In 1943, a chemist rode a bicycle in Switzerland and wound up changing a small chunk of the universe. That bicyclist who, having accidentally ingested through his fingertips a tiny amount of a new chemical he’d developed, was Dr. Albert Hofmann, who died today at age 102, just over 55 years after that fateful April 16th when the first LSD trip took place.

As mentioned in his Wired obituary, Hoffman often referred to lysergic acid as his “problem child” and, indeed, its effects on individual humans ranged from the apparent beneficial influence on the mental state of psychiatric patient Cary Grant on the one hand to the apparent disastrous impact on, among many others, a self-medicating Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, perhaps the most obvious and saddest known “acid casualty” in popular culture. Other prominent users, like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, had few apparent ill effects. (Lennon, fellow Beatle Ringo Starr, and mutual friend Harry Nilson certainly had far worse problems with far more addictive drugs like heroin, pills, and alcohol.) Lots of others, like Brian Wilson, fell somewhere in between. Mental explorers are, on the whole, probably better off meditating.

Whatever unwitting blame Hofmann shares for the problems with LSD, he also gets unwitting credit for making our mental landscape a little more interesting and fun. Below is a highly idiosyncratic selection of some great musical moments which I think were in some way influenced — one or two possibly indirectly, but no less powerfully — by Dr. Hoffman’s discovery. One great thing about psychedelia is that you can be influenced by it without ever taking a single drug.

Please enjoy these videos responsibly. As the somewhat less responsible Dr. Leary suggested, “set and setting.”