Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and two prostitutes drop acid in a cemetery in New Orleans. The Easy Rider acid scene is one of the most influential LSD scenes of 1960’s cinema. Click here if you want to watch it in better quality (but with Italian dubbing) or here if you want to watch the full movie online.
Tag Archives: 1960s psychedelia
Brian Jonestown Massacre – Illuminomi
13 OctA bewitched music video to Brian Jonestown Massacre’s “Illuminomi” made with bits out of legendary director Kenneth Anger’s classic 1964 “Scorpio’s Rising”.
Doctor Who?
20 JunWhat we are dealing with here in this batch of clips, is not the program “Doctor Who” itself, but with the various main title sequences that were produced for it since it was launchec in 1963 and were always styled with spacey/psychedelic visuals… But the program also offers some far-out ideas to fuel your imagination with (like time travel, communication with aliens, etc.)
Well, here are the opening titles from the original 1963 production, one version in black and white and one colorized version which looks even better:
And a web clip which compiles all the opening sequences from the show’s history, and provide different styles of sci-fi inspired animation:
Tomorrow Never Knows
13 JunHi there. This is my first post as a new contributor and I’m glad to meet you!
This is a very cool home made music clip for this amazing psychedelic song by the Beatles. The music is very trippy while the lyrics are some of the deepest I’ve known.
There is nothing like a bored bunch of teenagers to make for an exciting video clip. However it is open to decide if this particular one is subversive, or to be more exact – what it subverts: mainstream culture, or psychedelic culture. This clip mixes psychedelic imagery from suburbia with long scenes of eating a burger in McDonalds. It is hard to realize what its supposed to mean or of it even is supposed to mean something, but it smells like teen spirit, and I like it!
So enjoy!
6Dmind
I love to laugh – A high dinner
10 JunA very high dinner, from Mary Poppins (1964).
(Link: Galia. Thanks!)
The Porpoise Song, The Monkees, out of Head (1968)
4 JunIn 1968, with the psychedelic and political revolution at its peak, even The Monkees, who were previously known as a standard commercial-pop group were working on a psychedelic film with revolutionary themes.
“Head” (1968), was very different from anything the Monkees have done before. It was psychedelically inspired and this is noticeable both in terms of music, as well as in terms of narrative and the character of the film.
The movie actually makes fun of the commercial plastic image of the monkees in a silly sounding song which goes:
He, hey, we are The Monkees
You know we love to please
A manufactured image
With no philosophies.
[…]
You say we’re manufactured.
To that we all agree.
So make your choice and we’ll rejoice
in never being free!
Hey, hey, we are The Monkees
We’ve said it all before
The money’s in, we’re made of tin
We’re here to give you more!
The money’s in, we’re made of tin
We’re here to give you…
The final “We’re here to give you…” is interrupted by a gunshot, and footage of an execution of a Viet Cong operative. The line between commercialism, revolution and psychedelics becomes blurred again and agin. Such messages are interspersed throughout the film, which has a variety of subversive moments.
The Porpoise Song which appears near the beginning of the film features Micky Dolenz and some beautiful psychedelic underwater colors. A prime example of 1960s psychedelic film aesthetics.
(Link: Morningloria. Thanks!)
Psych Out – The Psychedelic Jack Nicholson Film
11 MarI’ll cut to the bottom line first: “Psych Out” is one of the best psychedelic films of the sixties. Many cheap sensational movies were done about and around psychedelics during the end of the sixties, most of them were using the topic in a sensational way looking for an easy buck, and did not leave much of an impression.
“Psych out”, in contrast, is worth seeing for a few reasons. The first of which would be that it features the young Jack Nicholson who also wrote the script (This was actually Nicholson’s second script to deal with Psychedelics, after 1967’s “The Trip”, with Peter Fonda) which was heavily revised because it was deemed too experimental by the producers.
Secondly, for those interested in 1960s culture, it acts as a rare time capsule of the 1967’s San Francisco and allows a precious glimpse into the world of the hippies at the time: from Free Shops to Guerilla Theater scenes; while trying to deal, at least superficially, with some of the issues of the era like the ideas of ego dissolution, mind expansion and bad trips. Even the talks about the STP-Fright seem highly characteristic of the time and place (STP was a major drug problem in the Haight-Ashbury around the end of 1967).
While the film is not a piece of cheap anti-drug propaganda, it does seem to carry the message that psychedelics are probably the path to your destruction, or are a the very least a very risky business, best left to madmen. It features 2 bad trips and lots of weirded out folk that the film portrays as acid casualties.
Jenny’s bad STP trip, in the closing scene, has nightmarish, acid-horror film qualities, and does a pretty good cinematic work at making the viewer feel what it is like to be on a really bad trip. I won’t tell you the outcome, but if you want to watch the whole movie you can skip this particular one (which contains spoilers) and go to this link on YouTube where you can find the whole thing, divided into 9 parts.
The Daily Psychedelic Video 