Summary:
The book, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe, looks at "Colored Power". No, not what everyone, during this time, is thinking of when they hear these two words. These words are referring to The Merry pranksters and their eccentric taste in color.
Kool-Aid, The Real Stuff
"Colored Power (Tom Wolfe 382)." No, not what everyone, during this time, is thinking of when they hear these two words. These words are referring to The Merry pranksters and their eccentric taste in color. The Pranksters loved Day-Glo, well not just the Pranksters but all acid heads in general, it was their symbol, along with the Prankster Flag, "An orange star with green stripes on it. (Tom Wolfe 25)." But who are the Pranksters? Are they just a bunch of Freaks with their faces and clothes literally glowing in the dark? Or are they just another group of people in American History? It is not who the Pranksters are but what they are, I cannot tell you who they are but I can tell you what they are. "Never Trust a Prankster. (Tom Wolfe 380)" this is their motto, but a Prankster does not have to be trusted to be known, but to know a Prankster we have to start at the very beginning with Ken Kesey "The non-navigator. (Tom Wolfe 126)."
Back in the day, meaning the late 1950's early 1960's, there was always a fantasy being created. "Fantasy is a word Kesey has taken to using more and more, for all sorts of plans, ventures, world views, ambitions. It is a good word. It is ironic and it isn't. It refers to everything...(Tom Wolfe 32)." Going back a way to one of Kesey's first Fantasies, even if it was crated for him by the intellectuals that lived on Perry Lane, the fantasy was that he was a "Diamond in the Rough (Tom Wolfe 33)." Perry lane where Kesey first got started as a writer and got his wife, he may have been born in Oregon but he became the Kesey we know today at Perry lane. "It was sweet. Perry Lane was a Typical 1950's bohemia. Everybody sat around shaking their heads over America's tailfin' housing-development civilization, and Christ, in Europe, so what if the plumbing didn't work, they had mastered the art of living (Tom Wolfe 34)." On Perry lane there were several writer, Kesey soon to join them when he finishes his first novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, but in particular there was Robin White, author of Elephant Hill. He was the one who took Kesey under his wing and showed him the ropes. He got Kesey his wife, Faye, and a cottage on Perry Lane.
"Jay Garrick inhaled an experimental gas in a research lab... and began traveling and thinking at the speed of light as...The Flash... the currant fantasy. Yes. The Kesey diamond-in-the-rough fantasy did not last very long. The most interesting person on Perry Lane as far as he was concerned was not any on the novelist or other literary intellectuals, but a young graduate student in psychology named Vic Lovell. (Tom Wolfe 39)." Lovell was the person who introduced Kesey to Freudian psychology and made everyone and everything around them fit into what Freudian psychology was. Lovell also told him about experiments that were being preformed at Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park. The experiments were based on Psychomimetric drugs. They were also paying volunteers $75 dollars a day. Kesey soon became one of them, and while he was volunteering he discovered LSD .
Lovell even went in and took it and ended up drawing a life size picture of a Buddha on the wall. The White Smock come in and begins and starts asking questions when Lovell buts in and says, "What do you think of my Buddha? (Tom Wolfe 42)." "LSD how can - now that those big fat letters are babbling out on coated stock from every newsstand...But this was late 1959, early 1960, a full two years before Mom&Dad&Buddy&Sis heard of the dread letters and clucked because Drs. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were French-frying the brains of Harvard boys with it (Tom Wolfe 43)." With the crew over on Perry Lane Kesey was becoming a gravitational force, people wanted to be with him or just near him. "Volunteer Kesey gave himself over to science over at the Menlo Parks Vets hospital - and somehow drugs were getting up and walking out of there and over to Perry Lane (Tom Wolfe 45)." After all of this Kesey finally set down and wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Kesey was said to have written several passages of this book under the influence of peyote and LSD, including the passage, Chief Broom in his schizophrenic fogs.
After finishing the book he and Faye rented out their cottage on Perry Lane and move back to Oregon to write his second novel Sometimes a Great Notion. This was in June 1961. Then in 1962, when One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the book was a hit. Then gradually Kesey and Faye made their way back to Perry Lane, where people began to show up after hearing about the "Many Day-Glo freaking curlicues (Tom Wolfe 51)." The people included Neal Cassady, Larry McMurtry; two young writers, Ed McClanahan and Bob Stone, Chloe Scott the dancer, Roy Seburn the artist, Carl Lehamann-Haupt, and Richard Alpert himself. They all came for "the Lane's fabled Venison Chili (Tom Wolfe 52)." However, "July 21, 1963 - and then one day the end of the era, as the papers like to put it. A developer bought most of Perry Lane and was going to tear down the cottages and put up modern houses and the bulldozers were coming (Tom Wolfe 53)."
So what Kesey did was move the whole trip to La Honda California. Kesey had bought a log house fifteen miles outside of Plato Alto. Here it became different than on Perry Lane. There was now a group and the called themselves The Merry Pranksters. There were people like Babbs and Cassady and Sandy. There were several others but they were the heart of the group. They would take Acid and walk around in the woods and do other things. The group rigged the whole forest surrounding them with microphones so that they could hear what was going on and they would also rap. It then was not long before "Intrepid Traveler (Tom Wolfe 66)" was born. And then came the bus, Futhur, with two u's. Furthur was a 1939 school bus rigged so that people could live in it. The Pranksters new fantasy had become to travel across the U.S. to be in New York for Kesey's second book release. Well the bus was painted in Day-Glo and the front reading Furthur and the back saying caution weird load. And what a weird load they were, the people that were on the bus included Cassady, Kesey Babbs, Page Browning, George Walker, Sandy, Jane Burton, Mike Hagen, Hassler, Kesey's brother Chuck and his cousin Dale. Soon there developed a code by which you were either on the bus or you were off the bus. To be on the bus you had to be doing your thing, if you could not do your thing you were not on the bus. Then came the great idea of the Prankster Archives . The whole bus was rigged with speakers and microphones to record everything they did. They even made films of themselves while they were on LSD and other drugs. Day-Glo was used for every possible thing while they were on the road. They even played with a Day-Glo football in the dark; I still wandered how they knew where each other were when they were passing the football. They traveled through Texas, Florida, Georgia, and other states while on their way to New York. Then they wee finally there.
"They reached New York in the Middle of July, and they were like horses in the home stretch. Everybody felt good. They tooled across 42nd Street and up Central Park West with the speakers blaring and even New York had to stop and stare. The Pranksters gave them the Day-Glo glad hands, Kesey and Babbs got up on top of the bus with their red-and-white striped shirts on and tootled the people (Tom Wolfe 101)." The group had rented out an apartment at Madison and 90th and had a huge party there with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Kerouac and Kesey did not speak much because Kerouac was thee old and Kesey was the new and exciting something. Kesey's second book Sometimes a Great Notion had some very good reviews and some very bad reviews, bud regardless Kesey said writing was old and outdated form and that this bus was the new for, but of what. "But in July of 1964 not even the hip world in New York was quite ready for the phenomenon of a bunch of people roaring across the continental U.S.A. in a bus covered with swirling Day-Glo mandalas aiming movie cameras and microphones at every freaking thing in this whole freaking country while Neal Cassady wheeled the bus around the high curves like a Super Hud and the U.S. nation streamed across the windshield like one of those goddamned Cinemascope landscapes cameras that winds up your optic nerves like a rubber band in a toy airplane and let us now be popping more speed and acid and smoking grass as if it were all just coming out of the Cosmo the Pranksters god's own local-option gumball Machines- Cosmo! Furthur. (Tom Wolfe 103)."
Soon the Pranksters headed back to Kesey's place in La Honda. The Pranksters began to get nicknames like, Gretchen Fetchin, Zonker, and Sensuous X. When they got back Kesey began on a new thing and that was that all religions start with a certain event a thing, not an idea. In the case of the pranksters it was The Experience on Acid.
Excerpt from Joachim Wach's paradigm of the way religions are founded, written in 1944:
Following a profound new experience, providing a new illumination of the world, the founder, a highly charismatic person, begins enlisting disciples. These followers become an informally but closely knit association, bound together by new experience, whose nature the founder has revealed and interpreted. The association might be called a circle, indicating that it is oriented toward a central figure with whom each of the followers is in intimate contact. The followers may be regarded as the founder's companions, bound to him by personal devotion, friendship and loyalty. A growing since of solidarity both binds the members together and differentiates them from any other form of social organization. Membership in the circle requires a complete break in social relations. Ties of family and kinship and loyalties of various kinds were at least temporarily relaxed or severed. The hardships, suffering and persecution that loomed for those who cast their lot with the group were counterbalanced by their high hopes and firm expectations... and so on.
"The kairos ! The Experience! (Tom Wolfe 129)" Sounds just a little like the Prankster doesn't it. This was what infact led to Kesey's next Fantasy, the spread of LSD, namely the Acid Tests. But first there were a couple of other things that happened. Mountain Girl was 18 years old when she first met Kesey and joined his group of Merry Pranksters. She became a very influential person in his life. But by this time the police were becoming annoyed with the load and eccentric group, so they called a raid. The pranksters heard about it and began to hide all of their things but they still got Kesey on Marijuana charges. He got a fine and also a nine-month sentence on a work farm, which he never completes.
Pretty soon after that Kesey wants to invite the Hell's Angels over to his place for a party. :And a great many were coming around in the summer of 1965. The summer of 1965 had made the Hell's Angels infamous celebrities in California. Their reputation was at its absolutely most notorious all-time highest. (Tom Wolfe 169)" The Merry Pranksters Welcome the Hell's Angels, was what a sign said that was up by Kesey's house in La Honda. And sure enough the Hell's Angels came on Saturday, August 7, 1965. The pranksters and the Angels got along just fine and ended up becoming the best of friends in the long run, they would get together for many other occasions.
Now Kesey and the Pranksters were invited to take part in the Annual California Unitarian Church conference at Asilomar, beautiful state park by the sea in Monterey. The theme for this conference was: Shaking the Foundations. Well I guess the Pranksters did a bit too much shaking because almost as soon as the got there, in their Day-Glo attire, that the others wanted them to leave. At one point Kesey "seizes the big American Flag up on stage and steps on it, grinds it into the floor. (Tom Wolfe 187)" The look on the crowds face was astonishment, then anger, and finally curiosity, at which point Kesey says, "Now wait a minute. That Flag is a symbol we attach our emotions to, but it isn't the emotion itself and it isn't the thing we really care about. Sometimes we don't even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by symbols. (Tom Wolfe 187)" He then goes on to lead the whole group in signing America the Beautiful. Kesey at this point was becoming very inclined to the idea, the phenomenon of Control. The pranksters were now almost able to control everyone around them; the conference was now gravitating around Kesey. Kesey became to some, Prophet Kesey. He was said to have preformed "A Miracle in Seven Days", the length of the conference.
Then one day the Pranksters put up a sign that said the merry Pranksters Welcome the Beetles. However, much to their dismay they never got the Beetles to come, but they did meet Owsley. Owsley was the greatest manufacturer of LSD in the world; his products included the "Owsley Blues." He came to pay for a lot of the expenses of the Acid Tests.
"Can you pass the Acid test? And Kesey emerged from the weird night in the graveyard with a vision of turning the world, literally, and a weirdly practical way of doing it, known as The Acid Test. (Tom Wolfe 230) " The Acid Test were when a group of people, usually a large group, would all get together with Day-Glo, lights, music, and video cameras and take LSD to spread the experience. There were several held in the California area and then there came the idea of the Trips Festival. An acid experience minus the acid. This went great except now Kesey had to feel the U.S. to Mexico because he might be arrested.
Kesey made it down to Mexico just fine, but went a little crazy while he was down there. He was paranoid and was always diving into the jungle for days at a time, going half crazy. Mean while the pranksters were holding acid tests on their own but missed Kesey and went to join him down in Mexico. After a while of sitting down there and doing nothing it was time for Kesey to reappear for the greatest prank ever, going beyond Acid. First thing he did was meet with the press at a secret location to give them an interview, he said to them "I intend to stay in this country as a fugitive as salt in J. Edgar Hoover's wounds." Next thing he did was a TV interview, and he said the same thing he did in the written interview. The last part of this prank was to hold a monster trips festival and for Kesey to make an appearance then disappear. However he was found and arrested before he ever got there.
He was arrested on two Marijuana charges and failure to cooperate with the law. He got out on bail and still had a work sentence to clear. But he also promised to warn the world against the dangers on acid, on public television. Instead he talked about going beyond acid and said the famous words never trust a prankster. And so the Acid Test Graduation started to form.
What exactly is the graduation? Is it no longer taking Acid? Is it trying to do everyday things on Acid? The graduation cannot be put into words, it cannot be put into a picture, and the graduation was the next step in the master plan of Ken Kesey. The question still remains, what was the next step, many acidheads thought he was selling out. But is it really him who is selling out or is it the other for not seeing what he was talking about. There are those that went and graduated, there are those that went, then there are those who didn't go, and then there is us, who cannot even begin to comprehend what was going to happen next.
This is the complete article, containing 2,806 words
(approx. 9 pages at 300 words per page).
