DeRogatis — Turn On Your Mind

Author: Jim DeRogatis
Title: Turn On Your Mind: Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock
Year: 2003
Type: Book (Hal Leonard)

The definition does the book’s heaviest lifting. Psychedelic rock, DeRogatis argues, “doesn’t mean ‘drug rock,’” but rock “inspired by a philosophical approach implied by the literal meanings of ‘psychedelic’ as ‘mind-revealing’ and ‘soul-manifesting’” — music that feeds the intellect as well as the body and lives, in his formula, in “the space between the headphones.”¹ Everything unusual about the book follows from that move. If the genre is defined by intent and sound, it has no reason to end in 1969, and DeRogatis’s survey runs it four decades: the sixties garage bands, San Francisco, and London, then krautrock, post-punk, Elephant 6, rave culture, and the garage revival, closing with an “Ultimate Psychedelic Rock Library” discography that turns the argument into a listening list.²

The author wrote it from the working critic’s chair at the Chicago Sun-Times, where his pop-critic tenure would eventually run fifteen years, and from the co-host seat of Sound Opinions; the book itself is a second draft, a revised and expanded edition of his 1996 debut Kaleidoscope Eyes.³ The judgments stay a critic’s judgments, loudly. The Grateful Dead “barely qualify as psych” in his telling, and Sgt. Pepper is a disappointment after Revolver. The Summer of Love is overrated.⁴ Trade reviewers recommended the book “for most libraries, both public and academic,” while noting that the harsh honesty softens for pet bands.⁵

Against the bounded-period histories, the book is the standing argument that psychedelia has a present tense — the only survey whose span reaches the revivals the genre actually had — and its anti-determinist definition is the quotable form of the craft position.⁶ The price of the span is the survey’s altitude: hundreds of acts at band-bio depth, a canon nobody else would draw, and breadth standing in for the analysis the academic literature supplies elsewhere: the whole territory, drawn by a partisan.⁷

Key contributions

• The anti-determinist definition: “mind-revealing” music — the clearest statement that the genre’s borders are drawn by intent and sound.
• The four-decade span: the first survey to run psychedelia as a living continuum through krautrock, post-punk, Elephant 6, and rave.
• The headphone world: “the space between the headphones” as the genre’s true venue, a framing that carries psychedelia past its ballroom era without strain.
• The listening list: the closing discography, the argument made assignable record by record.

See also

• Sixties Rock — the academic complement: Hicks supplies the device-level analysis the survey’s altitude skips
• Psychedelia and Other Colours — the opposing answer to the period question: Chapman’s bounded four years against these four decades
• Psychedelia — the family’s c. 1965–present span rests on this book’s side of the argument

Footnotes

1. The definitional passage as quoted in the High Bias review reproduced on the author’s site; the headphones formula per the reviews collected there (both accessed July 7, 2026). ↩

2. The span and structure per the SLUG Magazine review and the reviews collected on the author’s site (both accessed July 7, 2026). ↩

3. Jim DeRogatis, Wikipedia (accessed July 7, 2026) — the Sun-Times tenure (1992–2010, with a mid-nineties Rolling Stone interlude) and Sound Opinions; the Kaleidoscope Eyes lineage per the Go Freaks Go book survey (accessed July 7, 2026). ↩

4. The Dead, Pepper-after-Revolver, and Summer of Love judgments per the reviews collected on the author’s site (accessed July 7, 2026). ↩

5. The Library Journal recommendation and the pet-bands observation per the author’s collected reviews page (accessed July 7, 2026). ↩

6. The period-versus-mode debate is drawn in Psychedelia; the book’s side of it per the definitional sources at ¹. ↩

7. The breadth-over-depth character per the reviews at ² and ⁵. ↩