King Gizzard has been known to jam and improv. For fans who came in post-COVID pandemic, songs like “The Dripping Tap” and “Ice V” might come to mind as examples of their jam band sensibilities. Those who came before may point to songs like “Am I In Heaven?” But the band’s interest in jamming was first made clear in 2013 with the opener of Float Along — Fill Your Lungs, “Head On/Pill.” At a total runtime of fifteen minutes and fifty-nine seconds, the song was the band’s first jam, and a turning point into more psychedelic music perfect for live shows. The first section, “Head On,” is a droning psychedelic rock song with an iconic riff, its lyrics detailing what seems to be a trip that its narrator was trying to keep composure during. The second section, “Pill,” is a fast and energetic piece with simple lyrics about eating “the wrong pill.” Since its release, the song has remained an essential part of the band’s discography and still stuns audiences to this day.
The earliest history of the song came out of jam sessions. According to the liner notes for the 2018 reissue of the album, it wasn’t meant to be anything huge but couldn’t limit itself. “We were playing a lot of shows and had started jamming and improvising a lot live. Out of the ether came ‘Head On/Pill.’ It was short at first but it just kept fucking growing like pond scum. We thought we had better record it before we forgot it so we spent a day with Paul Maybury and laid the beast to rest.” Joey said during an SYN interview that their original performances of the song went on for an hour and a half, inspired by Krautrock music. Alongside this, during a Reddit AMA Stu stated that, while being listed and often performed as one, “Head On/Pill” was originally written as two different songs. In an interview with Levitation Stu said that it was the first song recorded for Float Along and that it was a perfect opener due to its length as the album’s title track would balance the track listing as a closer. The structure of the song was based on a few different cues and largely improvised with the band picking the best take out of a handful of different attempts. In an interview on 101 Part Time Jobs Stu said “it was the first time we jammed on tape and we allowed ourselves to jam on tape and to be a band — like a live band on record, I suppose… That was the first time we went into a recording extraordinarily loose and something actually kinda half decent came out of it, and I think it just opened up pandora’s box about what music can be. Because that was a song you couldn’t rehearse, it was impossible to rehearse. It just couldn’t be made that way.” It was also the first track by the band to be recorded with two drummers. To quote a Guitar World interview with Stu “that was actually the first time we used two drum kits in a recording. Cavs [Michael Cavanagh] has always drummed, but when Eric [Moore] joined Gizz, he was playing percussion and theremin and shit. We were always like, ‘we can’t have two drummers, that’s insane’, but eventually it was like, ‘fuck it, we can have two drummers, who cares?’ So ‘Head On/Pill’ was the first song we recorded like that. It just came out of a lot of jams. I think that it will always be one of my favorite things that we’ve done. There was just a spark.” Stu has also gone on record to say that it was a turning point for the band. “We were sort of changing from a two minute, three chord garage rock band to more of an experimental ‘try new things and try new styles’ type band, and that song was really the crux of that. So that was kind of, like, an important little journey in the band’s history.” It was released as a single on June 18th, 2013 — making it the first track heard from Float Along — Fill Your Lungs. On July 1st, the band uploaded a live video of themselves recording the song in the studio shot by Syd Row. It was featured as the opening track of Float Along — Fill Your Lungs on September 27th, 2013. For Record Store Day in 2014, “Head On/Pill” was released as a 12” single sided picture disc which has since become a sought-after collector’s item. The song was later used in promotional material for the band’s 2018 reissues of their earliest albums.
The first known performance was on 2013-02-28 at PBS Studios in Naarm (Melbourne). Following this, the song was in heavy rotation for 2013, with one performance of the song from 2013-10-16 even making it onto the third episode of ABABCd as a separate second part due to its length and quality. These versions don’t include the sitar found on the original (nor do later versions), but they do include Ambrose playing acoustic guitar, something which rarely occurs within the band. Throughout 2014 to 2016, “Head On/Pill” was commonly performed, though sometimes only the “Pill” segment appeared, like on 2015-09-12. While not as long as the earliest jam sessions, the song was going past the twenty-minute mark at times (see 2016-05-25) with a majority of the improv taking place in “Pill” like the studio version. These performances also contained teases of other songs like “Am I In Heaven?” and “Cellophane”, a feature that would prove to be a prominent feature of the song live. The song was primarily an opener or closer for the sets at the time, setting up its primary spot going forward. Two performances of the song from 2014 were included as part of the documentary BOOTLEG HOLIDAY FROM HELL. As five albums worth of new material was being introduced in 2017, “Head On/Pill” became much less frequent — with only one known appearance on 2017-06-24 as part of a secret Glastonbury show. The song appeared as a closer throughout the summer of 2018 with some renditions (such as 2018-06-22 going a full twenty-six minutes in length. It seemed that as time went on, “Head On/Pill” only grew in size. 2019 showed that this trend of increasing runtimes wasn’t stopping. The song was once again a closer but this time began to run nearly thirty minutes in length as heard on 2019-08-23. It would also see the addition of more teases such as “Cyboogie”, “Rattlesnake” and the “Alter Me” tracks. In the film Chunky Shrapnel “Pill” was included twice as part of “A Brief History Of Planet Earth.” The segments included were from 2019-10-12 and 2019-10-19. The song was never played in 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic and returned for “Jams Night” on 2021-12-20, marking its only 2021 appearance. 2022 saw the song played only a handful of times as a set opener or closer and in 2023 it was played even less. Once the first and only jam, it has fallen out of favor as setlists are consumed by jams of various different types.