ABSTRACT
The decomposition of psychedelic music, in the late 1960s, followed three principal directions. The first of these, in the United States, involved a return to traditional, largely rural musical styles, with the emergence of country rock, of which the stylistic changes in the careers of the Byrds (in 1968) and the Grateful Dead (in 1970) offer examples. In Britain, a second tendency took the form of a very eclectic reinscription of traditional and symphonic musical forms within an electric or electronic rock context, with groups such as King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Genesis, Yes, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. The third trend, which may be found in both American and British rock music of this period, was toward the heavy metal sound, frequently based in the chord structures of boogie blues, but retaining from psychedelia an emphasis on technological effect and instrumental virtuosity. In groups on the periphery of psychedelia-such as Blue Cheer, the Yardbirds, Iron Butterfly-many of the stylistic traits that would become dominant within heavy metal were already in evidence: the cult of the lead guitarist, the “power trio” and other indices of the emphasis on virtuosity, the “supergroup” phenomena, and the importance in performance of extended solo playing and a disregard for the temporal limits of the pop song. Their coherence into a genre was reinforced, through the 1970s, by the sedimentation of other stylistic attributes (those associated with stage shows, albumcover design, and audience dress and life-style) and by the relatively stable sites of institutional support (radio formats, touring circuits, record industry structures).
