It’s 2002 and Arthur Lee has just dropped the phone on me. A thud is followed by silence. Thirty seconds on and his PR person comes on the line. ‘Oh hi, Arthur just wanted to make sure you’re not going to ask him any questions about his prison sentence or the charges?’ Mildly affronted, I’d like to think I said something like: ‘Arthur’s a psychedelic rock god, I’ve waited half my life to come close to touching his psilocybin-coated hem. Why the hell would I want to talk to him about the false, jumped-up charges for which he’s just spent five and a half years in the clink? This is the diseased legacy of President Clinton’s racist, pathetic, three-strikes-and-you’re-out justice policy!’ But I think my answer was less prosaic than that.

Back on the line, Lee gushed about the recent CD reissue of Love’s 1967 album Forever Changes, featuring a ton of extras. He detailed the Memphis to Los Angeles musician-drift that cemented the creation of Love around his old school pal Johnny Echols and others: ‘this guy was playing with Billy Preston in his teens and hanging out with composer Clarence McDonald. I was panhandling to set up a rock group. Yeah, I wanted to play with him.’ Starstruck, gauche and no doubt hungover, I failed to make the most out of my 25-minute chat with the visionary leader of my favourite psych band, but Lee, at least, was revealing when it came to labels. I asked him the ‘musical legacy’ question beloved of this half-wit arts journalist at the time but clumsily tried to specify it within the psychedelic canon. 

He coughed lightly and then decided not to answer my question. ‘Man, I’m not a psychedelic artist; we played rock, folk, pop, even what we thought was classical or baroque music. On Reel To Real [1974 Love album] we even had a country track. Psychedelia isn’t a genre; it’s much bigger than that. It was the times, man. Yeah, we did our fair share of acid and other stuff, but you could ask a brother for the shirt off his back and he’d hand it to you. I wore one shoe for a year because this dude gave it to me. I was hoping for a pair but the other never came. That shoe became my expression. Politics, war, art, music, the vibe of that brief era changed everything.’ Within four years, Lee was dead from complications with leukaemia. His genius and truth went with him. 

Definitions of cultural phenomena are strange transitory beasts and psychedelia may be the hardest to define of all. Like the memoirs of anthropological hoaxer Carlos Castaneda, its story is an improbable stumble through longing, healing, medicine, shamanism and sorcery. Born of a social consciousness movement, psychedelia was defined by a commitment to civil rights, anti-war protests, flirtations with Marxism, eastern spirituality, and legalisation of recreational drugs, all underwritten by a post-war population boost resulting in a more empowered youth culture. It was an ether of positive dissonance and change. 

Les Paul and Robert Moog’s instrumental advances gave it a soundtrack. Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, The Byrds, Cream, Jefferson Airplane, The Doors and, most crucially, Grateful Dead and The 13th Floor Elevators, went down the psyche rabbit hole, each emerging at far-out fields but unified in collective ambition and hope. But by 1969 the game was up. LSD was illegal, the Manson Family had killed Sharon Tate and Rosemary LaBianca (and others) to the proto heavy metal beats of The Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’ while teenager Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death in plain sight by Hells Angels security guards at the Altamont Free Concert in California. As musician and writer Gary Lachman notes in his incredible opus The Dedalus Book Of The 1960s: Turn Off Your Mind, ‘if the Age Of Aquarius dawned in August 1969, by December and Altamont, the sun had set and left behind a dark night of the soul.’

Culturally and sonically, psychedelia began to buckle and fragment after Altamont, as the death of the hippie dream was extolled. The writings of occultist Aleister Crowley and cinema of Kenneth Anger had their moment with the counterculture’s jaded youth. Psychedelic folk and rock shattered into multiple shards. Acid rock as exemplified by Cream, The Jeff Beck Group and Led Zeppelin tripped out their machismo brand of blues. Mutations into heavy and progressive rock followed courtesy of Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, ELP and others. This begat Krautrock, P-Funk, P-Soul, P-Trance, space rock, stoner rock, trip hop and so on, until we can now rejoice in the manic, off-kilter joys of psych supergroup Mantra Of The Cosmos or the Swiss psych-jazz of L’Eclair, the glorious goth weirdness of Heartworms, and the Sun-Ra-ish bounce of Takeshi’s Cashew. 

To make sense of all this, I spoke to Dr Alex Coles, musical anthropologist and author of the remarkable Tainted Love: From Nina Simone To Kendrick Lamar and the forthcoming Crooner: Singing From The Heart From Sinatra To Nas. I asked if he could find the pulse and home of modern psych. After some thought he ruminated, ‘with the decentralisation and globalisation of culture, it’s no surprise to find that Laurel Canyon and Haight-Ashbury are no longer the hotbeds for psychedelia. Today’s psych festivals and bands are just as likely to turn up in Hungary or South Africa. With the shift from Love to a band like Elder, the speculative sonic explorations of the 60s becomes the mannered ambient grooves of today.’

 What about those non-musical aspects of the movement? Dr Coles takes a breath in. ‘Strangely, the shift in the drug culture from LSD to OxyContin works in the opposite direction to these geopolitics; where once drugs were mind expanding, today they are about maintaining a constant mood.’ And here may just be the point to all this. For a brief period between 1966 and 1969, rational and materialistic world views were held at bay by what can possibly be called the ‘psych sensibility’: equal parts LSD, invocations to mysticism, social consciousness and music. Some of these things have survived the decades of delusion and decline, but greed, avarice, commercialism and populism have undoubtedly taken their toll. And yet the psyche wind still carries. Brother, sister: lend me your shoe.

Edinburgh Psych Fest, Summerhall, Sunday 3 September, edinburghpsychfest.com