire going.
rwalker
<martin...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>On Nov 7, 12:48�pm, crazytimes <crazytime...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> I'd think
>> that Dylan would've got sucked into the '67 Summer of Acid vortex
>> along with everyone else to some degree, sporting a Sgt. Pepper
>> mustache and wearing psychedelic scarves and sharing drinks with
>> Hendrix at the Whiskey a Go Go... �
>
>Really? Ugh, what an unpleasant thought
As if that would be worse than Victoria's Secret and Cadillac ads?
marcus
Legend has it that he hated "Pepper".
Ron Fowler
Jumbo
> Psycadelic Bob's response to "Sgt. Pepper" might've been "Dr. Salt" :)
As Mr J said, it's not really clear what "psychedelia" means as a
genre. Obviously, creating a hallucinogenic mood is involved. But
Dylan's lyrics could be said to do that from as early as Hard Rain.
IMO(ov), it seems - in its best forms - to be about using the studio
as an instrument to create a sound-world that fills an album (or even
a single recording). In which case, Love & Theft could be taken as
*Bob's* "response" to Sgt Pepper and so on...
