The Sixties psychedelic moment was liberating and outrageously sexy, its visual expression unashamedly orgasmic. Richard Cork enjoys a dreamlike trip down memory lane

All the way round "Summer of Love", the "far-out" celebration of psychedelic art at Tate Liverpool, I struggled to recall my own first-hand experience of its mind-blowing grooviness. The occasion was an all-night International Love-In at the Alexandra Palace in London in July 1967, and everyone was there. John Lennon loomed from the darkness, while Pink Floyd performed in front of a spec- tacular light-show projection. The atmosphere was so overwhelming that I ended up collapsed on the floor, where I made drawing after drawing of stoned, ecstatic figures dancing, necking and floating away in bubbles.

It is impossible to re-create the atmosphere of such an event. Without the trigger provided by my carefully preserved drawings, I would probably remember nothing about it. But the Liverpool show is certainly a mesmerising attempt to revive interest in the liberating spirit of the psychedelic moment. Approaching it through a Tunnel of Love, we emerge in a space festooned with posters, album covers and underground magazines. Jimi Hendrix explodes in a flaring, multicoloured and dreamlike flurry of streaming hair and electrifying guitar chords. The designer of this image, Martin Sharp, signed his surname just below Hendrix's groin. This was an outrageously sexy year, and the retinal impact of psychedelic art is unashamedly orgasmic.

Drugs became an indispensable part of the burgeoning scene. Robert Whitaker's photograph of a scarlet-clad Allen Ginsberg reading in Hyde Park was taken at the "Legalise Pot 1967" rally, and most of the grinning, clapping figures around Ginsberg look suitably mind-expanded. Just before I went off to the love-in at Alexandra Palace, a full-page Legalise Pot advertisement was published in the Times, signed by all four Beatles, Tariq Ali, David Bailey, R D Laing and (very surprisingly) Graham Greene. No wonder one of the clothes shops that were multiplying on the King's Road in Chelsea called itself Granny Takes a Trip. Can-nabis was considered alluring and revelatory enough to entice the older generation as well as the young - even if the shop's facade was painted with a full-lipped dolly-bird face whose sensuality derived from pop-art pin-ups by Tom Wesselmann. When the police jailed Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones for drug offences, the pair were widely seen as martyrs. Richard Hamilton stuck together a cluster of press cuttings generated by their trial. Jagger was unrepentant, appearing in court flaunting a lime-green jacket and a floral-patterned shirt.

Nobody could curb the psychedelic impulse while it lasted. At Tate Liverpool, its visual frisson reaches a shameless climax in Lynda Benglis's Contraband, which spreads feverish colours across the floor of a large gallery. It looks, at first, as if Benglis has just poured her pigmented latex straight on to the wooden boards. Closer inspection shows that the colours have long since solidified into a continent of splashy, garish hues. Yet they still look unstable, their exuberance contrasting with the grey stillness of the Mersey, visible through the gallery windows.

Not content with covering a floor, Vernon Panton built a room-sized installation in which people could be bombarded by colours on every side. Visitors wanting to enter his Phantasy Landscape at the Tate show are warned, by an official notice, that a "maximum of six people" is allowed inside at one time - and "please remove your shoes". In the late Sixties, such authoritarian instructions would have been laughed at and blithely ignored. None the less, once inside Panton's installation, I could still imagine hippies relishing the marine-like rhythms of the undulating space, and lying down on ledges where they could close their eyes and feel at one with the universe.

Although united by this sense of cosmic well-being, the exhibits could hardly be more diverse. Entering the room where Mark Boyle and Joan Hills present Beyond Image on five large screens, we become aware of infinitely changing forms expanding and bursting in concert with music by Soft Machine. But Gustav Metzger's arena, where his Liquid Crystal Projections are shown, seems far more slow-moving. The screens lining his space are more akin to monumental abstract paintings, and invite contemplation rather than excitement.

We are also confronted by dramatic extremes of light and dark. Mati Klarwein's Aleph Sanctuary is a luminous, neon-lit room that bombards the visitor with paintings from 1968, including a super-erotic tree of life laden with amorous couples. La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, by contrast, created a place of shadows in their Music and Light Box. Walking into this cave-like interior, we are enveloped in blackness. Sound waves gently intrude, but the only visible presence is an enigmatic oblong rising from the centre of the space. Glowing with ultraviolet light, it creates a series of patterned frames enclosing mysterious dark voids.

The overall effect may be more ominous than Young and Zazeela intended. Towards the end of the exhibition, this feeling of unease intensifies. In Strobe Room, made by an implacable group of artists called USCO, we are ambushed at every turn by alarming visual aggression. The tie-dye floor, relentless music and strobe lights mount an assault that quickly becomes unbearable. The "Summer of Love" has here been transformed into a far more violent experience, and this strident room now seems to prophesy the sudden, brutal termination of all the utopian optimism.

In October 1967, Che Guevara died and demonstrations against the Vietnam war were held at the Pentagon. The following year, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, while thousands rioted in Munich after the shooting of the student leader Rudi Dutschke. By the end of the decade, when the Beatles split and Janis Joplin died of a drug overdose, the short-lived euphoria was over. National Guardsmen killed four anti-war demonstrators at Kent State University in Ohio, and Richard Hamilton's 1970 print of a dead student summed up the widespread, melancholy realisation that all those limitless dreams had turned into nightmares.

"Summer of Love: art of the psychedelic era" is at Tate Liverpool, Liverpool L3 (0151 702 7400) until 25 September. An accompanying catalogue is written by Christoph Grunenberg (Tate Publishing, £19.99 paperback)

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