Garage-psych Originating in the early 1960s,
garage rock was a mainly-American movement that involved
R&B-inspired
garage bands powered by electric guitars and organs. American garage bands retained the rawness and energy of garage rock, while incorporating its use of heavy distortion, feedback, and layered sonic effects into their versions of psychedelic music, which spawned early examples of "acid rock". Bisport and Puterbaugh, who defined acid rock as an intense or raw form of psychedelia, include "garagey" psychedelia under the label of "acid rock" due in part to its "energy and intimation of psychic overload". Exemplary garage-psych acts include
Blues Magoos,
the Electric Prunes, and
the Music Machine. {{listen|pos=right The earliest known use of the terms "
garage punk" or "garage rock" appeared in
Lenny Kaye's track-by-track
liner notes for the 1972 anthology compilation
Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968, to describe a song by
the Shadows of Knight, as "classic garage punk". At the time, the term "
punk rock" referred to the garage rock of the 1960s, with the compilation's liner notes containing one of the earliest known uses of the term. Musicologist
Simon Frith cites
Nuggets, as a showcase for the garage psychedelia of the 1960s, with the compilation epitomizing an overlap between 1960s garage rock and early psychedelia. Bands such as the
Count Five, with their 1966 single "
Psychotic Reaction", contained some of the earliest characteristics that would later come to define acid rock, such as the emphasizing of guitar feedback and distortion over traditional rock instrumentation. Another group included on the
Nuggets album, the 13th Floor Elevators from Austin, Texas, began as a straight garage rock band before becoming one of the original early acid rock bands and pioneers of psychedelic rock in general, with a sound consisting of guitar effects, screeching vocals, and "occasionally demented" lyrics. Their debut album,
The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, featuring the garage rock hit "
You're Gonna Miss Me", was among the earliest psychedelic rock albums. At around the same time, New York City's the Blues Magoos were referring to their wailing garage and blues rock as "psychedelic music", which would also be increasingly labeled "acid rock". Music critic
Lester Bangs writing in 1981 in his essay "Protopunk: The Garage Bands" noted that during the mid-1960s, American
garage rock bands such as the Count Five,
the Seeds,
the Standells, the Music Machine and the Electric Prunes began to draw influences from the early psychedelic music scene: "The next phase of
protopunk coincided with the rise of psychedelia and the fall of folk rock in 1966. Now the garage bands entered their golden age, as new technical developments like fuzztone and the electric 12-string guitar put truly awesome sonic possibilities within the reach of the most limited musicians. What’s more, just about the time they were also discovering acid, all these guys found out about instant ragas: to approximate the sounds of the mystic East, all they had to do was play scales up and down their fretboards".
Distinctions from other psychedelic rock performing in 1967 Acid rock often encompasses the more extreme side of the psychedelic rock genre, frequently containing a loud, improvised, and guitar-centered sound. Alan Bisbort and Parke Puterbaugh write that acid rock "can best be described as psychedelia at its rawest and most intense ...
Bad trips as well as good, riots as well as peace, pain as well as pleasure - the whole spectrum of reality, not just the idyllic bits, were captured by acid rock." "Acid rock" has also been described as more heavily electric and containing more
distortion ("fuzz") than typical psychedelic rock. By the late 1960s, in addition to the deliberate use of distortion and
feedback, acid rock was further characterized by long
guitar solos and the frequent use of
electronic organs. Lyric references to
drug use were also common, as exemplified in Jefferson Airplane's 1967 song "
White Rabbit" and
Jimi Hendrix Experience's 1967 song "
Purple Haze". Lyrical references to drugs such as LSD were often cryptic. At a time when many British psychedelic bands played whimsical or
surrealistic psychedelic rock, many 1960s American rock bands, especially those from the
West Coast, developed a rawer or harder version of psychedelic rock containing garage rock energy. "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" serves a notable example of 1960s and early 1970s acid rock or heavy psychedelia, and the band would continue to experiment with distorted, "fuzzy", heavy psychedelia into the 1970s. Both Iron Butterfly's 1968 album
In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida and Blue Cheer's 1968 album
Vincebus Eruptum have been described as influential in the transition of acid rock into heavy metal. Heavy metal's acid rock origins can further be seen in the loud acid rock of groups such as
Steppenwolf, who contributed their song "
Born to Be Wild" to the
soundtrack of the 1969 film
Easy Rider, which itself glamorized the genre. Ultimately, Steppenwolf and other acid rock groups such as Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and
Led Zeppelin paved the way for the electrified, bluesy sound of early heavy metal. , 1970
Coven is an American
rock band formed in
Chicago in the late 1960s. They had a top 40 hit in 1971 with the song "
One Tin Soldier", the theme song of the movie
Billy Jack. In addition to pioneering
occult rock with lyrics and aesthetics that explicitly dealt in themes of
Satanism and
witchcraft, they are recognized by
metal fans and metal historians as being the band that introduced the "
Sign of the horns" to rock, metal and pop culture, as seen on their 1969 debut album release
Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls. By the early 1970s, bands such as Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and
Black Sabbath combined the loud, raw distortion of acid rock with
occult lyrics, further forming a basis for the genre now known as "heavy metal". At a time when rock music began to turn back to
roots-oriented
soft rock, many acid rock groups instead evolved into heavy metal bands. As its own movement, heavy metal music continued to perpetuate characteristics of acid rock bands into at least the 1980s, and traces of psychedelic rock can be seen in the musical excesses of later metal bands. In the 1990s, the
stoner metal genre combined acid rock with other hard rock genres such as
grunge, updating the heavy riffs and long jams found in the acid rock and psychedelic-influenced metal of bands such as Black Sabbath, Blue Cheer,
Hawkwind, and
Blue Öyster Cult. In addition to hard rock and heavy metal, acid rock also gave rise to the
progressive rock movement. In the 1970s, elements of psychedelic music split into two notable directions, evolving into the hard rock and heavy metal of Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, and Led Zeppelin on one side and into the progressive rock of bands such Pink Floyd and
Yes on the other. Bands such as Yes, Pink Floyd,
King Crimson, and
Emerson, Lake, and Palmer kept the psychedelic musical movement alive for some time, but eventually moved away from drug-themed music towards experiments in electronic music and the addition of
classical music themes into rock music. ==List of artists==