Listen to Jimi Hendrix and Timothy Leary share a psychedelic jam session
In the early hours of the morning, Stephen Stills, Jimi Hendrix, John Sebastian, Buddy Miles and psychonaut Timothy Leary arrived at New York’s The Record Factory for an all-night recording session that would spawn one of the most brilliant and influential albums you’ve never heard of: 1970s You Can Be Anyone This Time Around.
By this time, Leary, a strong advocate of psychedelics like LSD, had already cemented himself as one of America’s most controversial psychologists and authors. In 1966, he’d addressed a crowd of 30,000 hippies in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. His speech, received by the attendants of the Human Be-In, included the famous phrase: “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” which would find its way into the lyrics of The Beatles’ ‘A Day in The Life’ in form of the line “I love to turn you on.”
In 1968, Leary decided to run for Governor of California against Ronald Raegan. You Can Be Anyone This Time Around was an attempt to raise money for the ill-fated campaign, the slogan for which was “Come together, join the party.” John Lennon, keen to support Leary in any way possible, agreed to write a campaign song. The following day, he sent Leary a tape with a demo of ‘Come Together’, of which he explained: “It’s gobbledygook,” Lennon told David Sheff. “‘Come Together’ was an expression that Leary had come up with for his attempt at being president or whatever he wanted to be, and he asked me to write a campaign song. I tried and tried, but I couldn’t come up with one. But I came up with this, ‘Come Together’, which would’ve been no good to him – you couldn’t have a campaign song like that, right?”
Leary wouldn’t have had time to use the song anyway. On December 26th, 1968, he was arrested on trumped-up charges of pot possession. After being found with two roaches in his pocket, he was sentenced to ten years in prison, with another ten years added on top of that for his previous arrest in 1965. The campaign quickly folded, but You Can Be Anyone survived and was released two years later in 1970. The spoken-word record, which features none other than Jimi Hendrix on bass, was apparently recorded in a single session and is often held up as one of the earliest records to utilise samples. Featuring fragments of records by The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and Ravi Shanker, it serves as a time capsule of the hippie movement’s most optimistic moment. Check out the album below.
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