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    The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
    The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
    The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
    Ebook504 pages9 hours

    The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

    By Tom Wolfe

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    One of the most essential works on the 1960s counterculture, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Test ushered in an era of New Journalism.

    This is the seminal work on the hippie culture, a report on what it was like to follow along with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they launched the "Transcontinental Bus Tour" from the West Coast to New York, all while introducing acid (then legal) to hundreds of like-minded folks, staging impromptu jam sessions, dodging the Feds, and meeting some of the most revolutionary figures of the day.

    "An American classic" (Newsweek) that defined a generation. "An astonishing book" (The New York Times Book Review) and an unflinching portrait of Ken Kesey, his Merry Pranksters, LSD, and the psychedelic 1960s.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateAug 19, 2008
    ISBN9781429961141
    The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
    Author

    Tom Wolfe

    Tom Wolfe (1930–2018) was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement and the author of contemporary classics like The Right Stuff and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, as well as the novels The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. As a reporter, he wrote articles for The Washington Post, the New York Herald Tribune, Esquire, and New York Magazine, and is credited with coining the term, “The Me Decade.” Among his many honors, Tom was awarded the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, the National Humanities Medal, and National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lived in New York City.

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    Reviews for The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

    4/5

    69 ratings41 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Read this first back in 76 or 77 when I was going throygh my first hippy/beat phase (actually I'm still going through that phase!)Read the book more times than I can count must be 30 - wil no doubt read it again soon.
    • 4/5
      Really enjoyed this book though I found it very tough to plough through as Tom Wolfe attempted to convey the Merry Pranksters experience through the book. To my mind he was largely successful in this venture, to the extend that I started to feel scattered if I read it for too long.
    • 5/5
      Mind blowing - hard to believe it was published in 68
    • 4/5
      You're either on the bus or you're off the bus.
    • 4/5
      I still constantly remind myself that art is not eternal.
    • 2/5
      It took me a long time to read this book. I kept walking away from it. I get that Tom Wolfe was trying to do something new and fresh with the writing style, but it ended up being just annoying and hard to follow. I read in another review that he was trying to emulate an LSD trip. Maybe you have to be on LSD to find the writing profound, or just be a lot younger than middle-aged. Ken Kesey sounds like an intolerable jerk with an ego problem to me, and the Merry Pranksters sound a lot like a cult. I guess against the context of the times (mid-1960s), taking off on a drug-fueled cross-country road trip in a psychedelic bus was the wildest thing EVER, so shocking and free! I can appreciate the appeal of an adventurous road trip, but from the perspective of the twenty-first century, these people just sound disorganized and drugged out. I cannot even believe these people had children with them during this chaos. Also, there are a couple of bad drug experiences in here that get treated cavalierly by the Pranksters, which actually sounded frightening for the people involved. The book is also much longer than it needs to be. I'm glad I read it, because I think this book is a cultural marker, but I would not have finished it otherwise.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Really enjoyed this book though I found it very tough to plough through as Tom Wolfe attempted to convey the Merry Pranksters experience through the book. To my mind he was largely successful in this venture, to the extend that I started to feel scattered if I read it for too long.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This is a group portrait of the Bay Area acid scene in the period 1962 to 1966. it was Wolfe's follow-up to his breakout book "The Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby". This work deals far more with America's differing cultures that the relatively simple precursor, which was about excessive materialism. "The Merry Pranksters" did arrive in my consciousness sooner, as I encountered them in my neighbourhood, while I was parking cars at the Calgary Stampede. they seemed smelly and defensive to me, but obviously a variant on the kind of Yank tourist I had been dealing with earlier that day. The book itself is an iconic work, and indispensible in academic discussion of the new drug life style, still with us today.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      This book is about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters during the late 60's as they were taking LSD and taking trips (but literally and figuratively) while traveling through California and Mexico making a movie. They held acid tests for anyone who wanted to join them--sometimes with LSD and sometimes using only their movie and music.This is an interesting book of the drug culture of the 1960's and the hippie culture. When people told their stories of their experiences with the Pranksters the book was fascinating. When Tom Wolfe tried to convey what was happening or people's experiences the book was confusing. My feeling is you had to be there to understand it. Not my scene.
    • 4/5
      A long bus ride into psychedelia, chronicling Ken Kesey's (and his band of fellow "merry" tripsters) tour cross country and into Mexico. Wolfe helps us tour the various "trips" that people take and provides us with insight into the psychedelic experience. This book was a journalistic breakthrough in its exploration into the [then] little-known world of the hippies.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 3/5
      I read this so freaking long ago. I guess I've read more about this book over the years, though, than just about any book I've read. When I read it I was "into" that sort of thing in a much different way (if you catch my drift...). Now it's like the history of my generation.
    • 4/5
      It's a fascinating read, up until Kesey goes to Mexico and it begins to drag. The getting-high descriptions are really good, and there are lots of recognizable people from that period, like Timothy Leary, the Grateful Dead, Allen Ginsberg, and Hunter S. Thompson.
    • 4/5
      A psychedelic read and a half! The book is full of references, wordplay, and cultural icons. It is written extremely well and has power and poise to it, but also appeals to the senses and is a gargantuan in scope.Overall, I was quite impressed. 4 stars!
    • 2/5
      Can't see why people thought this was a good book. Just describes the antics of a bunch of narcissistic dope takers. They think their expanding human consciousness, but there're really just doing what they want to do without respecting the rights of the people they're in contact with. Ken Kesey was just another person drunk on power. The book is hard to follow as well.
    • 3/5
      Well-known account of a trip with Ken Kesey and his ":Merry Pranksters"; vivid account of late hippie culture

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" is much more Hunter Thompson than Irvine Welch. Which was not a good thing to me, but I can see how this book would be great for someone else.This book is considered an essential work about the hippie lifestyle. Wolfe, a journalist, tells the story of Ken Kesey and his Merry Band of Pranksters as they experiment with LSD. The book's style is supposed to feel trippy to reflect what's going on, but I found that more irritating than effective, unfortunately.Unlike Wolfe's book "The Right Stuff," which was awesome and had incredible insights into the world of astronauts and pilots, this book seemed more surface to me. Wolfe is never part of the counterculture and never really gets to the heart of why the Merry Pranksters followed Kesey who is depicted as a Christ-like figure. After reading the book, I really didn't feel any more enlightened about the hippie movement.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      The first Thomas Wolfe novel I read was A Man in Full and I enjoyed it immensely. I’ve followed up with each subsequent novel he has published (I Am Charlotte Simmons and Back to Blood) and The Right Stuff is simply one my favorite books of all time. To date, I’ve never been disappointed by one of Wolfe’s efforts. It occurred to me that there were several highly regarded Wolfe novels that pre-dated my discovery of his work, so I ordered this novel, along with The Bonfire of the Vanities.This quasi-biographical work highlights the life of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters as they toured the country in their Day-Glo painted, modified school bus, dropping acid and other hallucinogens, documenting it all on camera. Wolfe then explores the goings on at Kesey’s forested retreat near Palo Alto as various disciples and assorted Hell’s Angels drop in and out to partake of Kesey’s special brand of mysticism and evangelical fervor for pharmaceutical experimentation. Kesey subsequently flees the country, faking a suicide in order to evade prosecution for multiple marijuana possession arrests. In his absence, the Merry Pranksters struggle along before reuniting with Kesey’s return to the states.Much of the book is amusing, however the writing is such that you either have to have dropped acid, or be on an acid trip to appreciate the prose and sometimes silly word play. Much of the book is written as stream of consciousness, while other parts are some form of poetry that I simply can’t appreciate. It is, nevertheless, an interesting look at the early 60s and the screwballs that populated the San Francisco area during that period. This book is nothing like the other Wolfe novels that I’ve read and I can’t recommend it unless you perhaps lived through the period and partook of some of the same “medicine” enjoyed by the Pranksters.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Wolfe highlights some interesting characters from the 60s including the Hell's Angels and Neal Cassady (whom Kerouac based his character Dean Moriaty from On The Road). If the book does nothing else, it has made me interested in becoming more familiar with Kesey's writing and long for a more relaxed drug policy to placate my (sanitized) inner hippie.The author uses a stream- of- consciousness style of writing which is very effective for getting the psychedelic topic of his book across. Unfortunately, by page 150 I was completely over the rambly and babbled details as well as the mostly immature shenanigans of the Pranksters. (And what was with Wolfe's repeated use of the racial epithet 'spade'?)This book reminds me loosely of HST's (who makes a brief appearance in the story) Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. Having said that, I probably would have appreciated this book more had I read it when I first fell in love with HST's similar style of writing.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Jeez, this was good, but I could hardly finish reading it because it was so incredibly vivid. Set my teeth on edge and my mind a-whirl, let me tell you. I don't think I've ever read another piece of fiction that was so evocative of what is essentially an indescribable state.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      At first, reading this book made my brain hurt. After a while, I grooved to the flow and grokked it fully. Actually, I would imagine I might understand this book better if I had ever taken LSD, which I haven't. Honestly, I wasn't even born when all of this happened. I wish I had been. It seems like an excellent scene. The writing begins semi-journalistically, but quickly devolves into a drug-soaked rambling that's just barely intelligible, until, as I said, you get into it. I mean, really into it. Wolf's words makes one *almost* able to understand what an acid trip might be like. It's an entirely different way of thinking. I think this book is essential to understanding the era.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      The drug-taking (psychedelic) hippies of the sixties, West Coast branch, are featured in this book. In particular, Ken Kesey, with whom Wolfe is clearly taken--perhaps too much so, since his approach implies a journalistic detachment, and I sense Tom lost his head a bit here, and that Kesey was a bit of a blowhard. But for the most part the author does a good job of laying out what happened and when.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      (150)This book was a very confusing story about the late '60s in San Francisco, CA. (Mostly the Haight Ashbury District)It's about how Ken Kesey returns from prison, and he tries to stop the pranksters from promoting LSD. Also, the story of how they ended up putting LSD into the Kool-Aid at a Dead concert. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone with a small attention span. It also requires a lot of knowledge of that time, and takes a while to understand. I liked it, but decided that after more research i should re-read it and I would understand it more.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Simply put, Wolfe was privy to the autumn of the beat movement as it transitioned into the free-love, experimentation era of hippie-dom in the 1960s. He captures the frenetic restlessness of the beatniks (most notably Neal Cassady) in a day-glo bus in a last gasp cross-country run. It's no 'On the Road,' but it's a good way to catch up with Kerouac's hero Dean Moriarty years on from his days with Sal Paradise.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This is a great book by Tom Wolfe first published in 1967. It tracks the story of Ken Kesey following the eye of the storm so to speak as it leaves the Beat Generation, stops by the Perry Lane bohemians and then crashes onto California at full force with the hippies, LSD and psychedelia.Kesey was voted "boy most likely to succeed" at his high school in Oregon and went on to a creative writing fellowship at Stanford University. Perry Lane was next door and he was welcomed as a kind of rough diamond writer from the wilds.Wolfe really takes the story from there, outlining the first culture clash as Jack London turns out to be Captain Marvel- not quite what the intellectuals had in mind. In fact Perry Lane was itself to physically disappear a little later as the bulldozers moved in and the journalists who arrived to meet the disgruntled academics instead found Kesey and the new arrivals on mattresses up a tree offering round a LSD chilli.Visitors at this point included Neal Cassady, Larry McMurtry and Jerry Garcia among others and Wolfe has carefully tracked down most of them to help build the zeitgeist.After Kesey's book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was published in 1962 the show moved to California and a clearing in the woods at La Honda. Royalties from the book paid for everybody and everything including a 1939 International Harvester bus that the Pranksters as they now called themselves painted (good photos on the unofficial Ken Kesey Home Page) and set out in with the idea of visiting the New York World Fair.The story of the acid-tests follows with Wolfe getting detailed accounts from Pranksters and participants. We meet Owsley the greatest LSD manufacturer in the world, Babbs,The Hermit, Mountain Girl, Stewart Brand trying to work out why there is no photograph of the earth, Timothy Leary and plenty of other exotic fauna.The energy builds through the book together with Kesey's fame and fortune, the grand climax to be the largest acid test (officially non-acid test) or "graduation" in the giant Winterland stadium.At this point Wolfe paints a portrait of Kesey's loss of control. His movement abandons him and he is left to stage the show in his warehouse dressed in a leotard and white satin cape. In a confused mess the press and people drift off leaving him with the faithful who eventually leave themselves.Apart from being a great story this is an invaluable record of modern history. No one seems to get to the nuts and bolts of events like these better than Tom Wolfe.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Read this first back in 76 or 77 when I was going throygh my first hippy/beat phase (actually I'm still going through that phase!)Read the book more times than I can count must be 30 - wil no doubt read it again soon.
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed a lot about this book mostly in the first part as it was like a who's who and about so many famous people and authors but when it veared off into total "on the bus stuff", I really lost interest. I really lost respect for Ken Kesey and I kept thinking "what a waste". I had no interest in LSD back in the sixties and I still don't but I was really surprised to learn it wasn't illegal, that the patent was held by Sandoz. Not surprised that the CIA thought they could use it. I think Tom Wolfe did a good job writing the book but I much prefer his fiction Bonfires of the Vanities. A good example of New Journalism using literary technique in such a way as to make fiction read like nonfiction.
    • 2/5
      I'm glad I read it just to get a better idea of the whole "acid scene" and the people who were in the thick of it. But I would never read it again. I thought that most of the people were fairly pathetic. What a total waste of energy, imagination and brain cells. Mostly spoiled middle and upper class fools who filled their lives with drugs instead of actual accomplishments.
    • 3/5
      Read this as a teenager. One of the weirdest books ever, like far-out.
    • 5/5
      I love this book. It is simply the best book ever on the hippies.
    • 5/5
      Read this in adolescence.

    Book preview

    The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - Tom Wolfe

    Introduction

    BY GEOFF DYER

    What do we expect from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test now, more than half a century after it was first published? Back in 1968 the story of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and their attempts to spread the gospel of LSD was not exactly breaking news—it had not, as the saying goes, been torn from the screaming headlines of today—but Tom Wolfe’s book expanded the reach of the Kesey project to an audience who’d not enjoyed the mixed blessings of encountering the Pranksters or sampling their unusually potent wares. It’s possible that even some of those who could answer the question posed by Hendrix’s first album—Are you experienced?—in the affirmative weren’t aware of the backstory, of how this mind-altering opportunity came their way. Today we read the book partly because the broad outline of that story is now well-known.

    In the process it has changed somewhat, has become a story of meetings, tangled bequests and legacies. Allen Ginsberg put it succinctly in The Village Voice: Neal Cassady drove Jack Kerouac to Mexico in a prophetic automobile to see the physical body of America, the same Denver Cassady that one decade later drove Ken Kesey’s Kosmos-patterned schoolbus on a Kafka-circus tour over the roads of the awakening nation. This struck Wolfe as a marvelous fact—and it was, it is.

    There are two strands of descent here: from Kerouac and the Beats to Kesey and the Pranksters, and from Kerouac to Wolfe. Kesey said that On the Road had opened up the doors to us just the same way drugs did. Kerouac’s initially warm response to the unusually good prose of Kesey’s first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), was upgraded to the ecstatic announcement that he was A GREAT NEW AMERICAN NOVELIST! In 1964 Kesey and the bus—with Cassady at the wheel—were headed to New York for the World’s Fair and the publication of his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. Kesey and Kerouac would meet for the first time; Cassady would be reunited with the friend who had immortalized him in On the Road, one of the greatest novels ever devoted to the subject of friendship.

    For his part, Wolfe, in interviews and in his introduction to The New Journalism anthology—only a matter of time, surely, before my old Picador UK edition turns up on Antiques Roadshow—was constantly harking back to the great social novels of Balzac and Dickens, but the unrestrained energy and overloaded abandon of his prose is inconceivable without the immediate and liberating precedent of Kerouac. So everyone involved in the upcoming encounter—both the participants and the writer chronicling its unfolding—has some kind of skin in the game. Wolfe sets it up beautifully: Here was Kerouac and here was Kesey and here was Cassady in between them, once the mercury for Kerouac and the whole Beat Generation and now the mercury for Kesey and the whole—what?—something wilder and weirder out on the road. And then he records what turned into an event momentous only in its refusal to live up to the narrative expectations it had engendered. Kerouac hadn’t just used Cassady in On the Road; in the long wait for its publication and, more damagingly, its aftermath, he’d used and boozed himself up too. If there was a hope that Kerouac might pass on some kind of blazing baton to Kesey, it came to nothing because by then the baton had become a bottle (of ashes, somehow) that Kesey was no longer interested in receiving. While the bus’s famous destination plate read Furthur, Kerouac had taken a befuddled pledge to stay put, brooding within himself on a success so huge it had assumed the quality of doom. Kerouac and Cassady would never meet again.

    The Pranksters drove on, up to Millbrook, to another meeting of considerable genealogical significance, this time with acid guru Timothy Leary. In a sense, writes Jay Stevens in Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, Kesey stood in relation to Leary as Leary did to [Aldous] Huxley: each represented a radicalization of the other’s position. It’s not just the Pranksters who had recovered their buoyancy as they approached Millbrook, Wolfe, too, is bubbling over with stylistic verve, expecting the Learyites to come rolling out of the house like the survivors of the siege of Khartoum. Instead… So, after another non-encounter, they move on again.

    Kesey is the leader, holding together this psychedelic anabasis by a principled willingness to let things fall apart, even to orchestrate multiple falls. The first thing he’d let slip was his ambition as a writer. He’d abandoned that in the name of something bigger, more far-reaching (farther-reaching), but was unwilling to renounce—perhaps was even motivated by—a craving for celebrity and attention. That is the opinion of his old writer-friend from Stanford, Larry McMurtry, who viewed the acid-fueled escapade as a lot of foolishness. McMurtry has a very minor part in Acid Test, hardly more than a cameo, but his recollections form a helpful complement to Wolfe’s account. When the Pranksters show up at his house in Texas it’s like the breeze of the future blowing into his quiet street. This brings out something in Wolfe’s book that’s easy to take for granted. The acid aesthetic has been around for a long time now; tattered it may be, but with technological and musical modifications, the paradigm still holds good, at Burning Man and trance festivals the world over. Wolfe is insistent that almost every component of psychedelic style and presentation can be traced back to its incubation with Kesey, the Pranksters, and their original Acid Tests.

    It’s a reasonable claim, but what Wolfe does in addition—and it may guarantee the book’s lasting value—is to enable us to see what has since become a familiar enacted style from the point of a view of a people, a culture, a society, who had never seen anything like it. This applies both to the participants—who discovered that they had been suddenly overtaken by exciting new iterations of themselves—and those who looked on askance, who were so thoroughly unprepared that they … let it happen. They had no choice, partly because LSD was so new and unknown a commodity it wasn’t even illegal. Few things are more difficult to achieve in narrative history than to frame events in such a way that they seem to be happening without the benefit of hindsight, as the pages are being turned. And there is another convergence at work; this account of how the new phenomenon of LSD came into existence was being written by someone who had the feeling, rightly or wrongly, that [he] was doing things no one had ever done before in journalism. We can actually tie this knot a little tighter. Aldous Huxley famously claimed that psychedelics enabled us to perceive things afresh, to see what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence. In his introduction to The New Journalism, Wolfe quotes John Bayley’s yearnings for an age when writers had Pushkin’s sense of ‘looking at all things afresh,’ as if for the first time. In the mid-1960s, Wolfe continues, that was exactly the feeling I had.

    In short pieces—long short pieces—Wolfe’s eyes and ears had proved highly receptive to the unfolding instant, but that attentiveness, he became convinced, had to be used as something other than training for the more demanding summit of a novel. No, the real ambition was to bring all the techniques and freedoms of the novel—whole scenes, extended dialogue, point-of-view, and interior monologue—to bear on the ostensibly inferior or apprentice work on the lower slopes of reportage. Having been assigned a story, the writer should throw the book at it! Acid Test was not Wolfe’s first book but it was his first opportunity to road test his abilities and approach over the extended length of a book. A key part of this endeavor was to put the reader into the eye sockets, as it were, of the people in the story, something that could be achieved only by sustained immersion in the lives of people one was writing about.

    Now, there are different kinds of immersion. The book begins relatively late in the day, after Kesey had sneaked back into the United States from Mexico in October 1966 and ended up in jail for possession of marijuana. Wolfe didn’t know much about him but managed to arrange a prison visit. They meet and Wolfe starts scribbling like mad, in shorthand, in the notebook. The interview lasts just ten minutes and then, in a narrative segue that anticipates Philip Roth’s move in American Pastoral, we move seamlessly back to events from a time before Wolfe was on hand to witness them. So even when he stressed the importance of reporting, he had to go further, to develop the novelistic skill of imaginative immersion to vicariously re-create things he hadn’t been around to witness. Robert Stone, whose trajectory was in some ways the opposite of Kesey’s—from Prankster to career novelist—was there when the bus set out for New York; as he later wrote in his memoir, Prime Green, Wolfe did not see the bus back then at all but is extremely accurate with facts.

    An early draft of history, William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich gains considerable immediacy from passages where Shirer becomes a direct witness in his narrative. Taking breakfast on his hotel terrace, for example, he happens to see Hitler striding past on the day of his epochal meeting with Neville Chamberlain. Wolfe’s ability to re-create what happened does not depend on this kind of first-person proximity. He is an invisible presence, an absence visible by virtue of the high-dosage signature of his prose. This enabled him to achieve a kind of virtuosic reliability that was necessarily independent of fact-checking. William Gedney’s black-and-white photos of the summer of love show wasted teenagers in the squalid crash pads of Haight-Ashbury. They offer a documentary truth, verified by Wolfe’s description of the lunger heads … slithering up and down the store fronts on Haight Street. What Gedney was not able to show was what these wasted youths might be seeing once the visionary wonders of LSD took hold. Everyone on the bus, Wolfe writes, is "on to something here, or into something, but no one is going to put it into words for you." But Wolfe does just that, plunging us into the inexpressible experience of a trip while simultaneously showing what the deranged tripper looks like from the outside.

    Crucially, both Kesey and Cassady, even when decked out like a pair of Day-Glo weirdos, also appeared to have one foot in this outside world. More exactly, they had shoulders the straight world could respect. Kesey changes into a buckskin shirt—what could be more frontier-traditional than that?—revealing huge latissimi dorsi muscles making his upper back fan out like manta-ray wings. (How easily simile-spiked empirical observation can take on the quality of open-eyed hallucination!) The most charged sequence in the documentary Gimme Shelter occurs not with the infamous stabbing carried out by the Hells Angels but when the camera shifts focus from Mick Jagger—heavily made-up, cavorting in his flamboyant costume—to Sonny Barger, leader of the Angels, standing to one side of the Altamont stage, blurred at first, then clearly looking at this superstar and deciding, with fathomless indifference, that it’s not worth devoting even the two seconds it would take to kick his skinny ass all the way back to England. When Barger and the Angels meet Kesey, they respect him instantly. Several times trouble is averted by the imposing fact of Kesey’s physique. In less charged situations suspicions are deflected by Kesey’s voice, his old soft Oregon drawl which puts us in mind of another continuity, another knot in the chronologically tangled lines of precedent and echo. That laid-back country drawl of Kesey, wrestler turned psychonaut, makes him a vocal twin of Chuck Yeager, the test pilot whose folksy Appalachian drawl, according to Wolfe, set the low-key style that became an aspirational default for pilot-speak throughout the United States. Yeager broke the sound barrier, either earlier, in 1947, or, within the chronology of Wolfe’s work, later, in 1979, with the publication of The Right Stuff.

    Kesey’s idea of breaking barriers was to ignore them: the barriers between keeping LSD as a serious aid to mind expansion and delirious mass recreation, between spiritual revolution and hedonistic silliness, between activism and solipsism. Just a few years before the Pranksters set off for New York in their bus, the Freedom Riders had undertaken perilous bus journeys with a definite political aim in mind. By the late sixties the wild and boundary-free craziness of the Acid Tests had become chaotically and corrosively entwined with radical politics. It was no surprise, by the time a brittle Joan Didion took a look around San Francisco, that she viewed with skepticism the less than great notion that a five-year-old girl taking acid might be a leap forward in the project of human enlightenment. Across the Atlantic in London, meanwhile, a character in Tessa Hadley’s novel Free Love falls out of sympathy with idiots who think that if all the governments dropped acid at the same time everything would be OK. Out of this chaotic and contradictory mix of hazard, hope, and disillusion (bummer!) the promise (and fun) of LSD lived on. Adapting itself to new styles of music, it survived Manson and Altamont, thrived, and, uniquely in the world of illegal drugs, remained exempt from the ruthless imperatives of maximal profit. Wolfe’s book contains all of these shimmering potentialities. He revels in the ludicrousness of it, both the fall from the Huxleyan ideal and the wonder that lies in the wake of that fall. Satire and celebration are stitched into each other.

    Kesey is the star of his own show but the reader keeps being drawn back to Cassady. He is like the guy who picks up an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, without whom the movie would have flopped. Muscular like Kesey and no less committed to Prankster silliness, he remains strangely resistant to Wolfe’s rapt scrutiny. While Kesey was as enthralled by his careening, corner-squealing commentary on the cosmos as Kerouac had once been, McMurtry found little about [Cassady] to like. A man who had achieved nothing, all he had was his vitality. Well, those heroically pointless, amphetamine-fueled feats of driving were achievements of a sort, but they took a fearsome toll. Wolfe was struck by the way that "there are two Cassadys. One minute Cassady looks 58 and crazy—speed!—and the next, 28 and peaceful—acid. Robert Stone extends the actuarial range still further, noting that by the time they get to New York in 1964 Cassady looked about seventy years old"—an age he never got close to attaining.

    Cassady is both tragic hero—tragic supporting hero—and fool. Kesey became a fugitive, fleeing from—and then returning to—the swirl of a heady revolution he’d helped foment. He advocated going beyond acid, whatever that meant, but the net effect of his efforts was a massive shot in the arm for recreational drugs generally. A lot of the psychedelic evangelists end up just getting high on whatever drugs come to hand, but amphetamine was a drug with no serious claims to mind-expansion—and speed was Cassady’s drug of choice. He died aged just forty-one, a character in other people’s books, alone in Mexico.

    It seems harsh to leave him like that, so let’s go back to another meeting, when Cassady is among the Pranksters welcoming the Angels to Kesey’s lair in La Honda. That’s the actual physical meeting but the literary convergence here is between Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson—and it’s a slightly lopsided one. Thompson was there, dropped acid, and re-created the scene in his 1967 book Hell’s Angels; Wolfe also wrote it up, based on tape-recorded notes taken by Thompson who is, throughout, an active spectator in many of the events he documents (ultimately getting stomped for his pains). Barely featuring in his own book, Wolfe stylistically is, as they say, all over it. Thompson, too, is a ferociously innovative stylist but compared both with Wolfe and what is to come in his own later work, his first book is in some ways a brilliantly dutiful piece of reporting. And then, right at the end, he opens up the throttle on a high-speed motorcycle run along the Pacific Coast Highway and takes the reader into a realm of sublime and terrifying transcendence: the edge, he calls it, a place that is still Out there. Or maybe it’s In. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions. After its high-momentum beginning, Wolfe’s book ends with … more of the same! Thompson’s power will eventually curdle in the wake of the gargantuan and gonzo excesses of various iterations of Fear and Loathing; Wolfe’s ambitions, inevitably and ironically, will lead back to the kind of hulking Dickensian and Balzacian novel he’d spent years claiming had been displaced by reporting.

    The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the first sustained surge on that road, but an honest appraisal has to concede that the reader grows occasionally impatient and is tempted to skim. This is not inappropriate. LSD trips are inconveniently, potentially frighteningly, long. Likewise the bus—who doesn’t want a bus journey to be over with? When the Pranksters first pull up at McMurtry’s place, he finds them extremely appealing. They were young, they were beautiful, they were fresh, and they were friendly. When they returned three years later, they were still beautiful, but they were far from fresh. They looked mushed, crushed, smushed, as bedraggled as World War I Aviators who had just managed to get their Sopwith Camels safely on the ground. (In a nice reversal of chronology, in other words, they had become antecedents of Yeager!) The exhausting nature of their travels has an inevitable knock-on effect on Wolfe’s exhaustive narrative account. Among all the claims he made in promulgating the aesthetic and work ethics of the New Journalism, he had no truck with the virtues of economy of expression. That’s why some pieces of New Journalism seemed to Martin Amis to be "as long as Middlemarch. Kesey may have quit writing but the bus’s long odyssey was underwritten by a sustaining artistic purpose. The money from his earlier literary success was sunk into making a film of the Pranskters’ exploits. Wolfe estimates that forty-five hours of footage were shot—much of it out of focus"—and though Kesey was defeated by the task of wrestling it all into some kind of coherent shape, it was a great boon for posterity that this raw treasure survived for future restoration and compilation. Except even after it was edited down to less than two hours in 2011, it remained borderline unwatchable. I suppose you had, as they used to say, to be there. Nothing if not readable, Wolfe makes us feel like we were, like we are.

    chapter I

    Black Shiny FBI Shoes

    THAT’S GOOD THINKING THERE, COOL BREEZE. COOL BREEZE is a kid with three or four days’ beard sitting next to me on the stamped metal bottom of the open back part of a pickup truck. Bouncing along. Dipping and rising and rolling on these rotten springs like a boat. Out the back of the truck the city of San Francisco is bouncing down the hill, all those endless staggers of bay windows, slums with a view, bouncing and streaming down the hill. One after another, electric signs with neon martini glasses lit up on them, the San Francisco symbol of bar—thousands of neon-magenta martini glasses bouncing and streaming down the hill, and beneath them hundreds, thousands of people wheeling around to look at this freaking crazed truck we’re in, their white faces erupting from their lapels like marshmallows—streaming and bouncing down the hill—and God knows they’ve got plenty to look at.

    That’s why it strikes me as funny when Cool Breeze says very seriously over the whole roar of the thing, I don’t know—when Kesey gets out I don’t know if I can come around the Warehouse.

    Why not?

    Well, like the cops are going to be coming around like all feisty, and I’m on probation, so I don’t know.

    Well, that’s good thinking there, Cool Breeze. Don’t rouse the bastids. Lie low—like right now. Right now Cool Breeze is so terrified of the law he is sitting up in plain view of thousands of already startled citizens wearing some kind of Seven Dwarfs Black Forest gnome’s hat covered in feathers and fluorescent colors. Kneeling in the truck, facing us, also in plain view, is a half-Ottawa Indian girl named Lois Jennings, with her head thrown back and a radiant look on her face. Also a blazing silver disk in the middle of her forehead alternately exploding with light when the sun hits it or sending off rainbows from the defraction lines in it. And, oh yeah, there’s a long-barreled Colt .45 revolver in her hand, only nobody on the street can tell it’s a cap pistol as she pegs away, kheeew, kheeew, at the erupting marshmallow faces like Debra Paget in … in …

    —Kesey’s coming out of jail!

    Two more things they are looking at out there are a sign on the rear bumper reading Custer Died for Your Sins and, at the wheel, Lois’s enamorado Stewart Brand, a thin blond guy with a blazing disk on his forehead too, and a whole necktie made of Indian beads. No shirt, however, just an Indian bead necktie on bare skin and a white butcher’s coat with medals from the King of Sweden on it.

    Here comes a beautiful one, attaché case and all, the day-is-done resentful look and the … shoes—how they shine!—and what the hell are these beatnik ninnies—and Lois plugs him in the old marshmallow and he goes streaming and bouncing down the hill …

    And the truck heaves and billows, blazing silver red and Day-Glo, and I doubt seriously, Cool Breeze, that there is a single cop in all of San Francisco today who does not know that this crazed vehicle is a guerrilla patrol from the dread LSD.

    The cops now know the whole scene, even the costumes, the jesuschrist strung-out hair, Indian beads, Indian headbands, donkey beads, temple bells, amulets, mandalas, god’s-eyes, fluorescent vests, unicorn horns, Errol Flynn dueling shirts—but they still don’t know about the shoes. The heads have a thing about shoes. The worst are shiny black shoes with shoelaces in them. The hierarchy ascends from there, although practically all lowcut shoes are unhip, from there on up to the boots the heads like, light, fanciful boots, English boots of the mod variety, if that is all they can get, but better something like hand-tooled Mexican boots with Caliente Dude Triple A toes on them. So see the FBI—black—shiny—laced up—FBI shoes—when the FBI finally grabbed Kesey—

    There is another girl in the back of the truck, a dark little girl with thick black hair, called Black Maria. She looks Mexican, but she says to me in straight soft Californian:

    When is your birthday?

    March 2.

    Pisces, she says. And then: I would never take you for a Pisces.

    Why?

    "You seem too … solid for a Pisces."

    But I know she means stolid. I am beginning to feel stolid. Back in New York City, Black Maria, I tell you, I am even known as something of a dude. But somehow a blue silk blazer and a big tie with clowns on it and … a … pair of shiny lowcut black shoes don’t set them all to doing the Varsity Rag in the head world in San Francisco. Lois picks off the marshmallows one by one; Cool Breeze ascends into the innards of his gnome’s hat; Black Maria, a Scorpio herself, rummages through the Zodiac; Stewart Brand winds it through the streets; paillettes explode—and this is nothing special, just the usual, the usual in the head world of San Francisco, just a little routine messing up the minds of the citizenry en route, nothing more than psyche food for beautiful people, while giving some guy from New York a lift to the Warehouse to wait for the Chief, Ken Kesey, who is getting out of jail.

    ABOUT ALL I KNEW ABOUT KESEY AT THAT POINT WAS THAT HE was a highly regarded 31-year-old novelist and in a lot of trouble over drugs. He wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), which was made into a play in 1963, and Sometimes a Great Notion (1964). He was always included with Philip Roth and Joseph Heller and Bruce Jay Friedman and a couple of others as one of the young novelists who might go all the way. Then he was arrested twice for possession of marijuana, in April of 1965 and January of 1966, and fled to Mexico rather than risk a stiff sentence. It looked like as much as five years, as a second offender. One day I happened to get hold of some letters Kesey wrote from Mexico to his friend Larry McMurtry, who wrote Horseman, Pass By, from which the movie Hud was made. They were wild and ironic, written like a cross between William Burroughs and George Ade, telling of hideouts, disguises, paranoia, fleeing from cops, smoking joints and seeking satori in the Rat lands of Mexico. There was one passage written George Ade—fashion in the third person as a parody of what the straight world back there in the U.S.A. must think of him now:

    "In short, this young, handsome, successful, happily-married-three-lovely-children father was a fear-crazed dope fiend in flight to avoid prosecution on three felonies and god knows how many misdemeanors and seeking at the same time to sculpt a new satori from an old surf—in even shorter, mad as a hatter.

    "Once an athlete so valued he had been given the job of calling signals from the line and risen into contention for the nationwide amateur wrestling crown, now he didn’t know if he could do a dozen pushups. Once possessor of a phenomenal bank account and money waving from every hand, now it was all his poor wife could do to scrape together eight dollars to send as getaway money to Mexico. But a few years previous he had been listed in Who’s Who and asked to speak at such auspicious gatherings as the Wellesley Club in Dah-la and now they wouldn’t even allow him to speak at a VDC [Vietnam Day Committee] gathering. What was it that had brought a man so high of promise to so low a state in so short a time? Well, the answer can be found in just one short word, my friends, in just one all-well-used syllable:

    "Dope!

    And while it may be claimed by some of the addled advocates of these chemicals that our hero is known to have indulged in drugs before his literary success, we must point out that there was evidence of his literary prowess well before the advent of the so-called psychedelic into his life but no evidence at all of any of the lunatic thinking that we find thereafter!

    To which he added:

    "(oh yea, the wind hums

    time ago—time ago—

    the rafter drums and the walls see

    … and there’s a door to that bird

    in the sa-a-a-apling sky

    time ago by—

    Oh yeah the surf giggles

    time ago time ago

    of under things killed when

    bad was banished and all the

    doors to the birds vanished

    time ago then.)"

    I got the idea of going to Mexico and trying to find him and do a story on Young Novelist Real-Life Fugitive. I started asking around about where he might be in Mexico. Everybody on the hip circuit in New York knew for certain. It seemed to be the thing to know this summer. He is in Puerto Vallarta. He is in Ajijic. He is in Oaxaca. He is in San Miguel de Allende. He is in Paraguay. He just took a steamboat from Mexico to Canada. And everyone knew for certain.

    I was still asking around when Kesey sneaked back into the U.S. in October and the FBI caught up with him on the Bayshore freeway south of San Francisco. An agent chased him down an embankment and caught him and Kesey was in jail. So I flew to San Francisco. I went straight to the San Mateo County jail in Redwood City and the scene in the waiting room there was more like the stage door at the Music Box Theatre. It was full of cheerful anticipation. There was a young psychologist there, Jim Fadiman—Clifton Fadiman’s nephew, it turned out—and Jim and his wife Dorothy were happily stuffing three I Ching coins into the spine of some interminable dense volume of Oriental mysticism and they asked me to get word to Kesey that the coins were in there. There was also a little roundfaced brunette named Marilyn who told me she used to be a teenie grouper hanging out with a rock ‘n’ roll group called The Wild Flowers but now she was mainly with Bobby Petersen. Bobby Petersen was not a musician. He was a saint, as nearly as I could make out. He was in jail down in Santa Cruz trying to fight a marijuana charge on the grounds that marijuana was a religious sacrament for him. I didn’t figure out exactly why she was up here in the San Mateo jail waiting room instead except that it was like a stage door, as I said, with Kesey as the star who was still inside.

    There was a slight hassle with the jailers over whether I was to get in to see him or not. The cops had nothing particularly to gain by letting me in. A reporter from New York—that just meant more publicity for this glorified beatnik. That was the line on Kesey. He was a glorified beatnik up on two dope charges, and why make a hero out of him. I must say that California has smooth cops. They all seem to be young, tall, crewcut, blond, with bleached blue eyes, like they just stepped out of a cigarette ad. Their jailhouses don’t look like jailhouses, at least not the parts the public sees. They are all blond wood, fluorescent lights and filing-cabinet-tan metal, like the Civil Service exam room in a new Post Office building. The cops all speak soft Californian and are neat and correct as an ice cube. By the book; so they finally let me in to see Kesey during visiting hours. I had ten minutes. I waved goodbye to Marilyn and the Fadimans and the jolly scene downstairs and they took me up to the third floor in an elevator.

    The elevator opened right onto a small visiting room. It was weird. Here was a lineup of four or five cubicles, like the isolation booths on the old TV quiz shows, each one with a thick plate-glass window and behind each window a prisoner in a prison blue workshirt. They were lined up like haddocks on ice. Outside each window ran a counter with a telephone on it. That’s what you speak over in here. A couple of visitors are already hunched over the things. Then I pick out Kesey.

    He is standing up with his arms folded over his chest and his eyes focused in the distance, i.e., the wall. He has thick wrists and big forearms, and the way he has them folded makes them look gigantic. He looks taller than he really is, maybe because of his neck. He has a big neck with a pair of sternocleido-mastoid muscles that rise up out of the prison workshirt like a couple of dock ropes. His jaw and chin are massive. He looks a little like Paul Newman, except that he is more muscular, has thicker skin, and he has tight blond curls boiling up around his head. His hair is almost gone on top, but somehow that goes all right with his big neck and general wrestler’s build. Then he smiles slightly. It’s curious, he doesn’t have a line in his face. After all the chasing and hassling—he looks like the third week at the Sauna Spa; serene, as I say.

    Then I pick up my telephone and he picks up his—and this is truly Modern Times. We are all of twenty-four inches apart, but there is a piece of plate glass as thick as a telephone directory between us. We might as well be in different continents, talking over Videophone. The telephones are very crackly and lo-fi, especially considering that they have a world of two feet to span. Naturally it was assumed that the police monitored every conversation. I wanted to ask him all about his fugitive days in Mexico. That was still the name of my story, Young Novelist Fugitive Eight Months in Mexico. But he could hardly go into that on this weird hookup, and besides, I had only ten minutes. I take out a notebook and start asking him—anything. There had been a piece in the paper about his saying it was time for the psychedelic movement to go beyond acid, so I asked him about that. Then I started scribbling like mad, in shorthand, in the notebook. I could see his lips moving two feet away. His voice crackled over the telephone like it was coming from Brisbane. The whole thing was crazy. It seemed like calisthenics we were going through.

    It’s my idea, he said, that it’s time to graduate from what has been going on, to something else. The psychedelic wave was happening six or eight months ago when I went to Mexico. It’s been growing since then, but it hasn’t been moving. I saw the same stuff when I got back as when I left. It was just bigger, that was all— He talks in a soft voice with a country accent, almost a pure country accent, only crackling and rasping and cheese-grated over the two-foot hookup, talking about—

    —there’s been no creativity, he is saying, and I think my value has been to help create the next step. I don’t think there will be any movement off the drug scene until there is something else to move to—

    —all in a plain country accent about something—well, to be frank, I didn’t know what in the hell it was all about. Sometimes he spoke cryptically, in aphorisms. I told him I had heard he didn’t intend to do any more writing. Why? I said.

    I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph, he said.

    He talked about something called the Acid Test and forms of expression in which there would be no separation between himself and the audience. It would be all one experience, with all the senses opened wide, words, music, lights, sounds, touch—lightning.

    You mean on the order of what Andy Warhol is doing? I said.

    … pause. No offense, says Kesey, but New York is about two years behind.

    He said it very patiently, with a kind of country politeness, as if … I don’t want to be rude to you fellows from the City, but there’s been things going on out here that you would never guess in your wildest million years, old buddy …

    THE TEN MINUTES WERE UP AND I WAS OUT OF THERE. I HAD gotten nothing, except my first brush with a strange phenomenon, that strange up-country charisma, the Kesey presence. I had nothing to do but kill time and hope Kesey would get out on bail somehow and I could talk to him and get the details on Novelist Fugitive in Mexico. This seemed like a very long shot at this time, because Kesey had two marijuana charges against him and had already jumped the country once.

    So I rented a car and started making the rounds in San Francisco. Somehow my strongest memories of San Francisco are of me in a terrific rented sedan roaring up hills or down hills, sliding on and off the cable-car tracks. Slipping and sliding down to North Beach, the fabled North Beach, the old fatherland bohemia of the West Coast, always full of Big Daddy So-and-so and Costee Plusee and long-haired little Wasp and Jewish buds balling spade cats—and now North Beach was dying. North Beach was nothing but tit shows. In the famous Beat Generation HQ, the City Lights bookstore, Shig Murao, the Nipponese panjandrum of the place, sat glowering with his beard hanging down like those strands of furze and fern in an architect’s drawing, drooping over the volumes of Kahlil Gibran by the cash register while Professional Budget Finance Dentists here for the convention browsed in search of the beatniks between tit shows. Everything was The Topless on North Beach, strippers with their breasts enlarged with injections of silicone emulsion.

    The action—meaning the hip cliques that set the original tone—the action was all over in Haight-Ashbury. Pretty soon all the bellwethers of a successful bohemia would be there, too, the cars going through, bumper to bumper, with everbody rubber-necking, the tour buses going through and here … Home of the Hippies … there’s one there, and the queers and spade hookers and bookstores and boutiques. Everything was Haight-Ashbury and the acid heads.

    But it was not just North Beach that was dying. The whole old-style hip life—jazz, coffee houses, civil rights, invite a spade for dinner, Vietnam—it was all suddenly dying, I found out, even among the students at Berkeley, across the bay from San Francisco, which had been the heart of the student-rebellion and so forth. It had even gotten to the point that Negroes were no longer in the hip scene, not even as totem figures. It was unbelievable. Spades, the very soul figures of Hip, of jazz, of the hip vocabulary itself, man and like and dig and baby and scarf and split and later and so fine, of civil rights and graduating from Reed College and living on North Beach, down Mason, and balling spade cats—all that good elaborate petting and patting and pouring soul all over the spades—all over, finished, incredibly.

    So I was starting to get the trend of all this heaving and convulsing in the bohemian world of San Francisco. Meantime, miraculously, Kesey’s three young lawyers, Pat Hallinan, Brian Rohan, and Paul Robertson, were about to get Kesey out on bail. They assured the judges, in San Mateo and San Francisco, that Mr. Kesey had a very public-spirited project in mind. He had returned from exile for the express purpose of calling a huge meeting of heads and hippies at Winterland Arena in San Francisco in order to tell The Youth to stop taking LSD because it was dangerous and might french fry their brains, etc. It was going to be an acid graduation ceremony. They should go beyond acid. That was what Kesey had been talking to me about, I guess. At the same time, six of Kesey’s close friends in the Palo Alto area had put their homes up as security for a total of $35,000 bail with the San Mateo County court. I suppose the courts figured they had Kesey either way. If he jumped bail now, it would be such a dirty trick on his friends, costing them their homes, that Kesey would be discredited as a drug apostle or anything else. If he didn’t, he would be obliged to give his talk to The Youth—and so much the better. In any case, Kesey was coming out.

    This script was not very popular in Haight-Ashbury, however. I soon found out that the head life in San Francisco was already such a big thing that Kesey’s return and his acid graduation plan were causing the heads’ first big political crisis. All eyes were on Kesey and his group, known as the Merry Pranksters. Thousands of kids were moving into San Francisco for a life based on LSD and the psychedelic thing. Thing was the major abstract word in Haight-Ashbury. It could mean anything, isms, life styles, habits, leanings, causes, sexual organs; thing and freak; freak referred to styles and obsessions, as in Stewart Brand is an Indian freak or the zodiac—that’s her freak, or just to heads in costume. It wasn’t a negative word. Anyway, just a couple of weeks before, the heads had held their first big be-in in Golden Gate Park, at the foot of the hill leading up into Haight-Ashbury, in mock observance of the day LSD became illegal in California. This was a gathering of all the tribes, all the communal groups. All the freaks came and did their thing. A head named Michael Bowen started it, and thousands of them piled in, in high costume, ringing bells, chanting, dancing ecstatically, blowing their minds one way and another and making their favorite satiric gestures to the cops, handing them flowers, burying the bastids in tender fruity petals of love. Oh christ, Tom, the thing was fantastic, a freaking mind-blower, thousands of high-loving heads out there messing up the minds of the cops and everybody else in a fiesta of love and euphoria. Even Kesey, who was still on the run then, had brazened on in and mingled with the crowd for a while, and they were all one, even Kesey—and now all of a

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