Leary's tribute disc offers 'enough inspired weirdness'

Robert H. Becker/Arizona Summer Wildcat

"I'm Timothy Leary and I'm 75 years old and, as a matter of fact, I believe that I just now have died. It was a wonderful experience . awesome. It's exciting. Next time I die, oh yeah, it's going to be tremendo us, monumental . oh yeah."

Thus begins Beyond Life With Timothy Leary (Mercury Records), an 11- track tribute compact disc put together to mark the passing of the late '60s figurehead and psychedelic PR man. The majority of Beyond Life was created with snippets taken from conversat ions Leary recorded for Mercury in the '60s and shortly before his death, reassembled and re-mixed over original works by Leary-inspired artists.

(Rumor has it that Mercury records initially wanted to throw together a compilation of all the recording artists ever inspired by LSD, but didn't think a 955 CD box set would sell too easily.)

I got to hear Leary speak a few years ago and that speech reminds me of this CD. For the first five minutes he seemed incoherent and loopy, rambling along while the crowd exchanged "we just paid $15 to hear a fried geezer" glances. Things were looking ugl y. But then, as if the two lobes of his brain decided to cooperate, Leary switched into high gear and hopped down off of the stage, pacing through the crowd and spouting off his ideas on everything from the Gulf War to his newfound interest in the Interne t.

Beyond Life is like that speech. The trippy, multi-image CD cover, the mushroom logos, the Leary-as-Buddha meditation photos - it prepares you for the archangel of acid shtick, readying you to either lick the liner notes or to write off the CD as a bunch of cut-and-paste Leary sayings looped over Tibetan death chants.

But there's some good stuff here. On this disk, it's Allen Ginsberg's "A Tale of the Tribe," a poet's look at the legacy of Leary's life, a track made even eerier by Ginsberg's own death earlier this year. "Lion's Mouth" by Ministry's Al Jourgensen stands out too and balances the CD's oh-so-conducive-to-tripping grooves with just the right kind of apocalyptic, guitar dominated tribute you'd expect from Jourgensen.

As for the tracks dominated by Leary's own reassembled words, enough of them work to offset those that don't. "While Birds Sing," has Leary pep-talking through an intense trip or death, you can't tell which, and that's the point. "Why Not? Why Not? Why No t?" is a spooky, five minute track that captures some of Leary's ideas on death and dying, i.e. "If you bring me back in the future ... bring me back any time except when a Republican administration is in power."

Other tracks can't be saved by the spoken-word trick and end up failing miserably. Namely "Goodbye, Goodbye," which could have been a damn good track if it weren't for the overdone music drowning out some of Leary's more emotional sentences.

Taken as a just a CD full of music, Beyond Life works just fine. It's a little on the new-age side, sure, but there's enough inspired weirdness here to keep you listening. Taken as the final tribute to Timothy Leary, though, it could have been done better . Splitting and re-mixing Leary's words into fragmented poetry may be in tune with Leary's "non-linear way of doing things," as the CD's producer called it. But using his uncut voice would have at least captured the emotional side of Leary's words as he c ame to terms with the One Big Trip he had not yet taken.