• Lennon and Leary

    From Norbert@21:1/5 to All on Sun May 19 11:26:09 2024
    Any fans of Timothy Leary here? As a young person, when I learned that Lennon's lyrics for "Tomorrow Never Knows" were based on Timothy Leary's
    The Psychedelic Experience (which was itself based on the Tibetan Book
    of the Dead), I found a copy of it -- but could find nothing interesting
    about it.

    I learned from a Rolling Stone article that Leary had written two
    memoirs, the better of which is entitled Flashbacks. I browsed it, but
    found it a disjointed mess. Leary had worked, for a time, with some
    real scientists, but he didn't write anything about them.

    Leary can be seen among the group at Lennon's bedside while John and
    Yoko were being ridiculed by Al Capp. Leary appears to have found the
    event hysterically funny (whose side was he on, anyway?).

    Leary appeared on William Buckley's Firing Line once to promote LSD, but
    he looked and acted too weird (e.g., giggling inappropriately, like a
    nut) to be taken seriously.

    Finally, I used to hear Leary on KPFA fairly regularly. He'd "debate"
    people like Gordon Liddy. Again, he was too incoherent to take
    seriously.


    The best thing Leary did, as far as I know, was ask Lennon for a
    campaign slogan while he was running for CA. governor. The song
    eventually became "Come Together" -- I believe it's great largely
    through McCartney's contributions. Lennon's version of the song, I
    suspect, was too obviously based on Chuck Berry's "You Can't Catch Me."

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  • From Norbert@21:1/5 to All on Sun May 19 12:01:52 2024
    Leary did one other good thing that I know. When Lennon's biographer
    Albert Goldman learned that Lennon had tripped continuously for a
    lengthy phase, he asked Leary what this would do to a person. Leary
    said something to the effect of: "You can't do that! You need to allow
    the brain to rebound for several days after each aid trip."

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