Not directly music-related, but a fine reading suggestion for the end of weekend:
Aldous Huxley, the renowned author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception, was one of the first in Los Angeles to take LSD and was soon joined by others including the writer Anaïs Nin. The screenwriter Charles Brackett discovered “infinitely more pleasure” from music on LSD than he ever had before, and the director Sidney Lumet tried it under the supervision of a former chief of psychiatry for the U.S. Navy. Lumet says his three sessions were “wonderful,” especially the one where he relived his birth and, after checking with his father, learned that the experience was factually accurate, not simply symbolic. Another early experimenter was Clare Boothe Luce, the playwright and former American ambassador to Italy, who in turn encouraged her husband, Time publisher Henry Luce, to try LSD. He was impressed and several very positive articles about the drug’s potential ran in his magazine in the late 50s and early 60s, praising Sandoz’s “spotless” laboratories, “meticulous” scientists, and LSD itself as “an invaluable weapon to psychiatrists.”
