This two-hour episode is divided into three parts. The opening sets are recent psychedelia, followed by a few archival releases including one from the Beatles latest super deluxe box set of Revolver. The last set is extended, mainly improvised tracks.

This episode also features a track from the compilation “Purple Haze From East Vol. 1” which collects 20 recordings from Chinese psychedelic and avant-garde artists. This compilation was recently released by WV Sorcerer Productions, which is based in France and China, but that’s about all I know about them. Through a brief exchange with them I discovered that they do plan to release a Vol. 2.

The theme of this episode is the “Paul is dead” rumor. As I mentioned in a previous episode I’ve been running a lot this year and I took the picture that I used for the cover image of this episode while I was out running not too long ago. I was coming down a hill and noticed that someone had spray painted “MISS HIM” with an arrow on the pavement. I have no idea what that might mean but it put me in mind of the rumor that circulated in 1969 that Paul McCartney had died three years earlier and that the Beatles had replaced him with a lookalike. So not only is that the theme of this episode, the “Paul is dead” rumor is also where I got the name of the podcast itself–Turn Me On, Dead Man.

We’ll also hear a couple of other recent archival releases. After the Beatles I’ll be playing a Peel Session track from the Heads reissue of Under Sided. And then we’ll hear a live recording Suzuki Junzo made a few years ago. Junzo is still recovering from injuries he suffered earlier this year, although I haven’t heard any updates about him in a while. This live recording just surfaced last week on the Bandcamp page called We Love You, Junzo.

We survived an election in the US this week. One of the results of the midterm elections was that Colorado became the second state to legalize magic mushrooms. That, along with Maryland and Missouri legalizing marijuana, indicates that the “war on drugs” may be finally winding down.

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After a 2+ month hiatus, Turn Me On, Dead Man is back with two hours of recent psychedelia. This episode is divided into three parts. In the first hour I cover psychedelic tracks released during the last few months, followed by a short set of notable reissues, and finally I round out the episode with some extended tracks, improvised and otherwise.

One notable track is “Cosmic Prophet” by Snakes Don’t Belong In Alaska. This track caught my attention because it opens with a passage from Arthur C. Clarke’s book 2001: A Space Odyssey talking about the ratio the number of people alive today to the number of human beings who have ever lived. Interesting to me because I teach a course called Population Geography and we actually cover this in a unit on population in history.

Arthur C. Clarke’s book version of 2001 was published in 1968 and he put the ratio of the dead to the living at 30:1. The ratio is actually lower than that now because the population of the world is just about to cross the 8 billion threshold, which is more than double the population of the world in 1968, and the estimate of the number of people who have ever lived is now around 117 billion–so the ratio now is more like 14:1. A few years ago the Population Reference Bureau released a video showing a timeline of the human population. I’m not exactly sure why they used the amped up soundtrack but it does illustrate this point effectively.

Anyway, I asked Snakes Don’t Belong In Alaska why they opened their track with this quote and Aaron explained to me, “The song inspiration comes from my realisation of my significance in being insignificant,” which is an interesting take on it. I guess I think about it a little bit differently, though. In the course I teach we talk a lot about human development. Around 1990 the UN began using the “Human Development Index” which is a measure of human progress and well-being. They wanted to shift the focus away from economic measures of progress to a more human centered approach. So given that through most of human history, only a select few were able to rise above the level of subsistence, when I think about how many people have ever lived it’s only been in the recent past that large numbers of people could focus on pursuits beyond bare existence. I wonder how many talented people didn’t have the opportunity to develop their abilities. How many Einsteins have there been? How many Jimi Hendrixes? How many Joey Ramones? I would imagine that there have been a great many people who weren’t fortunate enough to live in a social-technological environment to actualize their potential and share their accomplishments with a wide audience. Can you imagine a world without “I Wanna Be Sedated”? I mean, there had to be at least a few punks among the hunter-gatherers.

Some interesting reissues have come out recently. This episode includes a track from the White Hills album The Revenge of Heads On Fire, which is an expanded reissue of their 2007 album Heads On Fire. We’ll also hear a live track by Psychic Ills, recorded in 2012, and released as part of the Reverb Appreciation Society’s Live at Levitation series.

Going a little further afield, we’ll also hear a track from Naujawanan Baidar, who rework tracks from cassettes containing Afghan traditional music “by collaging traditional melodies, entrancing loops, and psychedelic noise.” This episode also includes a track from the recent LP compilation from Orchestra Gold called African Psychedelic Music. Orchestra Gold is a collaboration that began between Erich Huffaker, an American guitarist, and Mariam Diakite, a singer/percussionist from Mali. What’s interesting about Naujawanan Baidar and Orchestra Gold is that they emphasize the psychedelic orientation of their approach.

Just a note about the cover image I used for this episode. Running has become part of my daily life and I’ve logged over 1000 miles so far this year. I took this episode’s cover photo on one of my regular running routes. I kept noticing this van parked near a facility for the homeless and I was struck by the artwork on it. Actually what particularly caught my attention was the fart icon drawn on the heart. Simple but effective. After passing by it so often I’ve come to see this beat up van with a flat tire and a kind of defiant expression of peace and love as an effective metaphor for our world. Whenever I run by, I always take a moment to pay tribute to the peace and love van.

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In the last few episodes I’ve been exploring psychedelia from various parts of the world. The playlist in this episode is made up of new psychedelic music from Australia and New Zealand. I’ve noticed over the last couple of years that Australia, in particular, has a thriving psychedelic scene and this episode really bears that out. Not to take anything away from New Zealand or anywhere else for that matter, it’s just that so much good music is coming out of Australia and it’s really been enjoyable corresponding with the artists.

The drops in this episode come from the 1959 movie On The Beach. In that movie a nuclear war breaks out and the only life left in the world is in Australia, but even they’re not safe from the cloud of radiation that will eventually arrive. It’s a bleak movie, and with the end of the Cold War a lot of people (myself included) thought that we had left this behind and that the risk of nuclear war was remote. The situation has certainly changed with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Things don’t seem to be going well for Putin and he’s made noises about putting Russia’s nuclear arsenal on high alert. Even before that the doomsday clock was already set at 100 seconds to midnight–the closest that its ever been–and the UN secretary general recently said “The prospect of nuclear war is now back within the realm of possibility.”

So anyway, having said that, enjoy the great music in this hour of Turn Me On, Dead Man and just think of the message in the closing frame of On The Beach that said “There is still time, brother.”

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Trainspotting has taken on a narcotic connotation because of the 1996 film directed by Danny Boyle, based on the novel by Irvine Welsh. Although that story was not about psychedelics, the film has its share of hallucinatory moments, the sequel less so. About the music in this episode, the playlist features psychedelia that starts out more in the hallucinatory vein but then becomes more meditative. Check out the music map below. A good illustration of how psychedelia has become a worldwide phenomenon. This episode features artists from the US, Canada, the UK, Norway, Israel, Guatemala, and closes out with a soundscape from Peruvian artist Chino Burga.

The title of this episode is from something my two-year-old and I have been doing recently. We’ve been going to an overpass nearby and wait for trains to pass. I’d never thought of myself as a trainspotter but I guess I’ve had a fascination since my childhood days staying at my grandparents’ home. Their house was about 100 yards from train tracks and I vividly recall the booming sound of the freight trains on summer nights when all the windows were open. So anyway, where my son and I go there are two sets of tracks, one for the DC metro trains, which comes above ground where we are, and one for the intercity trains. It’s always a jolt when we get the metro drivers to honk the horn.

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The movie Soylent Green was released in 1973 and offers a dystopian view of the future, set in our current year, 2022. (Spoilers ahead) In Soylent Green’s vision of 2022, the world is overpopulated with a permanent heat wave from greenhouse gases. The Soylent company controls the food supply and they start producing a “miracle food” that they claim is made from plankton but as Charlton Heston discovers, it’s really made from human beings. In other words things get so bad by 2022 that cannibalism becomes the order of the day. As Tony Sokol points out in Den of Geek, Soylent Green did anticipate some of the darker features of our current world: face coverings, meat substitutes, climate change. Cannibalism, though? I don’t know, we’re not quite there yet but who knows? Anyway, in our timeline 2022 is already starting off with great psychedelia. All of the tracks in this episode have been released in the last month.

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