The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

You know those books that blew your mind in high school? Like Siddhartha or anything by Bukowski or Nietzche and you read it in a cafe trying to look cool to the older hippies who ran the place and one of them sleazed up to you and said, "you have beautiful skin" and gave you a copy of Tom Wolfe's book on the Merry Pranksters and tried to get you to go out back and smoke a suspiciously tangy looking joint which you delcline but take the book, and read it and are briefly tempted to run off to a commune you've heard about in Arcata where women do their own pap smears with hand mirrors (that's what the brochure said) and then twenty years later you find a copy of Woolfe's book in a weird used bookstore and re-read it and think, Christ, hippies were fucking annoying?

Trying to tease apart and count every single level on which this book succeeds is making me a little dizzy, but the first four that come to mind:
- A showcase for spot-on imitations of the goofiest, most entertaining acid-rapping
- A miracle of strategic thread-management w/r/t the massive cast of characters that pop in and out of the story
- Probably my favorite use of stream of consciousness as a device in any genre or era (I hope that someone somewhere has written their psychiatry thesis on his use of typeface, all-caps, and "::::::"'s)
- In its attitude towards The Thing, in all its ineffability and elusiveness, pulls off a hell of tightrope act b/w sly, ironic condescension (which makes the come-up so goddamn hilarious) and earnest admiration and yearning (which, for me at least, makes the downfall tangibly ... no, "heartbreaking" is too schmaltzy, but...)

... I guess to balance out the gushing, I'll share one nugget of feedback for ways in which this book could have used some more attentive editing though, which is that by the end, reading the word "Day-Glo" used metaphorically as an adjective kinda made me want to rip my eyes out.

Anyway, all in all though, an un-put-down-able book, and a serious candidate for my favorite work of Nonfiction ever.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

This was my second read of this book. Having first read it in high school, I did not appreciate hippies or know much about Hunter Thompson or Ken Kesey. Having read other Tom Wolfe books like 'The Right Stuff' and 'Bonfire of the Vanities' that I consider to be American classics, I thought I'd give this one another go.

I can say now that being much older helps and that the writing is quite good - as one would expect. Wolfe's extraordinary ability to capture the counter-culture in that moment - the mid 60's - is impressive. In an odd way this book serves more as a history of the period than a great story.

I also enjoyed Hunter Thompson's Hell's Angels which is a similar book about a similar topic written within the same year. Hell's Angels is more dramatic than the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Wolfe is still the better writer but the drama in TEKAAT is a little uneven - sometimes boring and sometimes seat of your pants exciting.

4 to 4.5 stars

This raw, in-your-face account of 1964-1966 will place you firmly in the hearts and LSD-addled minds of the early hippies, rife with all their accompanying obnoxious decadence. Suffice to say I'd always wished I'd been a young adult back then before reading this book - now, I'm not so sure (bummer, man).

Yet despite the loose and often treacly prose, this is worthwhile historical reading for any 1960s/Bay Area devotee. Wolfe makes a compelling argument for Ken Kesey (imho along with Bob Dylan and Timothy Leary) as the father of the late '60s counterculture movement.

Rounding up from 3.5. I have this weird pattern where I'll read ~half of a book in a burst, put it down for 6 months, and then read the rest also in another weeklong burst, did that here.

Enjoyed but was expecting to like this a lot more. I really love Tom Wolfe, and think this is considered to be his best but, this felt way less compelling to me than both The Right Stuff and Radical Chic. I think generally just over-long and could have been about half the length.

That said, this is a really compelling distillation of the Merry Pranksters/the general hippie scene in the Bay Area. I started reading this just as I was resolving to move to San Francisco, and finished it about a month after moving here. It's quite cool to see a very different version of the city—a hub of culture in North Beach, a not-yet-gentrified Haight, etc. Also fun to see familiar names, certainly Stewart Brand which I knew going in, but perhaps most bizzarely Bill Graham, of "Bill Graham Civic Auditorium" fame.

Anyways, the narration is enjoyable/entertaining and Wolfe does a great job capturing Kesey's charisma / what made the Pranksters so alluring. Lots of interesting sidenotes here about the New Left and general climate of the time as well. Recommend but not strongly.

"What we are, we're going to wail with on this whole trip."

What Ken Kesey is is a prick, so let's not get any delusions about that.

But most great leaders are pricks, and the case Wolfe is making in this masterful biography is that Kesey, in his way, was a great leader. His early days on the Furthur bus, discovering LSD and inventing the psychedelic movement, come off like Stanley or Shackleton: explorers in new lands, leading a ragtag but brave band of adventurers into dangerous frontier territory. The middle part makes you feel like Kesey was really on the edge of something new - or at least that he really, really wanted to be - placing him among prophets remembered and failed.

The final part...well, you know how this arc goes. Hubris and overreaching. It's a standard rise and fall plot - if you've seen The Doors, you get the idea - but I've never seen it done better.

This book doesn't make me care much for Kesey. But I do have a new respect for Neal Cassady, now the muse of two counterculture movements in a row. I came out of On The Road feeling sorry for Cassady, who seemed like a mentally unstable person taken advantage of by Kerouac and his crew. But the fact that he managed to become a central, trusted, key figure once again, in this movement also...dude had to know what he was doing. I mean, other than killing himself.

I can't believe Gus Van Sant is sitting on the rights to this because he doesn't know how to film it. For Pete's sake, dude, just cast Robert Downey Jr and turn a camera on.

You may be reminded a few times that it is super boring to listen to someone describe their acid trip. You may disagree with the philosophy getting chased here. You may not like Ken Kesey at all. You may think the whole thing is mostly bullshit. But you will enjoy hearing Kesey wail with the whole trip.

"You're either on the bus...or off the bus." This is the choice facing you as you begin to read Tom Wolfe's classic saga of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters as they test the boundries of consciousness and test the limits of other human's patience. What is almost as amazing as the lengths to which the pranksters went to enjoy their existence on Earth, is the style that Wolfe has chosen to narrate the adventures. Brillliantly blending stream of consciousness writing and a journalistic sense of description, Wolfe immerses himself in Kesey's world in an attempt to understand the thoughts of a group of adults who would paint a school bus with day-glo colors and trek across the United States with pitchers full of acid and a video camera keeping an eye on it all. Who could resist a chance to find out what it was like to spend a quaint evening in the woods reaching altered states of consciousness with a group of Hell's Angels, or taking a peek inside the world of the budding hippie stars led by a youthful Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. Whether or not you approve of massive drug use will not impact your liking of this book, and for anyone who takes an interest in the counterculture movement this book is a must-read. Also acts as a perfect companion to Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," and Jack Kerouac's "On the Road." Now you must decide, "Can YOU pass the acid test?"

So you're new to the psychedelic scene and you're grooving with it. So you want to know about it, drape the trappings of a notorious decade upon your brain a shimmering web of counterculture lore. You bought Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to read but saw the movie instead, and while you were at it, also watched Oliver Stone's Jim Morrison biopic. You collared yourself with a hemp necklace, dreaming of dreadlocks. Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley were cool so you got a shirt. You heard about the Grateful Dead, took some songs to heart, and dug Pink Floyd. Ken Kesey... Ken Kesey who? The guy who wrote the book that the Jack Nicholson movie was based on?

One of the most underrated figures of the Flower Power Era, Ken Kesey died in 2001, after several feeble recreations of his glorious original journey. Literally a government created monster, Kesey emerged from the MKUltra Project with an expansive knowledge of alternative consciousnesses and the means of attainment. That, compounded with his experiences in the mental institution where he worked, Kesey saw that people who didn't fit in society were not really crazy but were triangles trying to fit into squares or vice versa.

So Kesey made a place where people could be up front, be themselves without judgement from others in the circle and thus were born the Pranksters. With the earnings from his first book, he bought some land in La Honda, California where he formed a society of people whose sole purpose was to be up front. Be yourself. People began to develop bizarre It was a grand experiment, and one day they set forth, no, further in a long road trip towards New York. Another underrated driving force in the narrative of the sixties and seventies is Neal Cassady, made famous as Dean Moriarity in Kerouac's On The Road. As in Kerouac's book, Cassady is a tireless marauder of the roads, and he was a vital component of that mad bus drive across the country.

Kesey singlehandedly, with the manic enthusiasm of his fellow pranksters, dredged an entirely new, vital movement from the corpse of the stagnant cold war mentality of the fifties. Without him, the seventies as we know it would not have existed. The Beatles wouldn't have their Magical Mystery Tour (a watered down albeit more popular version of the pranksters' journey). We wouldn't have had communal living. Acid rock (Kesey reportedly had to kick out Jerry Garcia for hanging out with them, like a Senior booting out a froshie. Later, with the Grateful Dead helmed by Owsley, the acid king, creator of the most potent acid in the world, Kesey's acid tests became popular. Kesey's lover Mountain Girl eventually went on to wed Garcia). Be ins. Happenings. Music technology. Mixed media shows. That decade as we know it, was shaped by the indomitable vision of a single man.

The end of The Electric Kool-Aid Test is heart-wrenching, with a vision crushed into oblivion, and a man going quietly into the darkness. I for one, would have loved to see the DSMO experiment succeed, and who knows how the world would have shaped itself after this?

Tom Wolfe manages to tackle an extraordinary difficult subject matter with his first venture into the entirely new and self-created gentre New Journalism, and he pulls it off. Have you seen him? The guy looks like he oughta be sipping from a pipe while sharing conversation with Mark Twain on a riverboat! I can't picture him getting down and dirty with hippies, but I reckon that's one of the coolest things about journalists. Wolfe draws the narrative from interviews and Kesey's open willingness to share the entire library of footage and recordings from the bus tour. He descends into the psychedelic psyches of the Pranksters, and does a magnificent job for someone who says he has never taken LSD before.

I originally planned to read this along time ago, but I kept putting it off. It's a good thing. For some books, there is a time and place to be read, and for me, ten years ago wasn't it. Now I am hesitant to pick up other masterpieces of Wolfe's, lest they don't shine against the light of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.