There is no chicken and egg dilemma when discussing which came first, psychedelic music, or psychedelic art & fashion (of course, we can add psychedelic-influenced filmmaking there). It was psychedelic drugs, particularly LSD, that started the whole thing.

As BBC Culture wrote about one of the connected themes, “When you think of LSD, a very specific aesthetic probably leaps to mind: the psychedelic pink-and-orange swirls of the ’60s; naked people with flowers in their hair; the shimmer of a sitar.”

The term “psychedelic” (coined by British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in 1956) comes from the ancient Greek words for “mind-revealing.” Psychedelics, such as LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, DMT, mescaline, and peyote cactus, can induce sensory distortions, hallucinations and various other sensory effects that were also dubbed as ‘mind-bending.’

As they add, “the drug’s after-effects have seeped through much of Western culture, from art to literature to, most obviously, music, which was never the same after Bob Dylan, The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix dropped acid. Whole genres have since flagged their debt to mind-altering substances: psychedelic rock, psytrance, acid house… the latter hailing from that other spike in psych: ’80s and ’90s rave culture.”

Psych-Rock Didn’t Come First – Visual Artists Did It

While psychedelic rock didn’t come first, it seems that it was the influence of psych that left the strongest and the most prolonged effect on music, as…