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Nov 23, 1897

Mescaline is first isolated and identified by German chemist Arthur Heffter.   

Details

Arthur Heffter conclusively demonstrated that mescaline was the main hallucinogenic component in peyote by consuming 150 mg of mescaline hydrochloride. This was the first psychedelic experience with a purified compound.


(http://www.erowid.org/)

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NOVEMBER 23, 1953

FRANK OLSON DECIDES TO RESIGN

Monday morning at 7:30 a.m., Frank Olson told his supervisor, Army Col. Vincent Ruwet, that he wanted to resign. According to his sons, his decision was based on 'ethical concerns regarding the CIA's conduct, including the extreme interrogations he had witnessed and the experiment at Deep Creek Lake? Olson told his wife later, "I talked to Vin. He said that I didn't make a mistake. Everything is fine. I'm not going to resign. The next day, Ruwet and Lashbrook convinced Olson to see a psychiatric doctor in New York. Actually, he was meeting with Harold Abramson, an allergist-pediatrician, who was working with the CIA.


(https://frankolsonproject.org)




Frank Rudolph Olson (July 17, 1910 – November 28, 1953) was an American bacteriologist, biological warfare scientist, and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee who worked at Camp Detrick (now Fort Detrick) in Maryland. At a meeting in rural Maryland, he was covertly dosed with LSD by his CIA supervisor and, nine days later, plunged to his death from the window of a 13th-story New York City hotel room. The U.S. government first described his death as a suicide, and then as misadventure, while others allege murder. The Rockefeller Commission report on the CIA in 1975 acknowledged their having conducted drug studies.

Biography

Olson was born in Hurley, Iron County, Wisconsin, and earned both B.S. and Ph.D. degrees (Bacteriology, 1938) at the University of Wisconsin. He married and had three children: Eric, Nils, and Lisa. Olson worked for a time at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and then served as a captain in the U.S. Army Chemical Corps.

As a civilian, he was recruited to Camp Detrick, and to the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories, by the distinguished UW scientist Ira Baldwin, the technical director there. (Baldwin had been his departmental advisor at UW.) At Camp Detrick, Baldwin worked with industrial partners such as George W. Merck and the U.S. military to establish the top secret U.S. bioweapons program beginning in 1943, during World War II, a time when interest in applying modern technology to warfare was high. Olson's duties included experiments with aerosolized anthrax.[4] There were allegations that the US used biological warfare during the Korean War but the government denied this. After 10 years, Olson was a senior bacteriologist at the program.

At some point while assigned as a civilian U.S. Army contractor, Olson began working as a CIA employee with the CIA's Technical Services Staff (TSS), run by Sidney Gottlieb and his deputy Robert Lashbrook. Some of his CIA colleagues were involved in the MKNAOMI-MKULTRA program, previously known as Project Artichoke and, earlier, Project Bluebird. It was a program to explore the possible espionage and military uses of psychotropic drugs.

The author Ed Regis reports that the meeting at which Olson was dosed with LSD took place at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland:

    Deep Creek Lake was three hours by car from Camp Detrick. On Wednesday morning, November 18, 1953, about a week before Thanksgiving, a group from the SO Division, including Vincent Ruwet, chief of the division, John Schwab, Frank Olson, Ben Wilson, Gerald Yonetz, and John Malinowski, drove out to the retreat... The Detrick group was met at the lodge by Sid Gottlieb, his deputy Robert Lashbrook, and a couple of others from the CIA....On the second day of the retreat, after dinner, Gottlieb spiked a bottle of Cointreau with a small quantity of a substance that he and his TSS colleagues privately referred to as "serunin" but which was in fact lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD.

Olson asked to quit the biowarfare program the week after the retreat:

    Ruwet was surprised to see Olson at 7:30 in the morning, but asked him in. Olson told Ruwet that he was dissatisfied with his own performance at the retreat, that he was experiencing considerable self-doubts, and that in fact he had decided he would like to be out of the germ warfare business. He wanted to leave Camp Detrick and devote his life to something else.

Olson subsequently suffered severe paranoia and a nervous breakdown. The CIA sent him to New York City to see one of their physicians, who recommended that Olson be placed into a mental institution for recovery. This was Harold Abramson, an allergist-pediatrician, who was helping the CIA with the psychotropic research into the effects of the drug.

The ensuing police report said that on his last night in Manhattan, Olson purposely threw himself out of the window of his tenth-floor hotel room at the Hotel Statler, which he had been sharing with Lashbrook, and died shortly after impact.


(https://en.wikipedia.org)

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Quote:

"Another Brick in the Wall" is a three-part composition on Pink Floyd's eleventh studio album The Wall (1979), written by the bassist, Roger Waters. "Part 2", a protest song against corporal punishment and rigid and abusive schooling, features a children's choir. At the suggestion of the producer, Bob Ezrin, Pink Floyd incorporated elements of disco.

"Part 2" was Pink Floyd's first UK single since "Point Me at the Sky" (1968). It sold more than four million copies worldwide and topped singles charts in 14 countries, including the UK and the US. It was nominated for a Grammy Award and was ranked number 384 on Rolling Stone's list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time".

B-side "One of My Turns"
Released 23 November 1979
Recorded April–November 1979
Genre    Art rock Funk rock disco protest song
Length
    3:11 (single version)
    3:59 (album version)
    3:54 (A Collection of Great Dance Songs version)
    5:43 (album version combined with "The Happiest Days of Our Lives", alternative radio edit)
Label    Harvest (UK) Columbia (US)

Songwriter Roger Waters


(https://en.wikipedia.org)






23 November 1979
Pink Floyd's single Another Brick In The Wall, Part 2 (B-side: One Of My Turns) was released in the UK. It was the group's first UK single since Point Me At The Sky in 1968, and spent four weeks at No. 1 in the charts.


(http://www.pinkfloyd.com/)

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That's right!  And today is the 35th anniversary of "Another Brick In The Wall Part 2" single. 

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"Another Brick in the Wall" is the title of three songs set to variations of the same basic theme, on Pink Floyd's 1979 rock opera, The Wall, subtitled Part 1 (working title "Reminiscing"), Part 2 (working title "Education"), and Part 3 (working title "Drugs"). All parts were written by Pink Floyd's lead vocalist and bassist, Roger Waters. Part II is a protest song against rigid schooling in general and boarding schools in the UK in particular. It was also released as a single and provided the band's only number-one hit in the United Kingdom, the United States, West Germany and many other countries. In addition, in the US, along with the tracks, "Run Like Hell", and "Don't Leave Me Now", "Another Brick in the Wall" reached number fifty-seven on the disco chart.

In the UK, it was Pink Floyd's first single since 1968's "Point Me at the Sky"; the song was also the final number-one single of the 1970s. For Part II, Pink Floyd received a Grammy nomination for Best Performance by a Rock Duo or Group and lost to Bob Seger's "Against the Wind". In addition, Part II was number 375 on Rolling Stone '​s list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time". The single sold over 4 million copies worldwide.

The single, as well as the album The Wall, were banned in South Africa in 1980 after the song was adopted by supporters of a nationwide school boycott protesting racial inequities in education under the apartheid regime.

Part 2

Composition

In the album version of The Wall, "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)" segues from "The Happiest Days of Our Lives", with Roger Waters' signature scream.[citation needed] The song has strong drums, a well-known bass line and distinctive guitar parts in the background with a smooth, yet edgy guitar solo. The song also features a choir of schoolchildren singing in the second verse: as the song ends, the sounds of a school yard are heard, along with a Scots teacher who continues to lord it over the children's lives by shouting "Wrong! Do it again!", and "If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?!", and "You! Yes! You behind the bikesheds! Stand still, laddie!", all of it dissolving into the dull drone of a phone ringing and ending with a deep sigh.

School choir

Producer Bob Ezrin had immediately recognised the hit potential of this song, but it took some manoeuvring behind the band's back until "Part II" took its eventual form.

It was Ezrin's idea to use a school choir for this song, as he explained to Guitar World in 2009:

    The most important thing I did for the song was to insist that it be more than just one verse and one chorus long, which it was when Roger wrote it. When we played it with the disco drumbeat I said: "Man, this is a hit! But it's one minute 20. We need two verses and two choruses." And they said, "Well you're not bloody getting them. We don't do singles, so fuck you." So I said, "Okay, fine", and they left. And because of our two [tape recorder] set up, while they weren't around we were able to copy the first verse and chorus, take one of the drum fills, put them in between and extend the chorus.

    Then the question is what do you do with the second verse, which is the same? And having been the guy who made Alice Cooper's School's Out, I've got this thing about kids on record, and it is about kids after all. So while we were in America, we sent [recording engineer] Nick Griffiths to a school near the Floyd studios [in Islington, North London]. I said, "Give me 24 tracks of kids singing this thing. I want Cockney, I want posh, fill 'em up", and I put them on the song. I called Roger into the room, and when the kids came in on the second verse there was a total softening of his face, and you just knew that he knew it was going to be an important record.

Griffiths approached music teacher Alun Renshaw of Islington Green School, around the corner from Pink Floyd's Britannia Row Studios, about the choir.

Though the school received a lump sum payment of £1000, there was no contractual arrangement for royalties from record sales. Under a 1996 UK copyright law, they became eligible for royalties from broadcasts, and after royalties agent Peter Rowan traced choir members through the website Friends Reunited and other means, they lodged a claim for royalties with the Performing Artists' Media Rights Association in 2004.

Disco beat

The idea for the disco beat came likewise from Ezrin. As David Gilmour explained in 2009:

    It wasn't my idea to do disco music, it was Bob's. He said to me, "Go to a couple of clubs and listen to what's happening with disco music," so I forced myself out and listened to loud, four-to-the-bar bass drums and stuff and thought, Gawd, awful! Then we went back and tried to turn one of the [song's] parts into one of those so it would be catchy.

Of the final outcome, Roger Waters has commented:

    It was great—exactly the thing I expected from a collaborator.

David Gilmour said:

    And it doesn't, in the end, not sound like Pink Floyd.

Plot

After being insulted by the teacher, Pink dreams that the kids in his school begin to protest against their abusive teachers. The song talks about how he had a personal wall around him from the rest of the world, the teachers were just another brick in the wall.[citation needed]

Film version

Following "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" Pink starts to daydream during his class. He imagines several students marching in unison to the beat of the song, following a path until they enter a steamy tunnel section to re-emerge as putty-faced clones void of individual distinction and proceed to fall blindly into an oversized meat-grinder. Starting with Gilmour's guitar solo, the children destroy the school building using hammers (foreshadowing the subsequent neo-fascist Nazi-like animated sequence with its marching hammers) and crowbars, creating a bonfire, dragging their teacher out of the burning school kicking and screaming while chanting "We don't need no education." The song ends with Pink rubbing his hand, which the teacher slapped with a ruler in the song previously.

During the song, the teacher's "meat and pudding" lines are folded into the first few lines of the school choir's lines (with the instrumental breaks between shortened by a bar in 2 places), and are performed by the teacher in the film, played by Alex McAvoy.

Music video

Prior to the film, the first video for the track, directed by album/concert/film art designer Gerald Scarfe, depicted students running in a playground (Kings Square Gardens, Islington) and the teacher puppet from The Wall concerts was used. The video also mixed in some animated scenes later used in "The Trial" and "Waiting for the Worms". The opening shot, a pan across the London skyline was filmed from the top of Turnpike House in Islington, both St Lukes Church and St Clements Church (the one overlooking the playground) are both clearly visible in the shot. After the media furore surrounding the song, the Islington Green school head teacher Margaret Maden refused permission for the children who sang on the song to appear in the video or on Top of the Pops, although at the time they were told it was because they didn't hold Equity Cards.

Once the film was completed, the actual scenes of "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" and "Another Brick in the Wall, Part II" were combined into a new video, which now represents the music video for "Another Brick in the Wall".

Live Versions

When performed as part of the various live shows of The Wall, the teacher is represented by a giant inflatable puppet, based on the figure from Scarfe's animations. This puppet duly becomes the focus of the song's anger and frustration.

Alternative versions

    The single version has a short 4-bar rhythm guitar and drum intro before the initial lyric, but fades out earlier—ending after approximately 3 minutes 11 seconds.
    The 1981 compilation A Collection of Great Dance Songs includes a hybrid (3:54) version which, like the single version, omits the segue from "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" and includes the 4-bar guitar/drum intro—but retains the longer playground ending of the studio version, fading out just before the telephone sounds.
    The versions from live albums and videos Delicate Sound of Thunder and Pulse (recorded after Waters' departure from the band) feature the main guitar solo by David Gilmour, followed by an additional tapping guitar riff by touring guitarist Tim Renwick. These are backed by Guy Pratt's slap bass lines. On Delicate Sound of Thunder, the children's choir part is played from tape, while on Pulse, it is performed by the backing singers. The version on Delicate Sound of Thunder starts right after Money with the single four-bar intro, then stops, until the vocals start after a short break. The ending is also similar to the one on The Wall but without the shouting and other sound effects. In contrast, the version on Pulse is more of a reworked version with excerpt from all three parts: It starts with the telephone from the end of Part 2, then a helicopter can be heard, before David Gilmour starts playing the main guitar riff of Part 1 and the band join in for a couple of bars. Then the end part of Happiest Days comes up and the transition into the actual song is the same as on the studio album. After the second guitar solo, the keyboard staccato from Part 3 can be heard while the helicopter comes back shortly before the track ends with a cold stop. On the Pulse DVD, the vocal echo from the song Dogs can be heard during that final part, but it is not audible on the CD.
    The version from Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live 1980–81 (from the 1980–81 concerts at Earls Court, London) also features an extended solo by Snowy White and an organ solo by Richard Wright.
    In 1990, prior to The Wall – Live in Berlin a rare, limited edition promo CD titled "The Wall Berlin '90" was issued to radio stations (Columbia CSK 2126) which included "When the Tigers Broke Free" and a new version of "Another Brick in the Wall Part 2" credited as a "New Recording by The Bleeding Heart Band / June 1990".
    The version from The Wall Live in Berlin has Cyndi Lauper singing lead vocals, and features Rick DiFonzo playing the original solo, Snowy White playing a second guitar solo, Peter Wood playing an organ solo, and Thomas Dolby playing a synthesiser solo.
    The song was included with "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" in the compilation Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd, and segues into the first note of an edited version of "Echoes".
    Roger Waters' 2000 US tour, In the Flesh – Live (released on CD and DVD in 2006), featured the song—segued in from "The Happiest Days of Our Lives"—with live backup singers and the taped children's choir singing with Waters in the second verse, and—after two guitar solos—a third verse (same lyrics as second verse).
    During The Wall Live tour 2011, Waters added an acoustic coda to "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)" with brand new lyrics referring to the death of Jean Charles de Menezes:[citation needed] According To the 2012 Tour program this song is called The Ballad Of Jean Charles de Menezes.

    All in all it's just another brick in the wall
    All in all you're just another brick in the wall
    Just another blunder
    Just another lousy call
    Just another clap of thunder
    And apologies ring hollow
    From the guilty in Whitehall
    And there's no hint of sorrow
    Just the whitewash on the wall
    Just one man dead
    And nothing is gained
    Nothing at all
    And Jean Charles de Menezes remains
    Just another brick in the wall


(https://en.wikipedia.org)

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