Who The Hell Is Timothy Leary - Dearie?

Our joint song in Paris is Let The Sunshine from the musical Hair. Since I have never seen either the musical or the film version, it is a bewildering blend of lyrics - what do smells of laboratories have to do with Manchester, England? - which on the face of it appear disjointed. The only bit which is vaguely familiar is the "Let the sunshine in" chorus, but even that is without context.

Anyway, to try to make sense of it all, I've done a bit of a search, and it turns out that the story is about a guy called Claude Hooper Bukowski. Claude is from Flushing, Queens, but wishes he were from Manchester, England. Not sure where the advantage lies in that, but it does explain why Manchester, England is Claude's theme tune. It is the song he sings at the start of the show to introduce himself to the Tribe, a bunch of anti-war hippies (this being 1968 and all). To cut a very long and rather meandering story short, Claude eventually gets signed up for the Vietnam draft, letting down his friends.

What we are singing with Equivox, is in fact two songs, The Flesh Failures, a song sung by Claude in his shame at giving in to being a solder, in which he reprises his theme tune, which is then followed closely by Let The Sunshine, the song performed by the Tribe as the musical's finale. At the very end of the show, Claude dies in Vietnam.

To pile on that additional layer of complexity, the storyline to the film was significantly changed from the musical, and to explain the scene in the video above, the officer arriving in the car is the real Bukowski. Instead, the one who answers to Bukowski is his best friend George Berger, who took Claude's place so that Claude could spend his last night before shipping out with his girlfriend. When he sings, "That's me!" he is merely continuing this subterfuge, but the shot of his grave at the end indicates that, for his sacrifice for his friend, poor George died out in Vietnam.

Confused yet? Either way, someone dies in Vietnam, and the songs are about the tragedy of war. They are supposed to be sad and pensive, not chirpy and fun.

Oh, and this is a picture of Timothy Leary, the American writer, psychologist and advocate of psychedelic drug research and use. He is most famous as a proponent of the therapeutic and spiritual benefits of LSD and coined and popularized the catch phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out." Perhaps that explains the "laboratories" reference in the lyrics of the song? Who says being in the Pink Singers isn't educational?