Artists sabotaged Timothy Leary’s psychedelic lectures with Artaud recordings

Evidence

Then about eight minutes later he was still going, and we played another little gob of Artaud screaming. Ralph Metzner [Leary’s colleague] came running up to where our media control booth was and said to us, “You’ve broken your contract!” We just thought that was so terribly amusing. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 772

Categorization

• CANDY: The detail that Leary’s own colleague scolded the artists for ‘breaking your contract’ while they found it amusing is a delicious, tweetable anecdote about the clash between the psychedelic guru establishment and the emerging counterculture’s impish art.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in avant-garde conditions: this shows counterculture artists actively mocking the sanctimonious regime of the psychedelic movement itself.