I’m not asking about the first musically psychedelic album, but the one with the first typically psychedelic art style that prevailed for a few years between 1966 and 1970 (yeah, and after, but more rarely). But maybe it’s one and the same album, as I’ll later expand on. I think of albums like “Sergeant Pepper’s”. “Disreali Gears” or “Piper At The Gates Of Dawn”.
To get back on that thought, I think there is a case for the Byrds’ “Fifth Dimension” being the first psychedelic album as well as the first with psychedelic artwork. About the music there can be no doubt, but the Byrds sitting on a flying carpet? And the artwork of the “Byrds” name? It’s kinda trippy, isn’t it?
The cover of Rubber Soul pioneered the psychedelic typeface used throughout the rest of the 60’s
“The distinctive lettering was created by illustrator Charles Front, who recalled that his inspiration was the album’s title: “If you tap into a rubber tree then you get a sort of globule, so I started thinking of creating a shape that represented that, starting narrow and filling out.” The rounded letters used on the sleeve established a style that became ubiquitous in [psychedelic designs]
(Psychedelic art - Wikipedia) and, according to journalist Lisa Bachelor, “a staple of poster art for the flower power generation”.”
The Beatles’ “Rubber Soul” (1965) isn’t full blown psychedelic, but hey you gotta start somewhere. There’s definitely something trippy about the photo and the lettering.
When I think of psychedelic cover art my mind immediately goes to Cream’s Disraeli Gears, which is so iconic that it’s in MOMA.
That’s 1967, though. And the earlier examples here are more proto-psychedelic than full-fledged. I’d give an edge to 1966’s The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators.
A lot of acid-addled minds have pondered this question, and after being distracted by how…beautiful our toaster is, I conclude that the psychedelic-inspired debut album of LOVE with Arthur Lee (released March 1966) has trippy cover art.
The only psychedelic song (everything that sounded Indian in 1966 was psychedelic) from “Face To Face” is “Fancy”:
But the Kinks had some more psychedelic songs, for instance “Phenomenal Cat” from “Village Green” or “Lazy Old Sun” from “Something Else”. But yes, I agree, all in all they weren’t famous for their psychedelia.
This is a tricky question, because there’s no clear boundary between various schools of design that could be called “far out” (lots of jazz records in the 50s went in that direction, and we know those people took drugs), the Pop Art explosion, graphic art from advertising that delighted in repurposing images cribbed from old sources, avant-garde filmmaking, Beat culture, Mad magazine, comic books and other forms of “low” media including TV; all set the stage, and those San Francisco posters, the ones that could turn a Muddy Waters show into a freak scene, really caught the public imagination.
But, first psychedelic album cover? I don’t have an answer, but it’s only a matter of time before some stoner says “gotta be Floyd”.
Psychedelic songs and children’s songs were sometimes interchangeable in the second half of the sixties. Think of “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”, and some of Syd Barrett’s songs for “Piper At The Gates Of Dawn”, like “The Gnome”:
