Tune in, turn on, drop outThis week's installment is a little hippy-dippy, but is a pretty good song. The Moody Blues released "Legend of a Mind" in 1968, but the song is better known for its opening verse:
"Timothy Leary's dead.
No, no, no, no, He's outside looking in."
Timothy Leary was the notorious Harvard professor-turned-LSD advocate who graced the Sixties with his iconic slogan noted in the caption above. After crashing hard in the 70's (including a fugitive run through Algeria and Switzerland and a sentence at Folsom Prison), Leary reemerged in the 80's as a lecturer and personality. Kids like me who weren't around when Richard Nixon called him "the most dangerous man in America" saw Leary as a sort of relic of the Hippie Era. His last grab at publicity came around his death from prostate cancer in 1996. Leary arranged to have his head removed from his corpse for the purposes of cryonic preservation and his cremated remains to be loaded on a rocket so he could be buried in space. The rocket, which also carried the remains of Gene Roddenberry, was launched in April 1997 and was in orbit for six years before it burnt up.
Far out, man....
1 comment:
You'll find extended commentary on Dr. Leary's extraterrestrial phase at www.starlarvae.org HERE
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