A new set of tools
When people describe the sound of 1967, they often name drugs first, but the music itself was shaped by equipment and technique. Studios in London and California contained tape machines, microphones, amplifiers and a few unusual instruments, and musicians started treating them as creative tools rather than simply as ways of capturing a performance. This article looks at the methods rather than the drugs.
Tape tricks
Tape was the most flexible medium. Engineers could reverse a reel, change its speed, cut it and splice it. The Beatles had experimented before 1967: reversed guitar and vocals appeared on “Rain”, the B-side of a 1966 single, and tape loops, speed changes and processed vocals featured on “Tomorrow Never Knows”, closing the Revolver album later that year.
At Abbey Road, an automatic double tracking system devised by engineers for the Beatles in 1966 created a thickened vocal sound by electronically delaying a copy of the signal, saving time that would otherwise be spent singing a part twice. With machines that offered only four tracks, producers also “bounced” several tracks onto one in order to free space for more layers, though each bounce lost some sound quality.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released in Britain on 1 June 1967, used these methods extensively. The orchestral crescendos in “A Day in the Life” were produced by asking a group of orchestral players to rise gradually through their range, and the final piano chord was allowed to ring on and on. The album is often cited as a landmark of studio practice, though it was one of several records exploring the same ideas.
Sitar and other borrowed sounds
Indian music became an important influence. George Harrison played sitar on “Norwegian Wood” in 1965 and studied with Ravi Shankar, and “Within You Without You” on Sgt. Pepper used Indian musicians, with no other Beatles taking part. Other groups added sitars, tablas and drones to their own songs, sometimes with good understanding and sometimes only as a fashionable sound.
Other “borrowed” instruments included the harpsichord, brass and string arrangements, and the Mellotron, a keyboard that played back recorded tape for each key. Its flute-like sounds opened “Strawberry Fields Forever”, recorded in late 1966 and released in February 1967, and it became a signature of the period. The Moody Blues built much of their late-1967 album Days of Future Passed around the instrument and an orchestra.
Feedback, distortion and volume
Guitarists took a different approach. Feedback, the howling that happens when an amplifier’s sound re-enters a guitar’s pickup, had been used by a few musicians earlier in the 1960s, notably the Beatles on “I Feel Fine” and the Who. In 1967 it became a controlled instrument. Jimi Hendrix could shape feedback, distortion and effects pedals into long, expressive lines, and his debut album Are You Experienced showed what the approach could sound like.
Cream, the Jefferson Airplane and the Velvet Underground each used loudness and distortion in their own ways. In the Velvet Underground’s case, noise was deliberately unsettling rather than blissful, which is a reminder that psychedelia was never one sound.
Improvisation and long forms
On stage, bands were expected to stretch out. The Grateful Dead, Cream and many San Francisco groups turned songs into extended improvisations, sometimes lasting well beyond the length of a radio single. The dance halls, with their light shows, were suited to long pieces, since an audience was dancing rather than waiting for the next hit.
On records, these ideas were harder to fit, because vinyl and radio both pushed toward brevity. Some bands recorded long tracks anyway, and free-form FM radio gave them a place to be heard.
Pink Floyd as an example
Pink Floyd, working at Abbey Road at the same time as the Beatles, showed how a British band could combine the studio with live experiment. Their first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, was released in August 1967. It was dominated by Syd Barrett’s songwriting, with whimsical lyrics and unusual guitar sounds, and it also contained instrumental passages in which the band stretched out and used echo and feedback. Singles such as “Arnold Layne” (March 1967) and “See Emily Play” (June 1967) were more compact and brought the band to a wider audience.
The group’s concerts used liquid light projections, linking their sound to the visual experiments of the time.
Reading the results
It is easy to overstate the connection between a technique and a drug experience. Many of these effects were the products of patient work by engineers and musicians, often in sober conditions. What 1967 provided was a combination of increasingly capable machines, studios willing to allow experiments, and an audience that was curious about unusual sounds.
The result was lasting. Later recordings in many genres used the habit of treating the studio as an instrument, and the idea of the album as a crafted object became widespread.