Moodies’ Song Included On Leary Tribute Album

The Moody Blues have a track on a new tribute album to Timothy Leary. It’s an extraordinary album called “Beyond Life with Timothy Leary,” containing Leary monologues set to skillfully spacy, ambient techno music, along with contributions by Allen Ginsberg, the Moodies and others.

The Moodies’ track is “Legend of a Mind,” an old band tune (and psychedelic hit) in which the lyric was changed from “Timothy Leary’s dead” to “Timothy Leary lives.”

“We first met Leary in 1968 at a park in Los Angeles,” Moody Blues singer Justin Hayward says. “He invited us up to his ranch outside LA, but some members of the band didn’t go because they were afraid of having their drinks spiked.”

The ranch was home to “a communal, free-love kind of lifestyle,” says Hayward, who kept in touch with Leary and called him “a mischievous Irishman … and eternally youthful.”

The Moodies are staying young with another summer tour, again backed by different orchestras in each city. (They recently performed with the Spokane Symphony at the Gorge.) “We were intending to be without orchestras this tour, but the promoters convinced us to keep doing it.”

The Moodies are not touring behind a new album (instead another “Greatest Hits” package), but hope to have a new one next time, perhaps in their more ornate “Days of Future Passed” style of the ‘60s, says Hayward.

At present, he has a new solo disc, “The View from the Hill,” a gently rocking album with songs he first envisioned for the Moodies. Hayward will support it with his own shows after the Moodies tour.