Hicks — Sixties Rock

Author: Michael Hicks
Title: Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions
Year: 1999
Type: Academic book (University of Illinois Press)

Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions is a book by the musicologist and composer Michael Hicks, published by the University of Illinois Press in its Music in American Life series in 1999. Hicks calls it seven interrelated essays that form an “angular portrait” of the music, beginning with the distorted voices and guitars of garage and psychedelic rock and going on to ask what the words “garage” and “psychedelic” actually name in the music. It defines psychedelic music through three effects of LSD, dechronicization, depersonalization and dynamization, and holds that truly psychedelic music mimics them. Its publisher presents it as a study of mid-1960s rock musicians who, unlike their rock ‘n’ roll predecessors, came to consider themselves artists. The publisher’s page carries endorsements from Robert Walser and Charles Hamm, and the book was reviewed in Choice, Labour/Le Travail, Ethnomusicology and Notes.

Hicks, a composer and professor of music at Brigham Young University, published the book with the University of Illinois Press in 1999, and a paperback followed in August 2000.¹

In the preface Hicks calls the book “a collection of seven interrelated essays that, taken together, form an angular portrait of the music.” It begins with “the sonic foundations of the music,” the “distorted” voices and guitars, and asks, “How did the superficially coarse singing actually enliven the music?” and why electric guitarists tried to make their equipment sound broken. It then turns to the adjectives “garage” and “psychedelic,” asking what musical traits the word “garage” names and what, precisely, ties the drugs to the music.²

To understand what makes music stylistically psychedelic, Hicks writes, “one should consider three fundamental effects of LSD: dechronicization, depersonalization, and dynamization.” Dechronicization lets the user move outside conventional perceptions of time, depersonalization lets the user lose the self, and dynamization, as Hicks writes, citing Timothy Leary, makes everything from floors to lamps seem to bend as “familiar forms dissolve into moving, dancing structures.” Hicks concludes that “music that is truly ‘psychedelic’ mimics these three effects,” and on the simplest level dechronicization lengthens songs.³

The University of Illinois Press describes the book as a look at the mid-1960s rock musicians who, unlike their rock ‘n’ roll predecessors, came to consider themselves artists, and as delving “into everything from harmony to hardware.”¹ Its page quotes Robert Walser calling the book a stimulating addition to popular music studies and Charles Hamm writing that it “rings true, much more than anything else I’ve read on the subject.”¹ Reviews appeared in Choice in 1999, in Labour/Le Travail in 1999, in Ethnomusicology in 2000 and in Notes in 2001, where Edward Macan reviewed it with Nick Bromell’s Tomorrow Never Knows.⁴

Key contributions

• Psychedelic music defined through three effects of LSD, dechronicization, depersonalization and dynamization, which truly psychedelic music mimics.
• A study of garage and psychedelic rock that begins from their sounds, the distorted voices and guitars.
• An inquiry into what the labels “garage” and “psychedelic” name in the music.

See also

• Turn On Your Mind — Jim DeRogatis’s 2003 history of psychedelic rock from the 1960s to the 2000s
• Psychedelia and Other Colours — Rob Chapman’s 2015 history of psychedelia from 1965 to 1969