Moody Blues honor Leary with a twist

BY ROGER CATLIN
The Hartford Courant

"Timothy Leary's dead," the Moody Blues intoned in 1968-28 years before the fact.

And now after Timothy Leary's death May 31, at age 75, following a long, public bout with prostate cancer, an album will be released with a revised version of the same song, "Legend of a Mind."

This one will be wrong, too.

It begins: "Timothy Leary lives..."

The change wasn't the band's idea, lead singer Justin Hayward says.

"What happened was PolyGram was doing a definitive video biography of his life and death-which is what he wanted, as a matter of fact. He was doing a lot of filming of his last few weeks. And they asked us, since we're the only band who apparently wrote a song about him, to re­record or do an acoustic version of 'Legend of a Mind,' which is what we did.

"It was really the idea of the director of the movie to put a different slant on the lyrics."

The new version, recorded in April, will be part of an album of spoken­word interviews from Leary and other '60s figures. It will be released along with the video documentary.

Hayward says the Moody Blues didn't know Leary-and hadn't even traveled to America when member Ray Thomas wrote "Legend of a Mind" for the album "In Search of the Lost Chord."

"Some of us in the band-and this was 1966, '67-were going through our own psychic experiences, as a lot of musicians were at the time, probably being led by the Beatles. We were reading a lot of underground press and reading about Tim Leary, so we put him in," Hayward says.

"The song is a very tongue­in­cheek version, a very cheeky English version of what we thought things would be like in San Francisco in the 'flower power' days," he says. "It was tongue in cheek, but with a background of serious meaning. It did mean something to us. We were using a lot of phrases of the time, extracts from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, talking about the astral plane and so forth, and it's a reflection of that."

The Moody Blues didn't meet Leary until 1968. "We met Tim, and he wasn't offended by our lyrics at all. He enjoyed it, and we became friends over the years."

Hayward says he last saw Leary about three years ago.

Hayward says he has mixed feelings about doing the track over and tying its release to Leary's passing.

"It's a morbid thing, waiting for him to die," he says. "But that's what he wanted. He was quite a remarkable man."

As for Leary's example in increasing awareness of hallucinogenic drugs, Hayward says people were free to make up their own minds. Everyone is responsible for their own actions, and to blame him for misguiding people is just stupid."