Gavin B.

The release date of the Psychedelic Sounds of 13th Floor Elevators is in dispute as I pointed out on the list, but it's very close (maybe even earlier) to the release date of The Deep's Psychedelic Moods, which I've heard and love. The March release of Eight Miles High by the Byrds is my own choice because it was the first song that attempted to depict the subjective experience of what taking LSD was like.

The word psychedelic was already a part of the medical nomenclature in 1966 and was first coined in 1957 by psychiatrist Humphrey Osmund as a medical descriptor for psychotherapy involving the use of hallucinogenic drugs. Osmond consulted Aldous Huxley. Huxley suggested the term "phanerothyme," from the Greek terms for "to show" and "spirit." In a letter to Osmond, he wrote:

To make this mundane world sublime,
Take half a gram of phanerothyme

To which Osmond responded:

To fathom Hell or soar angelic,
Just take a pinch of psychedelic

By 1965, a Harvard professor, Timothy Leary became a well known evangelist for LSD use and he's credited with bringing term psychedelic into popular usage. I was a kid back in 1965 but my father, who was in the music business, frequently used the term psychedelic describe both a state of mind and a specific kind of music played by the Leaves, the Seeds & Love, three unsigned Los Angeles bands band he first heard at Sunset Strip clubs when he visited Los Angeles late in 1965.

From my perspective, being the band that first used of the word psychedelic in an album or song title doesn't necessarily establish bragging rights to being the band that recorded first psychedelic song. In Part II of my Psychedelic Chronicles, there will be more information on the central role played by Ken Kesey & Owsley Stanley in introducing the word psychedelic into the pop music vocabulary.