The Beatles ’ Revolver and a Half-Century of LSD

Half a century ago—when the Beatles album Revolver was released on Aug. 5, 1966, in the U.K.—John Lennon ended the last song on the record with a lyrical message best understood by a certain subset of listener: “So play the game ‘existence’ to the end, of the beginning, of the beginning.” That song, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” was quoting from The Psychedelic Experience, written by psychedelic researchers Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert. Fittingly, the album dropped during a summer when it would seem that many of music’s biggest influencers were questioning “the game of existence” with one ingredient in particular: Lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. The Beach Boys had just brought out what some consider to be one of the first mainstream psychedelic rock albums, Pet Sounds. A year ahead of the Summer of Love, hippies were beginning to migrate to its epicenter, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, where America’s first head shop—the Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street—had opened that year. TIME devoted an essay to the topic, reporting that tens of thousands of college students had tried the drug. The following year would see the “Human Be-In” in San Francisco and the release of the movie The Trip. And so one might consider the summer of ’66 the start of something much, much bigger, says Russell Reising, professor of American culture and Asian studies at the Univers...
Source: TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized 1960s Drugs LSD medicine Research Science Source Type: news