It begins with a rising, eastern-tinged guitar fanfare. A quick tap and a roll on the snare, and the rollercoaster ride begins – with raga 12 strings and rumbling bass hurtling against the drumbeat. A young voice sings in the soon-to-be-standard punk mystical style: "Unlocked by the key/ And now I am free/ Magic curtains of green and blue lights pass by/ Moon and sky."
Released in April 1966, the Dovers' The Third Eye is one of the earliest attempts at reproducing the LSD experience on record. You could be forgiven for thinking that it's a Xerox of the Byrds' Eight Miles High but not so, according to the Dovers' guitarist, Bruce Clawson. "We'd already worked on the tune," he told Mike Markesich, "a few weeks later I'm in the car and Eight Miles High came on. I was crushed. I thought I had something unique."
Both records had a similar starting point. Music from the Indian subcontinent had been filtering into western pop from mid-1965: the Yardbirds (Heart Full of Soul), the Kinks (See My Friend) and the Beatles (Norwegian Wood). The vertical runs and otherworldly sonorities of Ravi Shankar's ragas in particular inspired young musicians seeking to translate the sheer intensity of acid.
So it was for Clawson. The Dovers were from Santa Barbara, California, and had access to hip Los Angeles. Persuaded by bassist Robbie Ladewig, Clawson took LSD for the first time: the group had already smoked pot but this was something else. Inspired by a Ravi Shankar album, he dashed down his impressions: "No wings for my flight /I drift through the night /Understanding the secrets of space and time /The third eye."
This was serious stuff for a folk-rock band previously concerned with lyrics about love. Referring to the pineal gland – the brain's mood regulator stimulated by psychedelics – the Third Eye had been popularised as a concept by Lobsang Rampa's 1956 book of the same name. Although there is considerable controversy concerning its authenticity, this bestseller popularised the tenets of Tibetan Buddhism.
By early 1966, Bob Dylan was using the "third eye" in the lyric of Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window and the 13th Floor Elevators picked up on it as a central graphic and lyrical motif. The Dovers matched this resonant concept with a thunderous, threatening performance unlike anything else in their catalogue. The awestruck intonation of the lyrics fights against the compressed, jangled backing that threatens to fold in on itself.
It was an accurate impression. LSD was exceedingly strong. Taking it was, as Ian MacDonald has written, like playing "Russian roulette" with your mind. Acid turned off all the usual perceptual filters that allowed humans to get through the day: whether it be Aldous Huxley entranced by the folds in his trousers, or Syd Barrett gazing at an orange for hours, the sheer weight of unfiltered data was often overwhelming.
Before it was culturally mediated in early 1967 – prior to its full commercial exploitation – psychedelia was not the blissed-out pablum of punk rhetoric and lazy media tropes. It was dark, troubled, often harsh. Early LSD records such as Eight Miles High, Tomorrow Never Knows or Happenings Ten Years Time Ago still sound barely containable, surging against the constraints of form and meaning.
Pandora's box had been opened, and all the sprites were flying out. The teenage psyche was bombarded with revelations that could take a lifetime of spiritual practice to achieve. But this was an instant satori, the result of a single tablet or sugar cube, sourced on the black market and often taken in unstructured circumstances. It wasn't like pot or pills: it was fundamental.
In the short term, LSD posed more questions than answers: it offered a window into another world, but could so easily derail the unwary and unlucky. This is the contradiction that The Third Eye encodes. Lyrically and vocally, it brilliantly captures a moment of visionary transcendence. The rational mind seeks to define the experience in positive, if awestruck terms.
If the words speak of premature maturity, the explosive, chaotic intensity of the performance tells you something else. As the song hurtles up the scales to its frenetic close, it makes you feel that the whole experience is all too much. You're left with a disturbed aftertaste, a growl of chemical electricity that is anything but resolved or peaceful. Breakthrough has been achieved, but what next?
