R.U. Sirius has posted a tasty treat for the Christmas season, an 11-minute long audio clip of novelist William Gibson speaking with Timothy Leary. Part of the MONDO 2000 History Project:

Backstory:

We were working on our first Mondo 2000 issue. It was going to be the cyberpunk theme issue and we’d gotten interviews with the major cyberpunk SF writers, except Gibson. Gibson’s management wouldn’t put us in touch with him.  And then we heard that he was coming to the Bay Area and we turned up the heat, but his press agent had him set up for interviews with major outlets only and we were nobody and it was just a brick wall.  So somehow, Mu wound up on the phone with Leary complaining about this and Leary offered to let us transcribe a tape of him and Gibson in conversation about ideas for the game spinoff that would accompany the release of the film of Neuromancer — all of this being planned then — back in 1989.  Leary was going to lead the development of the game… at least conceptually. (Well, it was all conceptual, ultimately.)

So, the next day, we all showed up at a Gibson appearance in Berkeley radiating some kind of weird intense energy and Gibson was drinking warm beers and glancing nervously over at us while he signed books. We probably looked to him like some weird cult preparing a kidnapping. And after the line of autograph seekers cleared out, Mu strolled up with this insane bezoomny rictus grin that she has and told him that we were running this interview that Leary had done with him.  And he literally held the side of the desk like waves were making him seasick and shouted, “That was no interview!  That was a drunken business meeting!”

The article ran and Gibson eventually became friendly.  This edit from the tape features Leary and Gibson talking about the characteristics of Case (from Neuromancer) and then they go on to talk about William Burroughs.  I recommend listening through headphones.  Gibson’s voice is rather quiet.  There is also at least one other male voice that you’ll hear and that would be someone from Cabana Boy, the Production Company that had the rights to Neuromancer at the time.  If you hear a female voice, that would be Barbara Leary, who was Timothy’s wife at that time.

I recently interviewed Gibson for the MONDO project and he had this to say about his vague recollection: “I dimly remember being annoyed that that was going to be published. Mainly because I hadn’t been asked, I imagine.”

Click over to Acceler8or for the mp3 file

See also:
Timothy Leary and William Gibson promoting a Neuromancer film (Boing Boing)

 
In Growing Up In America, Morley Markson revisits his 1969 documentary on counter culture icons, Breathing Together:Revolution Of The Electric Family, with the original subjects of the film to get the perspective of age and hindsight.

Reflecting the past through the present, forming a kind of Möbius strip of history, we watch as they watch: Jerry Rubin’s transformation from firebrand radical to Capitalist cliche, the evolution and assassination of Fred Hampton (through the eyes of his mother) and the unwavering integrity and self-realization of Abbie Hoffman, William Kunstler, Timothy Leary, former Black Panther Field Marshall/expatriate Don Cox, Allen Ginsberg, and MC5 manager and White Panther founder John Sinclair. This is a fascinating glimpse at lives that mattered and still do.

It’s hard to believe that with the exception of John Sinclair and director Markson all of these men are dead. Are these the last of a dying breed?

While Growing Up In America is a vital and significant document, its failure to include some women in the mix is a glaring oversight. Bernardine Dohrn, Angela Davis, Shulamith Firestone and Diane di Prima are just a few of the women who were actively involved with cultural and political upheaval of the Sixties and any one of them would have provided a much needed woman’s point of view to the film. Once again, we’re confronted with the notion that the Sixties counter-culture was a boy’s club.

This fine documentary is out-of-print on video and has yet to be released on DVD.
 

 
Oh that this were true…

Utah-based maverick filmmaker Trent Harris, who we recently covered on Dangerous Minds when we posted about his cult film The Beaver Trilogy, shot this forthright interview with psychedelic guru Timothy Leary in 1978, still railing against the powers that be even after his time spent in federal prison.
 

 
Timothy Leary’s famous Cooper Union address in New York City on November 1964 was the one of the pivotal moments in the cultural revolution of the Sixties.

The audience seems to be on Leary’s wavelength, laughing and applauding with the excitement and enthusiasm of people who are ready for the change that was rising on the horizon like an orange and purple basketball.
 

Timothy Leary with Boing Boing founders Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair at Golden Apple Comics. Photo: Richard Metzger
 
At some point in 1995, I was visiting Dr. Timothy Leary in his home in Benedict Canyon. I showed up at the appointed time and waited outside on the patio.

And I waited. And waited. And waited and waited and waited. After about an hour and 45 minutes—the guy was one of my greatest heroes, how long are you supposed to wait in a situation like that?—I made to leave when Tim finally arrived. It had been some time, maybe five years, since I had seen him last and he looked terrible. Until recently Leary could have passed for a man 20 years younger, but now he looked just awful. It was the week before he told the media that he had terminal cancer.

That day, a delivery of several boxes of items which had been confiscated during one of his many drug busts of the sixties, had arrived at the house. There were several people in the housre cataloging the contents (one of them was Bill Daily, the antiquarian book dealer here in Los Angeles and I think former SNL comedy writer Tom Davis might have been there, too).

One item had the group on stitches when it was discovered: A tin flour container (my grandmother owned the exact same one) full of flour. It was surmised by the group that whoever grabbed it must have suspected the flour jar was where the cocaine was hidden. I recall Leary quipping “I wonder where they thought we kept our flour?”

It’s taken over a decade since Leary’s death, but yesterday an article in the New York Times reports that Leary’s personal papers have been acquired by the New York Public Library:

When the Harvard psychologist and psychedelic explorer Timothy Leary first met the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in 1960, he welcomed Ginsberg’s participation in the drug experiments he was conducting at the university.
Multimedia

“The first time I took psilocybin — 10 pills — was in the fireside social setting in Cambridge,” Ginsberg wrote in a blow-by-blow description of his experience taking synthesized hallucinogenic mushrooms at Leary’s stately home. At one point Ginsberg, naked and nauseated, began to feel scared, but then “Professor Leary came into my room, looked in my eyes and said I was a great man.”

Ginsberg’s “session record,” composed for Leary’s research, was in one of the 335 boxes of papers, videotapes, photographs and more that the New York Public Library is planning to announce that it has purchased from the Leary estate. The material documents the evolution of the tweedy middle-aged academic into a drug guru, international outlaw, gubernatorial candidate, computer software designer and progenitor of the Me Decade’s self-absorbed interest in self-help.

The archive will not be available to the public or scholars for 18 to 24 months, as the library organizes the papers. A preview of the collection, however, reveals a rich record not only of Leary’s tumultuous life but also of the lives of many significant cultural figures in the ’60, ’70s and ’80s.

Robert Greenfield, who combed through the archive when it was kept in California, for his 2007 biography of Leary, said: “It is a unique firsthand archive of the 1960s. Leary was at the epicenter of what was going on back then, and some of the stuff in there is extraordinary.”

Leary, who died in 1996, coined the phrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out” and was labeled by Richard M. Nixon as “the most dangerous man in America.” He was present in Zelig-like fashion at some of the era’s epochal events. Thousands of letters and papers from Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Charles Mingus, Maynard Ferguson, Arthur Koestler, G. Gordon Liddy and even Cary Grant — an enthusiastic LSD user — are in the boxes.

 
Thank you Douglas Rushkoff!

 
Over at his essential NeuroTribes blog, Steve Silberman—who knew poet Allen Ginsberg well for twenty years, and was his teaching assistant at the Naropa Institute in Colorado—interviews author Peter Conners about his new book White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg, recently published by City Lights Books.

In November of 1966, the poet Allen Ginsberg made a modest proposal to a room full of Unitarian ministers in Boston. “Everybody who hears my voice try the chemical LSD at least once,” he intoned. “Then I prophecy we will all have seen some ray of glory or vastness beyond our conditioned social selves, beyond our government, beyond America even, that will unite us into a peaceful community.”

The poet had been experimenting with drugs since the 1940s as a way of achieving what his Beat Generation friends named the “New Vision,” methodically keeping lists of the ones he tried — morphine with William Burroughs, marijuana with fellow be-bop fans in jazz clubs, and eventually the psychedelic vine called ayahuasca with a curandero in Peru.

For Ginsberg, drugs were not merely an indulgence or form of intoxication; they were tools for investigating the nature of mind, to be employed in tandem with writing, an approach he called “the old yoga of poesy.” In 1959, he volunteered to become an experimental subject at Stanford University, where two psychologists who were secretly working for the CIA to develop mind-control drugs gave him LSD; listening to recordings of Wagner and Gertrude Stein in the lab, he decided that acid was “a very safe drug,” and decided that even his suburban poet father Louis might like to try it.

By the time he addressed the Unitarian ministers in Boston, Ginsberg had become convinced that psychedelics held promise as agents of transformative mystical experience that were available to anyone, particularly when combined with music and other art forms. In place of stiff, hollow religious observances in churches and synagogues, the poet proposed “naked bacchantes” in national parks, along with sacramental orgies at rock concerts, to call forth a new, locally-grown American spirituality that could unify a generation of Adamic longhairs and earth mothers alienated by war and turned off by the pious hypocrisy of their elders.

Ginsberg’s potent ally in this campaign was a psychology professor at Harvard named Timothy Leary, who would eventually become the most prominent public advocate for mass consumption of LSD, coining a meme that became the ubiquitous rallying cry of the nascent 20th-century religious movement as it proliferated on t-shirts, black-light posters, and neon buttons from the Day-Glo Haight-Ashbury to swinging London: Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.

Among those who took up the cause was the Beatles. John Lennon turned Leary’s woo-tastic mashups of The Tibetan Book of the Dead into one of the most profoundly strange, terrifying, and exhilarating tracks ever recorded: “Tomorrow Never Knows” on Revolver, which swooped in on a heart-stopping Ringo stutter-beat chased by clouds of infernal firebirds courtesy of backwards guitar and a tape loop of Paul McCartney laughing.

As the public faces of the psychedelic revolution, Ginsberg and Leary made a dynamic duo. The charming, boyish, Irish Harvard professor and the ecstatic, boldly gay, Hebraically-bearded Jersey bard became the de facto gurus of the movement they’d helped create — father figures for a generation of lysergic pilgrims who temporarily jettisoned their own fathers in their quest for renewable revelation.

By the close of the ’60s — which ominous stormclouds on the horizon in the form of violent debacles like Altamont, a Haight-Ashbury that had been taken over by speed freaks and the Mob, and Charles Manson’s crew of acid-addled zombie assassins — Ginsberg was already looking for more grounding and lasting forms of enlightenment, particularly in the form of Buddhist meditation.

The poet retained his counterculture cred until his death of liver cancer in 1997, but Leary didn’t fare as well. Subjected to obsessive persecution by government spooks like Watergate plumber G. Gordon Liddy, Leary launched a series of psychedelic communes that collapsed under the weight of their own ego-trips. Years of arrests, jail terms, spectacular escapes from prison aided by the Black Panthers, disturbing betrayals, and bizarre self-reinventions followed the brief season when the psych labs of Harvard seemed to give new birth to a new breed of American Transcendentalism that was as democratic as a test tube.

Read the interview at NeuroTribes.

Below, an early interview with Leary, before he started wearing the guru drag…
 

Mark Christensen discusses his new book about Merry Prankster/novelist Ken Kesey, Acid Christ: Ken Kesey, LSD, and the Politics of Ecstasy. Christensen himself, “grew up around the Kesey Chautauqua,” and weaves in incidents from his own life (like arm-wrestling Kesey!) into the narrative, in the process speaking to the notion of how Ken Kesey influenced his own life and values, coming of age within the hippie/counterculture milieu of the Pacific Northwest. Acid Christ is a “sheep’s eye-view of the shepherd,” and an interesting experiment in biography.

 
Two of the planet’s most dangerous minds, Timothy Leary and Paul Krassner, meet in a video shot by Nancy Cain, Paul’s wife, a few months before Leary’s death.

There is an aura of sadness (perhaps mine) laced with much humor and hope in this intimate video. Understandably wistful and distracted at times (he’s dying), Leary becomes most alive when talking about death. He seems to be genuinely excited about exploring the psychedelic possibilities of the final frontier (or is it?), the ultimate out-of-body experience, THE death trip. In these moments you see the fearless shaman who always embraced expanding his realities, regardless of public outcry or legal persecution. And it is both moving and inspiring.

In an e-mail message to Dangerous Minds, Nancy reminisced about Leary and that day in September of 1995:

Paul and Timothy had been friends since the early days at Millbrook when the famous LSD experiments took place. Now that Timothy had inoperable prostate cancer that was moving into his bones, we stopped by more often to visit him at his home up Laurel Canyon. Even though he was not well, Timothy was ever the perfect host. On the afternoon of this interview I had tagged along, and Paul and Tim were happy to have me record what would probably be one of the last times they would be together. Paul interviewed Tim. I could feel the sweetness and the warmth that they felt for each other. The back and forth and banter was wonderful. Tim’s remarks about technology and the future still seem fresh and innovative today.

Among other visits with Tim in Laurel Canyon, I recall one Sunday afternoon with guests Ed Moses, the painter, Harry Dean Stanton, the actor, and Aline Getty, the heiress (by marriage). Aline was currently touring with Timothy, doing college gigs. They had a traveling psychedelic video show and gave a talk on the subject of death. They were both near it. Death, that is. Aline had AIDS and Tim had senility (so he said). They did a flashy good show, which I had seen at Chapman College in Orange County. That afternoon Aline was playing us the videotape that she and Tim shot the previous week when they were busted at the airport in Dallas for smoking a cigarette inside the terminal. They set the whole thing up (perhaps more of an art event, I thought), arriving in a silver stretch limo and video of them looking around the airport for a police officer to light up in front of. The nice young cop said, “Oh, please go outside to smoke—don’t do this—you give me no choice.” So Aline and Tim were busted and carted off to a place where the camcorder couldn’t go. They were the first, I think, to get popped for any nicotine-related crime, other than Connie Francis (smoking on an actual airplane). I think it was quite satisfying for them. Especially for Aline. Tim, after all, had already had some rather more astonishingly terrifying adventures, including escaping from prison and being a fugitive.

On an afternoon not long before he died, I recall Tim asking each of his guests to join him in a balloonful of nitrous oxide. At first I said no, but Timothy pointed out, “Why not?” He shuffled over to his closet carrying a gigantic wrench, pulled back the sliding door and revealed the hugest tank of nitrous I had ever seen.

During the political conventions in 1972 in Miami, there was a lot of nitrous. We had what they called E-tanks full of the gas. Hudson Marquez, of TVTV, scored it by posing as a whipped-cream artist. Nitrous is used to propel whipped cream, which I hadn’t known until then. An E-tank of nitrous, which is the size you see at the dentist’s office, is heavy but it can be carried. The tank in Timothy Leary’s closet would need to be moved on a dolly. Anyway, Timmy took his wrench to the thing and expertly filled the first balloon. “Here ya go. Take it back over to the bed so you can fall back if you like. But wait till we all get there so we can do it together.” We had our twenty seconds that day.

On the day Timothy Leary died, Friday May 31, 1996, on Channel 9 they said it happened a few moments after midnight. The news crew interviewed a friend who was standing out on Timothy’s driveway. She said that he suddenly sat up in his bed and said, “Why?” Then a moment later, “Why not?” He seemed excited and he died. Channel 9 then showed a recent clip of Timothy standing outside a club on Hollywood Boulevard wearing a jazzy black and white sport jacket. On TV, Timothy was disregarding the reporter altogether and looking directly into the camera. “Don’t ask me anything,” Timothy was saying. “Think for yourself.” Then he added, “And question authority!”

We’re pleased to share Nancy Cain’s video of Paul Krassner interviewing Timothy Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) on September 5, 1995 in its entirety.

For insight on the cultural impact of video read Nancy’s fascinatingly informative “Video Days.”

Paul Krassner’s homepage is a motherlode of wit, insight, provocation and counterculture history. Indispensable.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds: Richard Metzger interviews Paul Krassner.

 
See more distortions after the jump…

 
Turn on, tune in, happy birthday! Dr. Timothy Francis Leary, the revolutionary philosopher, “most dangerous man in America” (as per Richard Nixon) and High Priest of LSD was born on this day, October 22, in 1920.

More Timothy Leary on Dangerous Minds

 
In February 1967, just a few weeks after the first Human Be-In, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Alan Watts discussed how to “drop out” and radically change society in an hour-an-half interview recorded on Watts’ houseboat. In amongst the naive hippie shit, there are parts of this that are as relevant today as they were back then.
 

 
A few days ago, I posted here about disco singer Monti Rock III, the first queen I ever saw on TV when I was a kid, and I mentioned that he had not really crossed my mind in a very long time… then coincidentally, yesterday, Robert Coddington, Nelson Sullivan’s archivist (who I wrote about here), gave me a copy of a short film by D.A. Pennebaker titled You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You. Who should turn up in this obscurity? Well, Monti Rock III, that’s who, then working as a celebrity hair stylist (he did the bridal party’s hair). A young Richard Alpert (AKA Ram Dass) and jazz great Charles Mingus also turn up in the film.

And Mrs. TImothy Leary? Well, after divorcing the High Priest of LSD—their marriage lasted about a year—the high fashion model then known as Nena von Schlebrügge married Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman. Their daughter, actress Uma Thurman, was born in 1970.

Here’s how Pennebaker describes the Leary nuptials:

This movie is something of a mystery. Timothy Leary was getting married to a model named Nena Von Schlebrugge up in Millbrook, New York at the Hitchcock house, where Leary had been carrying on his hallucinogenic revelries for the past year or so after leaving Harvard. It was rumored that this was going to be the wedding of the season, the wedding of Mr. And Mrs. Swing as Cab Calloway put it.  Blackwood took me downtown to meet Monte Rock III who was singing at Trudy Heller’s but who was also a very pricey and off-the-wall hairdresser and was in fact going to be doing the bride’s hair.  Nena’s brother, Bjorn, known as the “Baron” was a friend of the Hitchcock’s, as was I, and the idea of going along and filming the wedding seemed not unwarranted. I’ve always wanted to film someone getting married.

So we drove up in Monte Rock’s ancient Buick, Diane Arbus, an editor from Vogue whose name I can no longer remember, and of course Monte Rock, his fingers covered in rings. Close behind, Proferes and Desmond filmed us as we drove, up the Taconic and through the gates of the Hitchcock mansion.

There were Hitchcocks and friends and relations of Hitchcocks, the Baron and his court, a score of models, and Charles Mingus playing a lonely piano. Even Susan Leary fresh out of jail.  It was indeed an amazing wedding, and for all I know, an amazing marriage, although someone later told me it was over before I’d even finished editing the film.

After Nena divorced Leary she married a Tibetan scholar, Dr. Robert Thurman and her daughter Uma is Uma the actress.  Dick Alpert became his own guru, Baba Ram Dass and achieved a sainthood of his own.  Monte Rock III left Trudy Heller’s and went out to Hollywood and became famous for his line in the John Travolta movie, Saturday Night Fever, when as the disco DJ he exclaims, “I love that polyester look.” Charles Mingus got thrown out of his loft and sadly perished, and in time the Hitchcock house itself burned down, or so I’ve been told.  The mystery is that we never filmed anyone actually getting married.

D A Pennebaker, 1964, 12 min., b&w

 
Part II after the jump…

 
Noteworthy entry today at Dorian Cope’s great On This Deity blog:

Today we remember Timothy Leary’s daring and ingenious highwire escape across the highway from his Californian jail – a middle-aged Harvard professor yet symbol of the psychedelic revolution, Leary was assisted to freedom by members of the righteous terrorist organisation, the Weather Underground, and ably financed by those idealistic drug-dealing bikers, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Despite the negative outcome of this escapade – kidnapping, a brush with the Black Panthers, even more jail time for the good doctor and the selling out of revolutionary comrades – at least its high aims of uniting disparate radical groups ultimately failed only because of the extraordinary thoroughness with which members of the CIA, FBI, Police, Customs and IRS had managed successfully to infiltrate the Underground. That this gang of unmitigated government bastards had felt compelled to join forces in order to discredit and destroy Hippy Society is, however, merely evidence of how seriously they were being forced to take the actions of Radical America; and of how seriously their authority was being challenged. So today let’s not dwell on how the ‘60s Revolution turned in on itself, but instead remember that brief moment of unity when such disparate groups as the Black Panthers, the Weathermen and the leader of the psychedelic movement came together to confront the MAN.

Below, my interview with Nicholas Schou about his book, Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World:
 

 
Dorian Cope’s On This Deity

 
At Folsom Prison with Dr. Timothy Leary is an extraordinary counterculture document, filmed during Leary’s incarceration there. Under 30 minutes in length, this 1973 film shows Leary at his most engaging and personable. It’s a testament to his considerable charm that he was able to pull off such a performance, considering that the prison warden and other officials were sitting across the room listening as this was filmed.

Leary discusses his jailbreak (intimating that the daughter of a United States senator he refuses to name helped him), the revolution in consciousness and drugs, Eldridge Cleaver and what it feels like to be an imprisoned philosopher.

At Folsom Prison with Dr. Timothy Leary was used to raise awareness of the reasons Leary was imprisoned in the first place and to raise money to fight his sentence. Joanna Leary, who was behind this film, also introduces it.
 

 
Via the Timothy Leary Archive

An interview with Nicholas Schou, author of Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World. The inside story of the infamous gang of dope-dealing surfers who played a key role in the counterculture of the Sixties. It’s a mindblowing—and improbable—tale of drug smuggling, large scale marihuana farming and LSD distribution—basically, it’s the hidden history of how America got turned on. The story of the Brotherhood might’ve gone to the grave with the participants if not for Nicholas Schou’s intriguing history. Highly recommended.