Rock Groups and Intellectuals Killed My Daughter

(the part of the video I'm discussing starts at 4:20)

Have you ever seen the video of Timothy Leary being verbally attacked by Art Linkletter on a New York talk show in 1990 or so? I bring it up because it’s a great illustration of Ross’s point about how both popular culture and intellectuals produce ripples in our culture, albeit in different ways.

First some background: Long-running TV personality Art Linkletter always blamed 1960s Harvard-professor-turned-LSD-guru Timothy Leary for the suicide of his daughter, Diane, who supposedly killed herself due to LSD. When Linkletter met Leary on this TV show via satellite, the sparks flew. But Linkletter didn’t only blame Leary; in his interview he also mentions rock music, poets, and novelists:

“And mind you, I do not blame Dr. Leary for all of this. I think he was an important part of it. Such things as Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane and the rock groups singing the songs of drugs. People who were like Ginsberg the poet and even Aldous Huxley and his Doors of Recep…uh…Perception was talking about the glories of drug abuse.”

Nevertheless, Linkletter holds special contempt for Leary and argues that Leary had a particularly strong influence because he was an intellectual:

“But Timothy Leary happened to be an intellectual, university-based guru and gave the youngsters a kind of a rallying point. They weren’t just talking about hippies, they were talking about an intellectual leader. And he, by saying these things, was giving them an additional argument for experimentation [. . .].”

There’s a lot going on here. First Linkletter’s choices are striking: popular rock music from Jefferson Airplane, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, relatively highbrow British novelist Aldous Huxley, and intellectual Leary. All colluded, according to Linkletter, in marketing drugs to the youth of the 1960s. But each did so, presumably, in a different way—each according to their own kind of authority. “At the heart of the story about intellectuals and popular culture,” explains Ross, “is a structural interrelatedness between knowledge and power” (5). While Jefferson Airplane had some catchy hits, their authority couldn’t quite match Leary’s: the former was merely branded with RCA Victor, while the latter was branded with Harvard.

Linkletter’s list is just one particularly interesting example of how intellectuals and culture are “fractionated [. . .] into countless arrangements of minute differences of taste and consumption, each governed by the authority of cultural competence, whether inherited or else explained by reference to an occupational hierarchy based on education and training” (6).

Linkletter knows this implicitly. Did you notice that his list goes from the force with the least authority and lowest position on the occupational hierarchy to the force with the most authority and highest occupation?

1. Jefferson Airplane (commercial rock group)
2. Allen Ginsberg (NYC Beat poet)
3. Aldous Huxley (British novelist)
4. Timothy Leary (Harvard professor)

Linkletter’s account is striking and reminds me of the way in which Ross talks about intellectuals’ relationship to popular culture.