Published in Penthouse, August 1967

Sergeant Pepper’s Dance | Now that everybody’s wearing rings on their fingers and bells on their toes, twining flowers in their hair and painting the town DayGlo, now that the underground has risen, here and in America the hippies and the flower children are celebrating, all to the tune of their special music.

Psychedelic music is sensual, anarchic and, most of all, environmental. It is non-linear, proceeds not from a beginning to an end, but happens in a continuous electronic now that must be surrendered to, whether it bombards or caresses you, or finally steps right up and blows your mind. And in these sunny days of the love generation, it is our tribal music.

Happily, Sergeant Pepper is leading the dance. Further and further out, accidental, quirky, slangy, sweet and tangy, the Beatles have always been there, picking up all the vibrations around them and changing the consciousness of the generation.

Says George Harrison: “We are as much influenced by everyone else as they are by us, if they are. It’s just all part of the big thing. I give to you and you give to me and it all goes like that into the music you know.”

Part of the music, Harrison’s music most of all, is the reception of the classical music of India into the permissive forms of English-speaking rock ‘n’ roll. Which is why it is not fanciful to understand, or at least catch at, the endless self-accelerating mysteries of the sitar and the sarod as psychedelic. The awareness of the miracle of being a person living in the world, and the possibility of loving harmony, which is the psychedelic experience, is a simple discovery, accepted unconsciously in the Indian way of living and dying, religiously. That is what Ravi Shankar and All Akbar Khan are playing, and what the faithful chanting a mantra are saying.

In England, most of the acid rock and the lightshows that contribute to the creation of a psychedelic environment are brutal, almost prehistoric. Groups like the Who, Pink Floyd, the Cream and those in their wake—depending on freaky feedback sound, experimenting with weird shattered electronics—are getting into bewildering, manic, cellular music. There is not, so far, anything like the orgiastic thunder and lightning that sets all the walls, the floor and the ceiling leaping and dancing in the Fillmore Auditorium or the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco when groups like the Grateful Dead or Big Brother and the Holding Company come out to play.

Nor is there in England the gentler side of psychedelic, the love rock of the Jefferson Airplane or the funky, funny music of another San Francisco group, Country Joe and the Fish, though the Soft Machine and Denny Laine here are making passes at it. It may be partly because no groups here have a girl to give them sugar and spice. In America, the loving, almost baroque sound of Judy Collins, making use of classical harmonies, makes the histrionics of, say, Barbra Streisand sound like high camp.

All the special alchemy of contemporary “classical” music that proceeds from the same dilemmas as popular music has been accepted frankly by the Beatles, and in a less conscious, joky way in the rhythm-and-blues of Jimi Hendrix. In London, classical musicians, hip to the changes, are developing their own sparse psychedelic sounds, notably duet guitarists Tim Walker and Sebastian Jorgensen (with Rosemary). And the union has been most brilliant in the full-length rock ‘n’ roll oratorio, with electrified brass, extravagant percussion, full orchestra and a respectful familiarity with the lost pop of the ’50s, called Absolutely free, the work of America’s most liberated group, the Mothers of Invention.

None of it is anything to be afraid of, but something to make everybody happy.