Ash Ra Tempel, Timothy Leary

CD - Remastered by Manuel Göttsching. "Ash Ra Tempel meet LSD guru Timothy Leary for 1973's tripped out Seven Up. Ash Ra Tempel's third release features Harvard professor Timothy Leary on vocals. Originally released in 1973, this edition on MIG has been remastered by Ash Ra Tempel leader Manuel Gottsching. More otherworldly acid rock!"

The story of how this album came to be seems worthy of mention, if not a Lifetime movie. Leary's Wikipedia page gives us the background, which begins with Leary's second arrest in Laguna Beach California for possession of two marijuana roaches and subsequent 10-year sentence. "On his arrival in prison, he was given psychological tests used to assign inmates to appropriate work details. Having designed some of these tests himself (including the "Leary Interpersonal Behavior Test"), Leary answered them in such a way that he seemed to be a very conforming, conventional person with a great interest in forestry and gardening. The tale of acid sage Dr. Timothy Leary’s prison escape and subsequent exile is among the most amusing stories in the annals of drug culture lore—though sentenced to an absurd twenty years for utterly petty offenses including possession of a couple of roaches, Leary was able to game the prison system: as a reputable Harvard psychologist, it happened that he himself had designed the psychological examinations he was given by prison administrators to determine his security and work situations. He got himself assigned to a cushy gardening job in a minimum security facility, from which he handily escaped, issuing an outlandish revolutionary screed to taunt authorities shortly after he fled. Via a series of sneaks involving the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, an arms dealer, and a socialite whom he eventually married Leary ended up in Switzerland, where he met with the German Kosmiche band Ash Ra Tempel, with whom he recorded the album Seven Up. Formed by musicians from Eruption and Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel mostly shunned structured songs in favor of lengthy and often downright fierce improvisations. Their albums typically featured two side-length compositions, a feral freakout on side one, and a more ambient, electronics-driven suite on the flip, presumably to help sand the edges off from side one.