ampfel, which may have been the first documented use of "psychedelic" in a lyric. It wasn't until 1966 that the collision of rock and psychedelic drugs began to result in an exciting new style of popular music. Sparked by the soul-searching that followed his first encounter with LSD, Beach Boy Brian Wilson created the breathtaking Pet Sounds (1966). His rivals in the Beatles responded with Revolver (1966), which included "Tomorrow Never Knows," a song likewise inspired by John Lennon's first profound acid trip. In Austin, Texas, Roky Erickson and his band debuted with an album entitled The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators (1966); its liner notes openly encouraged hallucinogenic experimentation. That year the Rolling Stones scored a hit with the mysterious, Eastern-tinged "Paint It Black." And though they maintained that it was about jet flight, the Los Angeles band the Byrds found their otherworldly single "Eight Miles High" blacklisted by radio programmers across the United States because of its alleged druggy subtext. Many of these musicians spoke openly about using psychedelic drugs. But by 1966, these substances had been written about enough (often in alarmist terms), so that even teenagers in Middle America who'd never consumed anything more potent than a beer thought that they understood the hallucinogenic experience. In noisy, chaotic singles that would represent rock's first golden age of one-hit wonders, a wave of garage bands imitated British Invasion groups such as the Beatles and the Yardbirds, singing about "bad trips" that often involved careening out of control or losing one's mind. In 1972 a sampling of lysergic chart-toppers from the 1960s--such as the Electric Prunes's "I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)," the Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction," the Seeds's "Pushin' Too Hard," and the Amboy Dukes's "Journey to the Center of the Mind"--would be collected by rock critic Lenny Kaye on an album called Nugget...
