I had forgotten (successfully) how pretentious, pseudo-intellectual, self-absorbed, and self-righteous hippies were. Maybe, as a full-fledged member of the If-It-Feels-Good-Do-It Generation, I was subconsciously embarrassed by my own pretentiousness, pseudo-intellectuality, self-absorption, and self-righteousness in those days.

But I recently restored my suppressed memory by hooking down Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," first published in 1968. The book I had avoided for thirty years despite glowing recommendations by assorted fellow travelers gave me a flashback that was, well, a bummer. But my reaction only testifies to the power of a work considered by many a nonfiction classic.

In 1966 Wolfe, who later penned The Right Stuff and Bonfire of the Vanities, set out to capture in print the essence of the acid-dropping Californian hippie cult led by Ken Kesey, the Typhoid Mary of LSD and author of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Sometimes a Great Notion." To do so Wolfe employed the techniques of "new journalism" that he, along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and others were then developing to produce nonfiction works that read like novels.

Like a novel, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" uses scene-by-scene construction, records full dialogue, provides the thoughts and emotions of the subjects, and describes in detail their behavior and possessions.

And, like a novel, it puts you there, in the midst of Kesey and his Merry Pranksters: in their Day-Glo bus careening across America, at their acid-laced parties, in their drug-addled minds. Instead of telling you what happened via objective narrative like most journalists, Wolfe shows you, infesting you with all the atmospheric and sensual details. And it works, at least in my case, only too well.

Through a rich, slangy, neologistic stream of consciousness, Wolfe compellingly portrays the insanity, duplicity ("Never trust a Prankster"), and manic, existential muddle of Prankster communal life: The glee in being weird and offensive, the pride in being "cosmic" and unintelligible; the cult-like worship of the charismatic Kesey, and the inevitable crackups, to which the remaining Pranksters remain strikingly callous.

But Wolfe also ably renders the captivating transcendence of the hippie experience: the high energy, high spirits, humor, and creativity--which, for the Merry Pranksters, owed so much to Kesey's wit and inventiveness. For a brief moment it made me long for the days when you could be openly outrageous, say most anything you damned well pleased to anyone, and live free and wild. Maybe even for more than a brief moment.

It made me wish I had been there when some shortsighted Berkeley anti-war-rally organizer invited the celebrated Kesey to speak. But instead of mimicking the militant tone of previous speakers, Kesey, in orange coat and Day-Glo World War I helmet, came to the microphone with a harmonica. Accompanied by the Pranksters' makeshift band, he played "Home on the Range," likened the previous speaker to Mussolini, and chided the 20,000 ralliers:

"Me! Me! Me!...That's the cry of the ego and the cry of this rally!...Me! Me! Me!...Yep, you're playing their game."

Ah, the good old days.

Wolfe then goes on to encapsulate the scene and capture its spirit in his conversational prose:

"--and the crowd starts going into a slump. It's as if the rally, the whole day, has been one long careful inflation of a helium balloon, preparing to take off--and suddenly somebody has pulled a plug. It's not what [Kesey] is saying, either. It's the sound and the freaking sight and that goddamn mournful harmonica and that stupid Chinese music by the freaks standing up behind him. It's the only thing the martial spirit can't stand--a put-on, a prank, a shuck, a goose in the anus."

No, not traditional, objective reportage, but something more, something that cuts to the heart of the moment and tells a deeper truth.

Wolfe nonetheless manages to do all this full-immersion, colloquial reporting without taking sides, without preaching, advocating, or admonishing. Along with the pandemonium and celebrity and wild joyousness of the Merry Pranksters, he shows you the psychotic reactions, the Hell's Angels gang bangs, and the betrayals. And you believe every word of it, even when his minutely detailed reporting and at times overly rich prose become tedious.

But, as in fiction, the details are everything. And the only way to get them right is to do your homework, which Wolfe did in spades. In addition to on-the-scene reporting and the usual documentary research, he conducted interviews with Kesey, various Pranksters, and others on the scene, such as writers Larry McMurtry, Hunter Thompson, and Robert Stone. He delved into Prankster archives--films, tapes, letters, diaries, photos--and into Prankster minds.

In an author's note at the book's end, Wolfe writes: "I have tried not only to tell what the Pranksters did but to re-create the mental atmosphere or subjective reality of it. I don't think their adventure can be understood without that."

In "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" Wolfe succeeds in re-creating the megalomaniacal atmosphere of a movement that profoundly changed our culture. In it he reveals the roots of the mass drug-taking and mass permissiveness that linger yet today.

Kesey's own story in the interim seems a sad microcosm of our culture: After his LSD experiences he never wrote another work that approached the verve and sweep of his first two novels. Later, from his website, he sold Prankster memorabilia, films, and T-shirts reading "Never Trust a Prankster."

I enjoyed this book. I grew up partially on the peninsula with a father who was pretty involved in the counter culture. I ran around at 12 in a black corduroy cape with a sparkly Mylar dot on my forehead.. and when Ken Kesey's bus pulled up in our driveway in Barron Park and he and the Pranksters melted out I thought the circus had arrived.

I read Electric Kool Aid Acid Test soon after it came out and I thought Tom Wolfe really captured the feeling of the times. It was exciting for me to read because I felt pretty immersed in the times through my dad. I was young and precocious and I thought Kesey was about as handsome as could be.. I had read his books and loved One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest a lot. He was a larger than life figure and I circled around he (?) and my father as they sat at the work table in our garage eyeing his muscular bicep under his black tee shirt from behind my fathers print dryer.

A thought: I haven’t read this book since it came out.
Not sure what I would think now some 30 odd years later!?!

Can You Pass the Acid Test?

C'è stato un periodo, fra la Beat Generation e il movimento Hippie, in cui l'uso di sostanze allucinogene come l'LSD creò delle vere e proprie comunità in America. Quella guidata da Ken Kesey è sicuramente la più famosa: intorno a questo scrittore rinomato e a un passo dal successo con "n  Qualcuno volò sul nido del cuculon" (di cui tutti avranno sicuramente visto almeno l'adattamento cinematografico con un grandioso Jack Nicholson), si riunì il meglio della controcultura americana, formata tanto da giovani sbandati alla ricerca di qualcosa di nuovo, quanto da personaggi che nell'ambiente avevano già lasciato o avrebbero lasciato i loro segni indelebili, da quel Neal Cassady protagonista di "n  On the Roadn" a Jerry Garcia e i suoi Grateful Dead, passando per Allen Ginsberg e Kerouac stesso.

Famosi per la loro stravaganza e abituati a vivere in comunità, il gruppo guidato da Ken Kesey noto con il nome di "Merry Pranksters" segnò gli anni fra il 1962 e il 1966 con eccessi di qualunque tipo, alla ricerca di nuovi modi per assumere consapevolezza delle proprie facoltà mentali e al tempo stesso di fuggire dalla routine. A bordo di un pulmino completamente ridipinto in colori sgargianti e con l'insegna "FURTHUR" a indicare la propria direzione (storpiatura di further, "oltre", ma richiamante anche il termine future, "futuro"), abbigliati con indumenti appariscenti e spesso fluorescenti, attrezzati con decine di registratori e microfoni e cineprese e quant'altro gli sarebbe servito per registrare tutto ciò che intorno a loro succedeva quasi fossero protagonisti di un grande film, i Merry Pranksters scorrazzarono per un'America che ancora non aveva capito l'influenza degli acidi sui giovani e che guardava con un misto di curiosità e di timore questo gruppo di sbandati.

Tom Wolfe, il più grande esponente di quello che è stato definito il "new journalism", con questo libro ripercorre tutta l'ascesa dei Merry Pranksters: dalla nascita del gruppo a seguito delle sperimentazioni allucinogene di Kesey all'ingresso dei vari componenti storici, dalle traversie subite da Kesey stesso (più volte arrestato, poi fuggito in Messico, poi tornato in America e nuovamente fermato) ai famosi "acid test" in cui centinaia di persone provavano insieme l'assunzione di acidi, dai concerti dei Beatles ai primi spettacoli dei Grateful Dead, dall'avvicinamento al gruppo di motociclisti ribelli Hells Angels fino alla naturale dispersione dei componenti una volta che questo stile di vita iniziò a lasciare il posto ad altro. Il libro di Wolfe è un dettagliato report giornalistico in forma quasi romanzata, non tanto per il contenuto — assolutamente fedele e frutto di numerose interviste, nonché di un periodo in cui lo stesso Wolfe si unì ai Merry Pranksters per "studiarli" da vicino — quanto per il modo di raccontare: Tom Wolfe riesce a riportare nel suo lavoro tutto il contesto e i motivi di Kesey e compagni, ne studia i comportamenti e ne ricalca in qualche maniera anche il modo di raccontarsi con trovate postmoderne.

Se ne "n  La stoffa giustan" Wolfe ripercorreva grandiosamente la sfida ai cieli da parte degli astronauti agli albori dei primi viaggi spaziali, entusiasmando il lettore e rendendolo partecipe delle vittorie di uomini visti quasi come super-eroi, con "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" lo scrittore-giornalista presenta uno dei fenomeni più interessanti della controcultura americana degli anni '60. È un piacere percorrere infatti al suo fianco tutto quello che i Merry Pranksters, senza rendersene conto, sono stati in quegli anni: pionieri di una vita "alternativa" prima ancora che gli hippie nascessero e al tempo stesso sperimentatori di nuove droghe che avrebbero dovuto, a detta loro, aprirgli nuove porte tramite cui percepire in maniera differente il mondo. Ne viene fuori un disegno dell'America lontano dagli stereotipi del periodo e un reportage giornalistico che, pur soffrendo sul finale di un'eccessiva lunghezza, rimane assolutamente consigliato agli appassionati di cultura a stelle e strisce.

On the bus or off the bus?

The trolley glided along the tracks. Hovering, floating, flying. The ticket checker, his name tag read Mitchell, had the head of a warthog. “Feed the bee”, he said. :::: “What?” Jeff seemed trapped in a powerful time space vortex. His hands looked rubbery, like Plastic. Plastic Man. But drawn by a meth freak. A bunny, half-gold, half-silver, Day Glo halo, blood dripping from its fangs. “Feed the bee”, she said. “Feed it now! It’s hungry.” Jeff turned to the other passengers. “I just want to grok”, he thought, but the passengers turned toward him. Sensing his thoughts. They started to howl. Are they howling because they’re pixilated, speckled like a Seurat.? “You should have tried the strawberry Kool Aid. You have choices.” CONTROL. CONTROOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLLL! Outside the trolley, flying monkeys were flinging sugar cubes at Ma&Pa&Buddy&Sis. Paul is dead. Just go with the flow. ::::: Dog plaster was oozing from the roof. It was red and slimy. Slimy. Cassady is there. Played by Nick Nolte. He’s juggling a toaster. He’s the oracle. He’s the big, eye on top of the pyramid.

More than half of this book was written like a faux LSD trip. This kind of rambling prose is about as thrilling and contemporary as a Peter Max drawing or a Nehru jacket. If you can get past this – it’s challenging – and you’re interested in the transition from unwashed Beatnick to unwashed Hippie, which is facilitated by Ken Kesey via psychedelic drugs, then this is the book for you. Groove to acid tests, self-absorbed hippies, squalor for the sake of squalor – soundtrack provided by The Grateful Dead (don’t get me started on them).

Wolfe’s archness, think The Right Stuff or The Painted Word (infinitely better books) takes a beating after about thirty pages of this stuff. He might have been the Daddy to New Journalism but he was Hunter S. Thompson's bitch.

Also, Wolfe like a young Norman Mailer, doesn’t know how to spell the word “fug”.

On the bus or off the bus? I’ll drive my car, thanks, but first a good de-lousing.

Recommended listening:

For a fun psychedelic album (and kids there aren't many): The Small Faces - Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake

For an album that skewers the hippies: The Mothers of Invention – We’re Only in it for the Money

(ETA: Supposedly Gus Van Sant is working on making a movie of this book, slated for 2011.)

Much like Kerouac's On the Road, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was one of those books that I tried several times to read and always failed miserably to get through the first chapter. I made it a priority of mine now to sit down with it and read the effing thing.

(Side note: I have a notebook I've kept for... a really long time... in which I started writing down books I wanted to read when I worked at a used bookstore in Missouri. I could borrow the merchandise while I worked there, though that benefit really wasn't as fantastic as it was with Half-Price Books later in my book-slinging days. Anyhow, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was the second book I ever wrote in there. The first, in case you freaking care, was Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World by Rita Golden Gelman, but I've already been able to cross that one off the list. Clearly I'm not reading every book from my notebook in order of when I wrote them in there, but I have been ignoring the earlier titles for some reason and I am making a concerted effort to get through some of them. Hence why I felt it was important to read Kool-Aid now.)



Ken Kesey is best known for his writing (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Sometimes a Great Notion), but there's another side (some might argue an integral side to his writing) of Kesey that not everyone (especially outside of the US) is familiar with. In the mid-60s Kesey formed a counter-cultural movement, participants of which were ultimately referred to as the Merry Pranksters. The Merry Pranksters promoted the use of psychedelic drugs and in 1964 began a road trip (California to New York and back) in a Day-Glo-painted school bus called Furthur [sic]. Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters are credited (attacked by many as well) for encouraging the individual search for the expansion of consciousness through the use of marijuana, LSD, and other drugs. This is that story.



I was actually surprised that my interest didn't wane after the first chapter like it had so many times in the past. I realized during this reading that Wolfe's journalist narrative was actually quite hypnotic at times, certainly intentionally mirroring the effect of drugs. Still, have you ever been sober around someone (or a group of someones) who are tripping on mushrooms or acid, rolling on Ecstasy, or just plain high on pot? And they're in this completely different place than you are and you realize just how fucking annoying they are while they're like that (but of course if you were doing what they were doing it would probably be a horse of a different color)? That's what reading this was like for me. Okay, yeah, I get it, but dude. Seriously, take your high somewhere else, I can't be your babysitter/guardian/guide right now, I got things to do.

Also surprising to me was that Wolfe did take the opportunity to point out the negative moments that did occur on this Magic Bus Trip, and there were a few. A few Pranksters burned out - or, more appropriately, fizzled out as their brains completely fried and they went a little buh-bye. I could almost smell the brain meltdown from here. But Wolfe also sort of glossed over those situations. As if to say, "Hey, yeah, these things happened, but don't worry, it won't happen to you." One of the more disturbing parts for me was during one of the Acid Tests in which the Pranksters and the Hell's Angels combined efforts for a raucous good time - there was a gang-bang which was quickly written off as being okay because the woman "volunteered" for it. Sometimes it's amazing to me how much (or maybe how little) has actually changed in some forty years since the Merry Pranksters took off in their bus.

Wolfe wrote this book like he was there, like he experienced any or all of this. From what I can tell of his Author's Note at the end of the text, everything he wrote in Kool-Aid was information gathered from some of the participants themselves, like Kesey, or through letters, diaries, photographs, movie clips (the Pranksters were making a movie of their road trip), etc. It's hard to know how much is actually accurate, or if there was some extra glamor thrown in for good measure, as one is apt to do when reflecting on something that happened previously. Throw in some drugs and lord knows what kind of memories will come out, or how accurate they were. Still, Wolfe wrote the story well and I found myself interested, though some of that interest may have come from all the name-dropping that came along with this story: Leary, Burroughs, Cassady, The Warlocks (later known more widely as The Grateful Dead), Ginsberg, and others. Biggest complaint: I would have really loved to have had some photos included in the text.

I think maybe if I read this 10-15 years ago (and actually made myself read it all) I might have had even a better appreciation of this. As it is, I'm in a different place now, both physically and mentally, and so I felt a little old at times while reading this. (Though to be honest reading this in October made me think quite a bit about how much I miss the Lupus Chilifest - which I understand is an actual "thing" now? And not how it was back in my teen days when there weren't that many people.)

Anyway, sure, I could go get totally ripped on some acid right now. But I have a feeling I wouldn't be able to make it to work tomorrow if I did. Though I might make it in by Wednesday or Thursday at least. Maybe. I think.

To me, nothing says Christmas better than trippy colors mixed with love, peace, and harmony.

Turn on the lights and turn yourself on, find the bus and/or Santa's sleigh, and it's truly the season to be jolly!

... and freak out the squares, man.

Break the mold in our lives, put on the day-glow, THINK DIFFERENTLY, and DEFY EVERYTHING! It's CHRISTMAS-ish. :) Let's check out those elvish helpers...

The Merry Pranksters!

Ken Kesey (un)led this band of social explorers took so many mind-altering trips that they spawned a whole movement in the mid-sixties... so much so that the whole thing became passe and overdone well before '69, and even burned out a number of mental cosmonauts before LSD became illegal a few years before.

This particular book is a Non-Fiction in the best tradition of great storytelling. Or is it the reverse?

Doesn't matter. It's all real. It happened. A Kerouac-Adventure diving deep in the psyche as well as busting social-norms, these Merry Pranksters hung out with Hell's Angels, disturbed a disturbed America, and gave access to unimaginable quantities of hallucinogenics to the world. The impact on music, fame, spirituality is undisputed. This was the total awakening of the imagination, for good or ill, that made people hope for a brighter future.

Hope and all these people working together to build something bigger than any of us IS the point. Never mind that it didn't quite turn out the way they hoped. The pendulum sure swang back HARD on them.

Even so, this history is pretty freaking amazing. All the good, the bad, the ignorance and the hope... it just smells like Christmas to me!

Merry Christmas! The bus is here!

I've been trying to finish this for a while. If the experience of reading it wasn't so much like an acid trip itself, I might be able to get past halfway. Each chapter starts out like a story but slowly devolves, sometimes into sheer chaos. I'm interested in the people being talked about, especially after reading On the Road, but I just can't slog through. I may come back to it.

eindelijk uit. heb hier zo lang over gedaan maar het was het wel waard om er de tijd voor te nemen. heel interessant om over die post-beatnik psychedelische tijd te lezen, hoe dat allemaal tot stand is gekomen. grappig dat andere figuren en schrijvers hierin voorkomen. hoe die LSD ervaringen werden geschreven vond ik echt wel knap, je werd er echt in meegenomen. ben nu wel benieuwd hoe dit en MK-ULTRA met elkaar te maken hebben gehad? hm. had verwacht dat dit meet culty zou zijn dan dat het was. en jess las dit boek in gilmore girls.

After finishing Back to Blood, I felt curious about Tom Wolfe's beginnings. My beginning with Tom Wolfe was reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 1969. I married my first husband in April of that year and we set out on our "honeymoon" which was really a glorified road trip across the country from Ann Arbor to San Francisco, inspired by Kerouac's On the Road. We camped the whole way, intending to end up as teachers in a "free school" in San Fran.

Reading Acid Test was our preparation, our Rick Steves. We were among the hippest drug-taking heads in Ann Arbor but wanted to be sure we were cool enough for Haight Ashbury. As it turned out, I was most assuredly not.

Reading the book again some forty years later was actually a fabulous experience (fabulous meaning "resembling a fable; of an incredible, astonishing or exaggerated nature" (Webster's dictionary.) It recaptured for me the entire mindset we had at the time: the mistrust and disgust we had for middle class values and morality; the disregard for authority and cops and the war in Vietnam; the pure hatred for the military industrial complex; the willingness to ingest any drug; the utter trust and camaraderie we had with all hippies.

Wolfe was already an engaging writer. Acid Test is nonfiction but reads like a novel. I recognized in Ken Kesey the birth of the quintessential Wolfe hero: a guy who drops out of his respected role in society and becomes a desperate, sometimes failing, often wanted man, spurred on by a vision and a quest for meaning. I wonder if Tom Wolfe had ingested Joseph Campbell's Hero With A Thousand Faces, another seminal text for literate hippies, which was curiously reissued in 1968.

Weird side note: In Back to Blood, the main protagonist Nestor Comacho, pulls himself up a rope, hand over hand, without using his feet, in his first manic feat of the novel. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (on page 385 in the original hardcover Book Club edition I got from the library) Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters plan a similar manic feat. By this time Kesey is wanted, jail-bait in fact, for numerous drug busts, so they are planning the Acid Test of all time at Winterland in San Francisco. All the cops will be there checking out all the stoned people and looking for Kesey. At midnight on Halloween, "Kesey, masked and disguised in a Superhero costume...will come up on stage and deliver his vision of the future, of the way 'beyond acid.' Who is this apocalyptic--Then he will will rip off his mask--Why-it's Ken Kee-zee!-and as the law rushes for him, he will leap up on a rope hanging down from the roof at center stage and climb, hand over hand, without even using his legs, his cape flying, straight up, up, up, up through a trap door in the roof, to where Babbs will be waiting with a helicopter,...and they will ascend into the California ozone looking down one last time..."

That was the current fantasy for the day. Either you were on the bus or off the bus. Did it happen? No spoilers here. I'm just saying that Wolfe felt the need to use the prank again 44 years later.

Fabulous!!

Let me preface this review by saying I was not alive in the 60's, and I never talked to my parents about their experiences, yet through this book, I feel as though I shared in the madness that were the Acid Tests. Tom Wolfe's masterpiece "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," is an absolutely amazing book written about a group of Hippies hell-bent on spreading they're organized chaos throughout the nation. Apart from the subject matter (which I'll get to) this book is as well written as you could imagine. Somehow, Wolfe captured the experiences of the Merry Pranksters with his writing style. His use of the elipses (...), run on sentances, and his insightful commentary actually puts the reader into this experience. The experience itself is a whirlwind journey accross the US, in a cloud of pot-smoke, a rush of speed and a series of mescaline and lsd induced hallucinations. All the while, this seemingly nonsensical journey is carefully laid out as only Wolfe could have done. To read a book about 15 men and women that travel the nation not knowing right from left, Wolfe explains everything in stunning imagery and intense detail. Whether or not you approve or liked the hippies movement, and even if your offended by drug related subject matter, you should read this book. As a purely literary work, it's easily top 10, and as a story of the acid movement and a historical look at the 60's, there's none better.

I did not like this book at all and the only reason I finished was that I read it for a book group. I don't think I was Tom Wolfe's intended audience for this. I lived through that era but led a very conventional life so there was nothing for me to identify with. I loved the other books by Wolfe that I read - The Right Stuff, Bonfire of the Vanities, and A Man in Full. And I understand why Wolfe chose to write this book in the style that he did. But it did nothing for me. I felt like having a big party to celebrate finishing it.

I had a brief interaction with Tom Wolfe last November.

He came to speak to my class in one of those rare "Oh wow, Columbia Journalism might be worth it" moments. Inexplicably, he started in on a lengthy out-of-context run about how the New York Sun was a disgrace of a newspaper. I happened to be working there as a reporter at the time (and hating it), it was one of those surreal coincidences that seem to happen to me on an eerily regular basis. He asked for questions, my hand shot up first, and I prefaced with "Hi Mr. Wolfe, big fan of your work, and I write for the NY Sun...." He hemmed and hawed, we both laughed and shared a little moment.

As for the Acid Test, well, it's a masterpiece of writing.