Turn on Your Mind: Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock

TURN ON YOUR MIND is a history and critical examination of rock's most inventive genre. Whether or not psychedelic drugs played a role (and as many musicians say they've used them as not), psychedelic rock has consistently charted brave new worlds that exist only in the space between the headphones. The history books tell us the music's high point was the Haight-Ashbury scene of 1967, but the genre didn't start in San Francisco, and its evolution didn't end in the Summer of Love. A line can be drawn from the hypnotic drones of the Velvet Underground to the disorienting swirl of My Bloody Valentine; from the artful experiments of the Beatles' Revolver to the flowing, otherworldly samples of rappers P.M. Dawn; from the dementia of the 13th Floor Elevators to the grungy lunacy of the Flaming Lips, and from the sounds and sights at Ken Kesey's '60s Acid Tests to those at present-day raves. TURN ON YOUR MIND is an attempt to connect the dots from the very first groups who turned on, tuned, in, and dropped out, to such new-millennial practitioners as the Elephant 6 bands, Moby, the Super Furry Animals, and the so-called "stoner-rock" and "ork-pop" scenes. Jim DeRogatis is the pop music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times and a contributor to Spin, GQ, Penthouse, Guitar World, Modern Drummer, and Salon, among other publications. Together with the Chicago Tribune's Greg Kot--Siskel to his Ebert--he co-hosts "Sound Opinions, " the world's only rock 'n' roll talk show, on WXRT-FM. He is the author of LET IT BLURT: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic, which was published to considerable acclaim in the summer of 2000. He is working on an anthology of his work, MILK IT!:Collected Musings on the Alternative Explosion & The Music of the '90s, which will also be published in the spring of 2003.

Turn On Your Mind Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock is a history and critical inventive genre. Whether or not psychedelic drugs played a role (and as many musicians say they've used them as not), psychedelic rock has consistently charted brave new worlds that exist only in the space between the headphones. The history books tell us the music's high point was the Haight-Ashbury scene of 1967, but the genre didn't start in San Francisco, and its evolution didn't end in the Summer of Love. A line can be drawn from the hypnotic drones of the Velvet Underground to the disorienting swirl of My Bloody Valentine; from the artful experiments of the Beatles' Revolver to the flowing, otherworldly samples of rappers P.M. Dawn; from the dementia of the 13th Floor Elevators to the grungy lunacy of the Flaming Lips, and from the sounds and sights at Keney's '60s Acid Tests to those at present-day raves. Turn On Your Mind is an attempt to connect the dots from the very first groups who turned on, tuned in and dropped out, to such new-millennial practitioners as the Elephant 6 bands, Moby, the Super Furry Animals, and the so-called "stoner-rock" and "ork-pop" scenes.