Hetty MacLise, the wife of original Velvet Underground drummer Angus MacLise, played music with him in various projects in the late '60s and 1970s. Formerly Hetty McGee, she was an illustrator for the countercultural publications The East Village Other and The SF Oracle, and met her husband in San Francisco, where they were married by Timothy Leary in Golden Gate Park. They went to New York, where Angus MacLise had become established as an important figure in the city's multimedia avant-garde, collaborating with various partners in experimental music, film, and poetry projects.

Hetty MacLise played organ, tanpura, and probably other instruments in the Universal Mutant Repertory Company, which played psychedelic drone trance music with an Indian flavor. One track by the Universal Mutant Repertory Company, Heavenly Blue Pt. 4 5, appears on The Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda, a collection of musical endeavors in which Angus MacLise participated between 1968 and 1972. Another track on the CD -- the 39-minute title piece, a live improvisation while Ira Cohen's #Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda film played at St. Mark's Church in New York -- is not explicitly credited to the Universal Mutant Repertory Company. But the five musicians listed, including the MacLises, are the ones that comprised that group.

Hetty MacLise is also on a couple of other songs on The Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda, Blastitude (on which she plays prepared harp) and Humming in the Night Skull (on which she plays harmonium). In addition, she plays on a couple of tracks on a subsequent release of 1968-1972 MacLise material, Brain Damage in Oklahoma City (issued in 2000). On that CD she plays organ on Epiphany (also featuring her husband on hand drum), and tanpura on the extremely lengthy, meandering improvisation Dreamweapon Benefit for the Oklahoma City Police Dept.

The MacLises spent much of the 1970s in India and Nepal, where Angus MacLise died of hypoglycemia in 1979. The MacLises' son, Ossian, lived for a lengthy spell in a Tibetan monastery, where he was considered the first Western child to be recognized as a reincarnated lama. ~ Richie Unterberger, Rovi