These are the four Beatles albums you need if you like psychedelic music. I won’t put them in order (other than alphabetical) because you really need all four and I don’t want you to think you can get away with leaving any of them off your list.
magical and mysterious tour (1967)
This is probably the most psychedelic album by The Beatles. Nearly every song on the album is rife with mental insanity of some kind or another, be it experimental production, unusual song arrangements, and/or unusual songwriting. Arguably “I Am The Walrus” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” are John Lennon at his “wackiest.” These are the songs where he went all out with the “kitchen sink” production, the weird lyrics, the unexpected song arrangements. It’s all there. “Flying”, “Blue Jay Way” and the title track “Magical Mystery Tour”, these are songs designed to melt minds and they do just that.
Stir (1966)
What brilliant songs. And what an incredible variety of music in such a compact album. There’s more variety on this 35-minute album than in most bands’ entire careers. And it’s all done incredibly well. And then there’s “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which may well be the craziest song the Beatles have ever recorded.
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
This is a trip. Sure the “concept” isn’t that strict, but I think that’s why it works so well. It’s like you’re at a carnival listening to these different incarnations of the same band. Again, a wild selection of different styles of music, but unlike Revolver, each of the songs also sounds connected to one another. It’s an amazing trick to make “Within You Without You” and “When I’m 64” make sense together on the same album.
This is an album that has become so legendary that sometimes I think people don’t appreciate how good it is. It’s not overrated. It’s really that good. If you think otherwise, you may not have gotten out of that stage where you want to be different just for the sake of it.
the white album(1968)
I talk a lot about variety in this article because it’s one of the things I love most about The Beatles’ music and it’s one of the things I think makes listening to their albums so amazing. Well, this is the peak of that variety. There are 30 tracks here and the vast majority of them are completely different than the other 29 songs on the album. In many ways this is the Beatles’ last trip and I think it’s their best album (psychedelic or not).
And then there’s “Revolution #9.” It’s hard to get much more psychedelic than that. If you really listen to this track closely with your headphones, you’ll probably freak out and I think that makes the song a pretty successful piece of sound art.