WHITE RABBIT
JEFFERSON AIRPLANE (1967)

You would expect a song that so explicitly references Lewis Carroll's Alice stories to be a wistful, rather twee track recorded by a fey British psych outfit, but the lyrical imagery that peppers Grace Slick's classic bolero is altogether darker, more sinister and undeniably West Coast.
Written by Slick while she was in the Great Society 'White Rabbit' was the track that persuaded the San Franciscan Airplane to recruit the former model as their second lead singer. She has stated that the song was a scathing attack on parents who failed to see the link between surreal children's stories and their little darlings's later drug use, although since it's appearance in the Vietnam movie 'Platoon' it has become shorthand for the acid fuelled nightmare that the troops in that conflict endured.
The martial rhythm of the song reinforces those bellicose associations, building insistently from tightly controlled menace through a frenetic, paranoid middle section to a climactic wailed invocation to 'feed your head' (which is not, in actual fact, a direct quote from Wonderland's Dormouse).
For many the ultimate hippy anthem 'White Rabbit' is the perfectly distilled embodiment of a hallucenogenic trip, veering from anxiety and paranoia to euphoria with red queens and hookah-smoking caterpillars popping up at regular intervals.

SUNSHINE OF YOUR LOVE
CREAM (1967)

Supergroups are rarely a good idea but the bringing together of former Bluesbreakers Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton with Ginger Baker, who wielded the sticks for the Graham Bond Organisation alongside Bruce, was inspired. These performers were true craftsmen, steeped in the blues and pushing rock's envelope with increasingly heavy sounds. Their virtuoso live jamming had an immense influence on Led Zep and the Grateful Dead as well as numerous prog rock acts of the early seventies. But we can't hold that against them.
'Sunshine of Your Love' is built around a monumental guitar riff and a killer Clapton solo which starts off as 'Blue Moon' and swiftly transmutes into an atonal squall. The lyrics were dreamed up by the poet Pete Brown and fit perfectly with the prevailing psychedelic mood of the day; even if the mention of sunshine does seem somewhat at odds with the song's relentless pounding beat.
Whilst they were too blues oriented to fully embrace flower power 'Disraeli Gears,' the album on which 'Sunshine...' sits, is often described as British rock's great leap forward. It is as good a marriage of psychedelia and blues as any UK band has produced and in that respect can be seen as the culmination of British RnB's journey into the mainstream. And, despite many other great compositions, 'Sunshine of Your Love' remains the band's most popular and defining track.

STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER
THE BEATLES (1967)

By the end of 1966 rock music was moving like an express train through popular culture. The Beatles' 'Rubber Soul' had been answered by the Beach Boys' 'Pet Sounds' which was in turn countered by the Fab Four's 'Revolver.' The gauntlet had been thrown down to any self-respecting group to produce ever more elaborate and unexpected compositions.
'Strawberry Fields Forever' is possibly the apex of that kitchen sink philosophy. A technical marvel, it incorporates tape loops and overdubs as well as mellotron and the Indian swarmandel. It sounds warped and dislocated yet poignant and warm. It is, in short, one of the greatest tracks ever recorded.
Strawberry Field was the Salvation Army Children's Home in Lennon's boyhood home of Woolton and the strong element of nostalgia that courses through the song lays down the tenet of dreamy wistfulness that separates British psychedelia from it's American counterpart. It is also an exploration of what made Lennon Lennon: 'no-one I think is in my tree' being a reference to his unique creative ability and worldview.
As well as being a meditation on youth and genius it is also, of course, saturated in drugs. LSD had begun to infiltrate the Fab Four's camp and the results established a new artistic high for the rapidly developing world of rock. Despite the record's lofty status 'Strawberry Fields...' (backed as a double A-side with McCartney's 'Penny Lane') did the unthinkable and only reached number 2 in the charts, behind Englebert Humperdinck's grandiose ballad 'Release Me'. Posterity has decided which is the real winner.

GOOD VIBRATIONS
THE BEACH BOYS (1966)

In 1966 Brian Wilson and Bob Dylan were the only real rivals to the hallowed Lennon-McCartney partnership and it is this record more than any other that cements the damaged Californian's reputation as symphonic pop auteur par excellence.
Pet Sounds, with its stunningly orchestrated and harmonic meditations on love and loss, had more than answered the Beatles' Rubber Soul and Wilson was scratching around obsessively for the follow-up; something more spectacular, profound and emotive, the piece of music that would definitively place him on a higher plain than his scouse counterparts.
Amazingly, it was a feat which he achieved, albeit temporarily. The recording of Good Vibrations was breathtakingly complex for the time, separate sections were recorded at different studios and various rough mixes and seemingly random effects edited together afterwards. Had this happened a year or so later, when Wilson's mental state was so fractious and warped, the result would have been an aimless and unfocussed mess. But at this moment in time Wilson was so driven by being the best that the perfectionism reaped enormous rewards. Everything about the track is inspired from the spooky theremin of the chorus to the chugging rhythm of a cello and the sheer audacity of packing so many musical sections and moods into one song. It truly is, as Wilson's publicist Derek Taylor asserted, 'a pocket symphony.'
Of course it was all too good to last. The praise lavished on him filled the song's composer with crippling terror that it was all downhill from here on. Which, sadly, it was; the interminable, increasingly demented sessions for Pet Sounds follow up Smile, the drug induced breakdowns, the shameless exploitation of a musical genius by his venal family and bandmates. But there will always be Good Vibrations, shining, shimmering and exploding through radios and Ipods till the end of time.

EIGHT MILES HIGH
THE BYRDS (1966)

The Beatles generally get the credit for inventing just about every subgenre of rock going but California's Byrds can lay claim to creating jangle pop, folk rock, country rock and, with 'Eight Miles High,' psychedelia. For all 'Happening Ten Years Time Ago's weirdness it is still more quirky than mind-blowing; 'Eight Miles High' is pretty much the distance skywards the record sends your head.
Taken at face value the song merely recounts a plane journey the band took at the start of their UK tour, but the spindly, raga-tinged opening chords tell an altogether more mystical tale. McGuinn's guitar intro was based upon the work of legendary saxophonist John Coltrane, specifically his 1961 recording of 'India,' and that freeform jazz style is the blueprint for this otherworldly, lysergically spiritual music.
Throughout the psychedelic movement it's US variant would retain the explosive and chaotic soundscapes forged by 'Eight Miles High.' Jefferson Airplane or Quicksilver Messenger Service are unthinkable without it and the burgeoning moral uncertainty of American life found it's aural equivalent in the dark, unpredictable licks that the Byrds pioneered.

HAPPENINGS TEN YEARS TIME AGO

THE YARDBIRDS (1966)

The devil may have all the best tunes but from the early to the mid-sixties the Yardbirds had all the best guitarists. Clapton, Beck and Page all passed through the band on their way to bigger (though not necessarily better) things and this parade of talent combined with a sense of reckless experimentalism to produce a string of innovative singles. None more so than the extraordinary 'Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.' One of the few tracks the group recorded while both Beck and Page were in the line-up it prefigured British psychedelia by several months, effectively ushering in an age of spaced-out lyrics and guitar freakouts. On twin lead guitars the two superstars do pitched battle while Keith Relf's fey vocals float over the top, gabbling none too convincingly about reincarnation. Just to add to the bizarro mix a cockney monologue starts up towards the end of the song, supposedly modelled on the ramblings of a doctor at a VD clinic Beck went to. Unsurprisingly in these pre-Sgt. Pepper times the single didn't even make the top forty, a cast iron example of a song way ahead of its time. Within months every motley group of macho, beer swilling lads would kill for the hippy, trippy sound so brilliantly encapsulated by 'Happenings...'

THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE

SIMON AND GARFUNKEL (1965)

Folk music had always been protest music since before the dustbowl polemics of Woody Guthrie. As the sixties shaped up to blow our minds Bob Dylan had inherited the mantle with excoriating diatribes against war, politics and the class and generational divides.

But Simon and Garfunkel's first big hit was something altogether different. Dylan was a poet no question, but there was a ragged, raw quality to his sentiments that was not shared by the two smart troubadors from New York. The Sound of Silence wasn't just intellectual, it was real and perceptive; a sober slice of social comment for a country, and a world, drenched in paranoia and injustice.

Paul Simon originally wrote the song in 1964 after the assassination of JFK, that pivotal event in twentieth century US history which came close to breaking the spirit of a nation. An acoustic version was included on the duo's patchy debut album 'Wednesday Morning 3am,' which stiffed resulting in Paul and Art going their separate ways. The song resurfaced in Simon's solo shows but it was the intervention of Columbia's Tom Wilson that saved the track from obscurity, overdubbing electric guitar, bass and drums without the band's knowledge or permission and re-releasing it as a single.

Whatever the ethics of the decision Wilson's chutzpah paid off in spectacular style. Simon and Garfunkel reformed and the single climbed the charts to become the first number one of 1966. They may have had bigger hits since but The Sound of Silence is the finest example of Paul Simon's devastatingly artful songwriting and one of the most prescient and haunting records of the sixties.