Another passenger on that first flight was Timothy Leary—or at least, a sample of his remains. I don't know what condition the remains were in: we all know what Leary was famous for: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Leary was a doctor of psychology at Harvard when one of his mates took him to Mexico and fed him some mushrooms. The experience, which taught him more about the brain and its possibilities in five hours—he later said—than 15 years of research in psychology had, led him to start a program studying the effects of LSD on graduate students back at Harvard.

Swiftly the program was dropped in favour of tripping parties and the research got some bad publicity and Leary was sacked from the university and in 1966 LSD was made illegal. After several arrests for things like possession of marijuana and a lecture tour promoting LSD and psychedelic drugs as a way of opening the mind and freeing the nervous system, Leary ran for Governor of California against Reagan in '69 with a campaign slogan of “Come together, join the party.”

From that phrase, Leary's friend, John Lennon, wrote a campaign song. It didn't actually get to be used in the campaign which came to an abrupt end when Leary was again arrested for marijuana possession but Lennon reworked the song for the album Abbey Road released later that year. ‘Come Together’ is a cracker of a tune with lyrics rewritten to contain digs at McCartney (who provided one kickass bass line) and Harrison.

The Abbey Road album, of course, contained some outstanding songs—it is surely among the greatest records ever—‘I Want You (She's So Heavy)’, ‘Something’, ‘Golden Slumbers’… such magnificent material.

Harrison's ‘Here Comes The Sun’ came after he had been playing around with a riff that he and Eric Clapton had earlier used for the bridge in the song ‘Badge’ that Cream used for their final album Goodbye. Clapton and Harrison were good friends—Harrison had Clapton play on his song ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ for the White Album and on All Things Must Pass, Harrison's first post-Beatles album.

Eric Clapton's own post-Cream project was Derek And The Dominoes (the name came from a compere who kept getting Clapton's first name wrong when introducing them at a gig) who recorded only one studio album. But what an album! Duane Allman plays some magnificent slide guitar through all four sides of this double LP and challenged Clapton to raise his game with some stunning fretwork. Their version of ‘Little Wing’ (recorded only eight days before Jimi Hendrix's death) is, in my opinion, better than Hendrix's and it is forbidden in rock music to say anything is better than Hendrix. The title track from the album, ‘Layla’ with Allman's riff over Clapton's chords and lyrics about his unrequited love for George Harrison's wife, proved to be a mammoth hit and is now an evergreen Gold FM favourite.

The piano-driven coda was written by (and on the recording the piano was played by) Jim Gordon who was the drummer of Derek And The Dominoes. He had been a Los Angeles session drummer before joining Clapton. He worked with such people as the Byrds, the Monkees, Frank Zappa. You can hear his drumming on the old Carly Simon classic ‘You're So Vain.’ Gordon suffered from acute paranoid schizophrenia and in 1983 he murdered his mother with a hammer. Sentenced to 16 years to life, he is currently serving his time in California Men's Colony.

The CMC is a prison designed to hold about 3900 inmates; today it holds over 6600. Overcrowding of American prisons is a well-known problem and the reduction of overcrowding was one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's policies for his run for the position of Governor of California (the same position Leary ran for, three and a half decades earlier).

Exactly what Schwarzenegger is doing running California, I don't know. Reagan? Schwarzenegger? Perhaps there is something in the water in California. This isn't the forum to speculate. Schwarzenegger—the star of such fare as Kindergarten Cop,Junior, and True Lies—got his Hollywood breakthrough in the film Conan The Barbarian.

OK, so Conan is no Citizen Kane but it is still a terrific flick. The Riddle Of Steel, The Tree Of Woe… “There comes a time, thief, when the jewels cease to sparkle, when gold loses its lustre, the throneroom becomes a prison, and all that is left is a father's love for his child.” You can't help but love it. The film has very little dialogue; the narrative is often carried by Basil Poledouris's dramatic and brilliant score.

The producer really liked Carl Orff's Carmina Burana but the makers of Excalibur had used it for their film a year earlier so Poledouris was told to write something that sounded similar. Bits of “Dies Irae” from the requiem mass and of Ravel's Bolero were inspirations and a huge orchestra and choir employed for the recording. It is one of my favourite movie soundtracks.

When I was a younger lad with a bit more spare time than I have now, I made a tape of all the musical cues from a videotape I had of the movie and I often listened to it in the car. I did the same for Ennio Morricone's unparalleled score to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly which is probably the best thing ever. Go and rent GB&U tonight and listen to the score. Watch Clint Eastwood if you like, the movie is cool, but listen to the score. The scene where Tuco has found Sad Hill Cemetary is, thanks to Morricone, the finest scene in film history.

The composer Michael Nyman provided some of film's finest scenes when collaborating with Director Peter Greenaway in movies like Prospero's Books and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. One of Nyman's few ventures into Hollywood was for the Andrew Niccol film Gattaca staring Ethan Hawke. It was a movie about genetic predetermination with Heinlein/Huxley themes of utopia and destiny. It left me somewhat bored but it was kind of cool. In order to invoke an Orwellian-Big Brother style of soulless newspeak the world in which Gattaca was set had all public announcements read in Esperanto.

This language was constructed by Ludovic Zamenhof in the late 19th century and is generally now thought to be a failure. Zamenhof's vision was that everybody would know a common second language thus solving “the language problem” that hindered communication, caused misunderstandings, distanced people and ultimately caused wars. The language is easy to learn and has been used to communicate between most countries of the world but only by a small minority, almost all of which have already learnt English to some degree.

A common criticism of Esperanto is that it cannot be a real language as it has no culture. This criticism seems to be belied by the amount of material, fiction and non-fiction, written natively in Esperanto. An Esperantan poet has been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. A couple of Asterix books have appeared in Esperanto and if that is not culture, I don't know what is. There has even been a studio movie written and performed entirely in Esperanto.

Made in 1965, the film Incubus tells a timeless story of good vs evil and so on, shot in stunning black and white by Conrad Hall who went on to win Oscars for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and American Beauty. The movie starred a 33-year-old classically trained Shakespearean actor—speaking Esperanto in his French-Canadian accent—who, a year later, would gain fame as Captain Kirk in Gene Roddenberry's new TV series Star Trek.

And that is where we started.

¶ 10:30 pm