SAN DIEGO ARTS : Pop Arts

Aging acid-heads of the 1960s, get ready for the flashback to end all flashbacks! Timothy Leary, the notorious LSD guru who once advised the world to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” will be appearing tonight at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach for what’s billed as “an evening of stand-up philosophy.”

Huh?

“Don’t mistake that to mean I’m a stand-up comedian,” Leary said, by phone from his Los Angeles home. “I’m not going to get up on stage and talk about how small my penis is, like Robin Williams (does). What I do is perform philosophy. I just throw out screwball ideas, like a pitcher, and try to get the audience to laugh, or think, or be shocked, or be outraged.”

For nearly three decades, Leary has done plenty of shocking and outrageous things. He first gained notoriety in 1960 when, as a psychology professor at Harvard University’s Center for Personality Research, he began his clinical study of psychedelic drugs--specifically, LSD, which at the time was legal.

Three years later, his vocal advocacy of drug use led to his dismissal from the Harvard faculty. Leary promptly opened his own research center, the privately funded Castalia Foundation in Millbrook, N.Y., where he continued his experimentations with psychedelic drugs.

Before long, Leary found himself heralded as the symbol of the burgeoning counterculture. He traveled extensively in the Far East and India, comparing notes with monks, mystics and philosophers; he wrote and lectured about the alleged benefits of drug use all over the United States.

At the first Love-In in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, in January, 1967, Leary uttered the famous “turn on, tune in, drop out” slogan. A year later, he was immortalized by the Moody Blues in the song “Legend of a Mind.”

In January, 1970, Leary was sentenced to 10 years in prison for possessing less than half an ounce of marijuana. Nine months later, he was sprung from the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo by the infamous Weather Underground and he fled to Algeria with black revolutionary Eldridge Cleaver.

In 1973, Leary was captured by Drug Enforcement Agency agents in Afghanistan, extradited to the United States and sent back to prison, where he remained until his parole in 1976.

Since then, according to a press release announcing his local “stand-up philosophy” appearance, he’s been equal parts “philosopher, author, actor, computer-software designer, lecturer, nightclub performer, free-lance gadfly and ahead of his time.”

“People are constantly asking me, how can a philosopher appear in nightclubs?” Leary said. “My answer is that philosophers are supposed to stir up new ideas, and major-league philosophers are never found in college campuses or on the payrolls of state-supported institutions, but in nightclubs, comedy clubs, port city barrooms, and anywhere else that rowdy, disrespectful people hang out.

“That’s because modern philosophy is best expressed through music, double-meaning jokes and graffiti, things like that. And I’m convinced Socrates and Voltaire would sit in with me if they were still around.”