n London (1967) and the Rolling Stones documentary Charlie Is My Darling (1966). "The zeitgeist of the time was the final collapse of a certain kind of thinking. The seeds were sown for feminism, for the whole notion of cyberspace, ecology, and the whole philosophy of Gaia." Suzy Hopkins, formerly Suzy Creamcheese, a dancer and inspirational figure on the underground scene in Los Angeles and London, remembers the visceral way psychedelic culture affected the senses. "There's a difference between a drug and a psychedelic. Drugs make you drugged and psychedelics enhance your ability to see the truth or reality," she says. For her, LSD and music created a kind of alchemy. "When I start to dance, at a certain point, the dance takes over and the music is dancing me. Dancing is this electric enhancement of your spine by sound." Many psychedelic bands explored this sense of abandonment in their music, moving away from standard rock rhythms and instrumentation. The Grateful Dead of San Francisco, for instance, created an improvisatory mix of country rock, blues, and acid R&B on albums like The Grateful Dead (1967) and Anthem of the Sun (1968), while another 'Frisco band, Jefferson Airplane (fronted by the striking vocalist Grace Slick), sang of the childlike hallucinatory delights of an acid trip in the 1967 Top Ten hit "White Rabbit." In Los Angeles the multiracial band Love played whimsical, free-flowing rock, fueled by the unique vision of their troubled frontman Arthur Lee. A typically eccentric line from their third album, Forever Changes (1968), satirizes hippie dinginess: "The snot has caked against my pants." Also from Los Angeles, the Byrds plowed a different furrow, creating a jangly psychedelic folk augmented by rich vocal harmonies and orchestration. With such hits as "Eight Miles High" and their cover of Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man," they, along with the brooding intensity of the Doors, were among the most commercially successf...
