Rival avant-garde factions dismissed each other’s psychedelic spectacles as rip-offs

Evidence

Leary’s first psychedelic celebration was provocatively (or hilariously) titled The Death of the Mind. Opening night, the 2,000-seat Village Theatre was packed. The line outside had stretched nearly to St. Mark’s Place, where the Velvet Underground was back at the Open Stage, now owned by Albert Grossman, who, supposedly at Bob Dylan’s suggestion, had renamed the venue the Balloon Farm. The Velvets resented working for their bête noire and regarded The Death of the Mind as a pathetic rip-off. Morrissey deemed Leary a ludicrous con artist while one of Leary’s associates dismissively told Richard Goldstein that the Exploding Plastic Inevitable was “just an amphetamine scene.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 927

Categorization

• SHARE: For anyone into the Velvet Underground scene: their dismissal of Leary’s spectacle (‘just an amphetamine scene’ thrown at EPI) is a great inside-baseball detail.