I'm still boggled that it took me until a few weeks ago to read this book (or anything by Wolfe.) I also will posit that a good deal of my enjoyment derived from interest and lack of moral judgment over the drug-fueled lifestyles depicted in this book. However, even removed from those contextual constraints, this book was an amazing account of the west coast acid revolution.

What I found most striking reading this book some four decades after the events it depicts took place is how many niche, or sub-cultural, movements had their birth in these events. I had been wholly unaware that the first ravers (despite that name not being coined until much later,) where basically these acid heads.

Above and beyond the sociological trends that were interesting, I learned a fair amount about the beginnings of American prog and acid rock, the Hell's Angels, and author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Not many books can pull that many interesting stories together into a comprehensive and fulfilling narrative.

This is one of the popular books of adolescence which I didn't get around to reading until an adult, inspired, in part, by having seen the movie version of Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest. I would have liked it more as a teenager.

Now, forty some years after publication, Electric is a bit of an historical curiosity. As much as the writings of Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert or Alan Watts, it substantially contributed to the creation in the public's eye of the counter-culture. As a kid I would have read it as a celebration. As an adult I read it from a greater distance, as someone else's loud party which got a bit out of hand.

In the popular imagination the psychedelic phenomenon started in the labs around Harvard on the East coast and amidst psychotherapeutic communities on the West, used primarily by intellectuals, then spread throughout America like a virus out of a research lab. This book gives an account of one of its more spectacular courses through the heartland, linking West to East and, incidentally, the countercultural generations of the fifties and sixties, the beats and the hippies.

As the outline above suggests, the real source of the psychedelic movement were the laboratories of governments and major pharmaceutical corporations, but, like the Andromeda Strain, the stuff got out of containment and the promised truth serum and miracle cure for addiction became instead 'all things to all men'--anything from the road to god (or Satan), to the party drug of choice.

I found this to be an exhausting read, quite honestly. I've never read any Tom Wolfe, but I'd heard of this one, and thought it could be interesting, but it was disappointing. Now I know why Hunter S. Thompson gave Tom Wolfe so much grief. Wolfe is doing his best Kerouac imitation, when he should have chosen another tactic, as it came off as forced and hollow. The characters that appear in "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test", are familiar: Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, Sonny Barger, Mountain Girl, Neal Cassady, etc., but for such complex, interesting people, he doesn't explore their depth. In Wolfe's account, they are two dimensional mythologized heroes, and he never asks any questions of them, or of the hippie movement. Also, I found it annoying that every reference to African Americans by this hip daddy of the New Journalism is the patently racist term "spade". It's hard to imagine these people considered themselves so enlightened and yet, they still primarily held their parents views on sex and race. It's not a book that has aged well, in my opinion, and now that we can look back at all the wreckage left behind from the 60's, the cynicism of Charles Bukowski seems more appropriate.

Picked this up after a friend of mine (a reader, but not a book junkie- you know what I mean, fellow GR people, represent!) lit up with consternation upon hearing that I hadn't read this before. He's got a green thumb, ifyaknowwhatImean, and he was shocked that I hadn't yet gotten on the bus with Ken Kesey and the gang....

And what a bus it is! We've got the almost-unseen narrator (Tom Wolfe, naturally, though he really does keep his opinions and preferences more or less out of the picture and lets the story of the Pranksters pretty much tell itself- more on this later), the aforementioned Kesey, Neal Cassady, Mountain Girl, the same bunch of Hell's Angels that Hunter Thompson had tangled with a couple years back, and on and on and on and on with the Day-Glo and the dank, crash-pad-cum-movie-set that was the Further bus (45 hours of documentary footage!?) floors strewn with hippie debris and the pot busts and the manic, gleeful energy of whatever was fueling these rowdy, charming, fazed and frenetic pure products of America just a-goin' nutso...

Here are a few things one can look forward to, if one has an interest or some love for the dramatis personae (Melina Martin, looking in your direction....)

* I'm not the biggest fan of Tom Wolfe's social philosophy or aesthetic tastes or political affiliation or whatever but the guy can write, he can sustain a narrative that pretty much seems to go off the rails at any moment, and he can be a wonderful all-seeing-eye to the colorful chaos going down all around him.

I think that the real charm of the book is that it takes a Tom Wolfe- not a doper, not a hippie, not a radical, not quite a square- to really give the perspective some depth and counterpoint. He's bemused, he clearly likes the kids, and he's sympathetic to Kesey to the point of admiring the lad but he's also more than a little skeptical about the merit and potential for this whole 'Further' thing, which actually sets just the right tone.

I heard somewhere that he was covering a motorbike race or something for Esquire and he got so befuddled with his notes and impressions and recollections and such that in the end he told his editor that he just couldn't have the piece on time, sorry. According to legend, the frantic and desperate editor told him to just send him his notes and they could maybe work something out.

Wolfe did, he wrote "Dear Rick" or something on the first page and just let it blurt. "Rick" ended up loving it and publishing it as is, omitting only the first two words on page one...

This book reads a little like that.

* His portrait of Kesey is decidedly approving, multifaceted, vivid and surprising. I haven't read anything Kesey has written but I didn't need to. Wolfe puts his leading man in the midst of the caterwaul and lets him have a mind of his own, does't pigeonhole him or condescend, and actually Kesey comes off a little bit better off than some of his compadres. Kesey seems to believe in the essential value and rightness of his whole trip, but it's not hard at all to see the bullshit detector and skeptical intelligence that would make him a good novelist also limit his desire to follow this trip all the way down the line and to profoundly balk at being a spokesman for anybody, let alone a kind of perpetual psychic outlaw...

*....as somebody like Neal Cassady would, and did, continue to be. It's great to check up on the hero of On The Road and much of Kerouac's fiction (not to say the poetry of Allen Ginsberg) a few years after the Beat Generation turned fluorescent. There he is, everywhere and nowhere, shirtless, sweating, flipping a sledgehammer (!?) metronomically, only letting it fall when he senses a sudden disturbance in the force.

If you know a bit of his story you wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find him behind the wheel ;)

* A fun little slice of immersible sociology examining what happens when some freewheeling nogoodniks clash with the forces of Johny Law. Kesey's excursion to Mexico and inevitable high-tailing it outta there is one of the best sections of the whole book and you can feel Wolfe digging in and enjoying himself...

The old canard about the 60's goes like this: if you could remember the party, then you probably weren't there.

Wolfe seems to remember everything about the Further people pretty damn well....

So he wasn't really there...

So maybe there wasn't much of a 'there' there, at all, in the first place...

2.5/5 stars
Fascinating time in history... bridging the beats and the hippies. Although I find this period fascinating... I hoped this book would be better/more interesting. Again: this is important work... but I also just feel like Wolfe is an outsider painfully trying to appear to belong, and that most of these people aren't as interesting as we would be lead to believe...
Ultimately not that much really happens... The pranksters kind of all just act dumb... and then it fizzles out.

even the craziests trips eventually come to an end

Kesey unabashedly gives the modern reader a look at the psychedelic movement- before it was a movement. I was hooked from the beginning- 'Cool Breeze' and the rest of the Pranksters were too amazing. ::grins:: And the way they handled the cops- by being friendly and honest- awesome too! LOL The element of surprise is always key. Brightest blessings to everyone who reads this- may your journeys be twice as wierd, and twice as loving and positive as the Pranksters'.

I thought I would enjoy the story of the birth of the hippy subculture. To me it means being tuned in with yourself and with nature, and not being overly materialistic.
Ken Kesey was a charismatic figure, who believed that 'tuning in' through use of LSD was THE WAY to be 'On the Bus'. The book is full of his dogmatic, paranoid fantasies, and rejecting anyone who didn't agree with his philosophy as squares and 'Off the Bus'. It is not always completely clear about whether a viewpoint is Kesey's or Tom Wolfe's but there is also an element of bigotry toward blacks and hispanics that I found very offensive.
There were very ambitious elements to this book about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, especially Tom Wolfe's use of psychadelic stream of consciousness to give the effect of being on LSD.
An interesting passage was the description of going to see the Beatles play at the Cow Palace. Apparently, being high on LSD and surrounded by thousands of screaming teenagers makes for a bad trip.
When Kesey was arrested on a marijuana charge, he decided to fake a suicide (ineptly, I may add) and run off to Mexico where he denigrates the lifestyle of the inhabitants at length. By the time he returned, he found that others had moved on and he was no longer the center of the hippie culture in San Francisco.
The only one of the Pranksters that I could relate to was Carolyn 'Mountain Girl' Adams (later Jerry Garcia's lady for many years). She somehow seemed more real and less pretentious than the rest of the bunch.

I read it in the psychedelic 60s , so I can't remember ; but probably was far out , like I was then !

Ok, Children of the Sun and Merry Pranksters and all the Merry Wannabes and heads and freaks. I’m going to tell you how it was, and what it meant, and what it might still mean for today if anyone wants to still be up front and open their minds and LISTEN instead of jawboning...spend a bit of time in the NOW, and understand how things went down….back then.

In 1962 a man named Ken Kesey wrote a book called “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and he and the book became very popular. That book was about control in its many forms, and at his root Ken Kesey was also about control, but we’ll get to more of that later. For now you just need to know that Kesey UNDERSTOOD things on a higher level, because he had been introduced to the great God Rotor, and had taken some LSD trips in a lab environment, and he wanted to unleash that knowledge upon the world in a glorious, colorful blast of pure NOW. And so he gathered a few followers and took them into the woods, where a few more showed up. And the circle of knowledge grew, the disciples of the great God Rotor. Even Neal Cassady showed up, fresh from his Beat trip and ready to begin a new journey…..Kerouac knew the torch was to be passed….the Beats were the old hands….they were on the road but weren’t anymore, but Neal needed to be, and so he landed with Kesey in order to….drive the BUS.

And the BUS was a real thing, a tripped out, tricked out monstrosity that could carry Kesey and the Pranksters forth to spread the message, and so they did. And you were either ON THE BUS or OFF THE BUS. And they took the bus to Houston, and through the Southlands, and up the Eastern Seaboard all the way to New York City, where they found that others were taking their own trips. But as it turned out, old Tim Leary and his meditative shroud were most decidedly not ON THE BUS, and so they were Pranked. And along the way Kesey and the Pranksters learned more about control and how to use it. And all of this trip was recorded for posterity in THE MOVIE. Endless loops of footage documenting the trip, but more importantly it was becoming clear that THE MOVIE was the thing itself, and that others could be drawn into the movie, and the trip and the movie and the bus and Kesey and the Pranksters could control the movie. All in the glorious, technicolor, Day-Glo NOW.

It was all a time of discovery, a new paradigm that only a select few were into as of yet, but there would be more in time. And they made their way back to the woods to recalibrate the trip. And lo and behold but there was a Mountain Girl standing there when they got back. The bus was parked, but the REAL bus was still in motion, Cassady behind the wheel cranking up the speed and Kesey not the leader, but still the leader….not the prophet, but still the prophet. And in the midst of all of this, Kesey would bring the Hell’s Angels into the movie. Hulking, menacing creatures of doom and death, but they had a role to play in the movie, and so they came to get turned on and find the great God Rotor for themselves. And this whole movie was about one thing, the NOW. Motion, one must stay in motion to be in the NOW, and the Pranksters were most certainly in motion.

And by now the coppers, the flatfeet, the guys with the shiny shoes, well….it turns out they had figured out that all this crazy Prankster business out in the woods can’t be a square shooting deal at all, and they eventually moved in and tried to create their own movie. And the Pranksters had to scatter, and leave the woods behind, but still in the NOW, still ON THE BUS. Well, most of them….a few people got off of the bus or were left behind along the way. But the true believers, they could always find the bus. Those left...well, they were never REALLY on the bus in the first place.

And a dude named Owsley became part of the movie, and it turned out that he was the key to turning more people on to the NOW. And so the Acid Tests were born, to show people the way. Big multimedia events these Acid Tests were, and more and more folks showed up to partake of the magic of the MOVIE, to participate in the NOW. But the heat was still on Kesey, and now he was busted, busted, busted. And so he ran. He ran down to the Ratlands of Mexico in the bus, Cassady still driving. And he holed up to play the Fugitive Game on the Rat coastline. But the Ratlands were harsh and unforgiving, and eventually the heat found its way to the Rat house, where Kesey was holed up. And so he went back to the source, to play the Fugitive Game on American soil once more. Until the Cops and Robbers Game was played, and he took the fall. But by this time the magic genie was out of the bottle, and couldn’t be put back, not yet anyway. And so Kesey paid his dues and retreated, and the Merry Pranksters scattered to the winds, but once you were ON THE BUS, you were always ON THE BUS.

And this dude named Tom Wolfe wrote a book called “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” to try and tell this story to the people, and maybe the squares who didn’t really understand just what the hell had gotten into their kids. And it was a good book, and it turned out to be one of the best documents of the entire experience of the NOW, because in the end it was also part of the MOVIE. Now you need to understand that Wolfe was himself a bit of a square, from New York City and we already know those guys weren’t really ON THE BUS. But it was ok, Wolfe tried his best to get the whole story put down. And his book came out before the whole scene reached its screaming, orgasmic creshendo at a place called Woodstock in August of 1969. And it was before the whole scene reached its skidding, horrible death knell at a place called Altamont just a few months later in December of 1969, at the hands of the Hell’s Angels no less. And the circle seemed complete at that point. The movie was over. Neal Cassady was found dead in Mexico and would no longer drive, which was fitting because that trip was done. The bus would go with Kesey to Oregon, where it would lay in a field, rusting and decaying.

I can’t really describe to you how it feels to be in the NOW, but I have been there. You are either ON THE BUS or OFF THE BUS where that is concerned. But living in the NOW certainly opened my doors of perception, with all apologies to Aldous Huxley. There are many ways to live in the NOW besides THAT way, and people today could learn a few good lessons about what it was like to live in the NOW back THEN. Because for an all too brief moment there back in the then it seemed like maybe people really COULD make their own MOVIE. Maybe people really COULD cause change to occur in conformity with Will, with all apologies to Aleister Crowley.

I will tell you this much….everyone in the end has the choice to either be ON THE BUS or OFF THE BUS. It’s up to you. You get to decide. You either have the control, or you don’t. The lessons are here, in Wolfe’s book. It’s a snapshot of THEN, and how that relates to the NOW. Read it. It’s a fine bus ride.

My god. Was this hard to read. It feels good to challenge myself with an author who disregards the common rules of structure to create exactly what he wants to create. He is reporting on these stories about such a confusing drugged up, misguided and well intentioned people and telling it straight just wouldn’t do justice to that. However I can’t reaaaally say I recommend unless u like a hard to follow narrative as a challenge. Also maybe would recommend to read this as a secondary book so you don’t get sick of it bc the difficulty level makes it easy to need a break. Very interesting though and I feel like I have learned a lot about acid and the early psychedelic scene in the 60s and also what “Hippies” really were.

I posted before I finished the reread. Now I am taking away one of the stars for a couple reasons. One is Wolfe's self-indulgent hipster mind-flow (it gets tedious) and his poetry (heaven help us!). The other is the blatant sexism, especially the Hell's Angels gang bang sequence. Saying "she was a volunteer" and it was "her movie" doesn't really cut it in 2018. Also, Kesey starts to come off as a drug-addled asshole, prankster bombing a Vietnam protest in Berkeley. (In my mind, Kesey's mindless gambits don't diminish his earlier literary achievements: "Sometimes a Great Notion" and "Cuckoo's Nest." It's seems more like a case of another guru gone bonkers.)

Still, "Kool-Aid Rock Acid Test" is an archival gem. And Wolfe does get better as writer. "Bonfire of the Vanities" is my pick of the litter.