This book was okay. Tom Wolfe was always an outsider, a New Yorker, even a (gasp) Yalie. He was never really 'on the bus' if you know what I mean. But for a square, he explains the scene pretty well. The pranksers were like the scenesters of any era: self-absorbed and fairly boring pricks. It is an interesting book for one fact if nothing else: it's kind of the only book written in the 60's about the 60's. HS Thompson didn't really get rolling til the early 70's (Hells Angels came out in the 60's, but it wasn't til Fear and Loathing in 1970 that he really got it together, and even then it was the beginning of the revisionist nostalgia 60's. . .), and I'm hard pressed to think of another book from the era ABOUT the era.

I'm now reading In Cold Blood, written in 1965, the year the pranksters dosed my mom at the Trips Festival in SF. And shit, if Capote isn't from a whole different world than those day-glo banshees. . .

From my perspective, three dynamics were occurring simultaneously in this book, and each had an impact on my reading experience. The first is a kind of flashback to the mid-1960s hippie period of American culture, or counterculture, which I had exposure to as a very young child, but no practical first-hand experience with. As a result, this aspect of the book gave it an almost nostalgic tone, which for me made it the most benign of the three dynamics. It’s not an era I’ve longed to know more about, or regret that I missed, so I think I processed this more as curiosity than anything, and which I could probably have gotten just as effectively from an issue of Life magazine from that time. The second dynamic was its chronicling of a character, author Ken Kesey, and his cult-like Merry Pranksters, and the movement they begat and the other hangers-on they attracted. To me, Kesey is a supremely unlikeable character; a self-impressed, self-indulgent, self-centered egomaniac who was recklessly and heedlessly irresponsible with his followers in the way all cult leaders are, from Jim Jones to Donald Trump. Aside from his one-hit literary fame, it is hard to understand the appeal he evidently had, and used, to accelerate the LSD trend the way he did. At any rate, I couldn’t stand him, and found myself wishing he had suffered greater consequences, if for no other reason than for being such an ass. Finally, the third dynamic is Tom Wolfe’s writing, which I know was groundbreaking in its time, and an earnest attempt to capture the mood and spirit of the subject. It is immersive, evocative, stream-of-conscious stuff, self-indulgent in its own right, and while I’d previously read The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities, and had mixed feelings about both, I personally found his approach here especially tiresome and annoying, all the more so after some 400-ish pages. My oldest brother lived through this era, and counts this among his all-time favorite books, so it may be that it simply has a different generational appeal. Or it may be that it just didn’t work for me. But it most definitely didn’t.

At the time I read this I was enchanted with Wolfe as a journalist. In retrospect, his response to the subject matter seems not quite right. He's a debunker who yearns to believe, I think, not the aloof observer he thinks he is.

This book was not for me. It's not that the acid tests weren't interesting, or that Kesey's time as a fugitive (especially faking his own death) wasn't worth reading about, but the style of writing felt like it's own acid trip. I picked this for our true crime book club because I thought it'd be a nice break from serial killers and our more murder minded cults, although we all agreed that it was a good thing that Kesey just wanted to get everyone high instead instructing his zonked out followers to kill people.

I will say that this book is a good deterrent from dropping acid, as whatever urge I had prior to reading this book is pretty much gone. Although, if I make it to my 80s, I'm gonna do all the drugs except for the ones prescribed to me by doctors.

If you like the beat poet generation and that style, then you might like this book. Lots of people do. It is definitely a snapshot of time, one that has not aged well by today's standards, but still an insight into the early days of LSD. And I totally get the 80s so much more now. What better way to rebel against your crazy hippy parents than to focus on material things and money?

As electrified as the name!
What a ride.
I am definitely an on-the-bus sort of person.

I’ve wanted to read this book since I was a kid watching Gilmore Girls and saw Jess reading it in a scene. So random but it always suck with me! I got a cute copy of it at Half Price Books recently and it felt like fate!

The atmosphere of this book was, for lack of a better adjective, ELECTRIC! References to so many popular people/things from the 60s/70s. Even Beatlemania and the Grateful Dead.

I never knew this book was about Ken Kesey who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest! I always knew about the day that was the origins to “drinking the kool-aid” but that was about it! A wild culty trip! I also now feel like I HAVE TO read On The Road by Jack Kerouac. He’s another recurring character here!

My main concern with this book was my confusion with the narrator. Sometimes they’re an active member of the story and other times they’re never mentioned. But we never get explanation how this narrator even knows all of this. Was he on the bus the entire time? Why did they let him tag along? I left with answers AND questions. Also they’re EXTREMELY unkind to women/minorities in this book.

I don’t regret reading it! Cool nonetheless to know the history. My nonfiction pick of the month.

Oh dear, what was my teenage self thinking of when liking this? It is a piece of literary journalism which looks at the roots of the hippie movement and the origins of the use of LSD. The book centres particularly on Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Kesey took LSD very early (1959) in a trial to test its effects (funded by the CIA, although Kesey was not aware of this). He liked it and felt it was something that everyone should try, in fact he became a bit of a zealot in promoting it, gathering a group of disciples around him. With some of his literary earnings he bought a property in La Honda in California where a group of devotees congregated. They bought a bus, decorated it and went on a road trip. They also filmed a good deal of it and there are hours of film. The bus was driven by Neal Cassady, already immortalised as Dean Moriarty in “On The Road”. The collection of people on the bus became known as the Merry Pranksters. Copious amounts of drugs were taken, not just LSD, which was not yet illegal. The police were never far behind. As they travelled they set up Acid Tests, parties involving LSD and various types of lighting. The in house band morphed into The Grateful Dead.
It’s all very repetitive and the portrayal of Kesey is a bit too messianic for me. You also have to wade through writing like this:
“EXCEPT FOR HAGEN’S GIRL, THE BEAUTY WITCH. IT SEEMS LIKE she never even gets off the bus to cop a urination. She’s sitting back in the back of the bus with nothing on, just a blanket over her lap and her legs wedged back into the corner, her and her little bare breasts, silent, looking exceedingly witch-like. Is she on the bus or off the bus? She has taken to wearing nothing but the blanket and she sheds that when she feels like it. Maybe that is her thing and she is doing her thing and wailing with it and the bus barrels on off, heading for Houston, Texas, and she becomes Stark Naked in the great movie, one moment all conked out, but with her eyes open, staring, the next laughing and coming on, a lively Stark Naked, and they are all trying to just snap their fingers to it but now she is getting looks that have nothing to do with the fact that she has not a thing on, hell, big deal, but she is now waxing extremely freaking ESP. She keeps coming up to somebody who isn’t saying a goddamn thing and looking into his eyes with the all-embracing look of total acid understanding, our brains are one brain, so let’s visit, you and I, and she says: ‘Ooooooooh, you really think that, I know what you mean, but do you-u-u-u-u-u-u-u- ueeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee” — finishing off in a sailing trémulo laugh as if she has just read your brain and !t is the weirdest of the weird shit ever, your brain eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee —“
A good deal of it is just bloody annoying (a bit like the hippies), but did you spot something else. The drugs clearly affected some more than others and there were some vulnerable people involved as well. The attitude to women and race is pretty awful (plenty of use of the word “spade”). There is also a level of cruelty which I found disturbing. Perhaps it would be more accurate to sat there was a level of self-absorption which drugs can bring leading to a lack of awareness of the needs of others.
In fact Wolfe does portray all this as similar to the birth of a new religion:
“In fact, none of the great founded religions, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, none of them began with a philosophical framework or even a main idea. They all began with an overwhelming new experience, what Joachim Wach called ‘the experience of the holy,’ and Max Weber, ‘possession of the deity,’ the sense of being a vessel of the divine, of the All-one.”
The ironic thing is that the whole thing was funded by the royalties from “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” Kesey’s famous novel. Capitalism funding psychedelia! Wolfe did all his research in three weeks when he was with the Pranksters and never took LSD himself, so there is almost an element of parody and ridicule. Given what I have quoted above there is the issue of whether the cruelty, racism and misogyny comes from Wolfe himself or the original Pranksters. Given Wolfe’s history being reactionary and racist I would question the veracity of anything he wrote. As the book says:
“You’re either on the bus…or off the bus.”
I’m definitely off it!

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe: The first time I read this was in 1968 or 1969 when it was first published. It was fresh and showed a new culture and promised change and exciting times. It introduced me in a solid way to the 'Hippie" culture. I read this a few times in the early years.
I just read it again over the last month. It was a slow grind to get through the pages. It is still very well written. This book for me has not held up well over time. Now having lived through those times they faded and are none too bright. It made me look back at the generation and wonder what happened to the counterculture. I wonder what happened to the idealists and dreams back in the day. I think as a history, reading for the first time shows what can come of dreams and wonder. Having lived it I look back and see the failings and wonder how the 'Hippies' and the love generation. It brought about sadness for my younger years. Well written but lost its impact over the years and the shine it produced when I first read it has turned into a dull glow. It still found be 5 stars but for me now it is a hard 3 stars.

A wild story, really captures the atmosphere of the psychedelic counterculture. Just gets a bit tedious to follow all the disjointed, erratic details. However, I guess the point of the book is to make you understand and feel the spirit of the events described and go inside the minds of the people rather than give you a history lesson.

Once upon a time, there was a band of tricksters called the Merry Pranksters. Ken Kesey was their Chief. He bought a bus and he and his band loaded it with recording equipment and movie cameras and went for a wild ride through the United States of America. They were cartoon character heroes, but they were also a tribal community. Neal Cassady was with them. He was the man whom Jack Kerouac called “the greater driver,” because of the time he and Jack spent on the road, which Jack later wrote about in a big book about hitchhiking, but now Cassady was driving the bus, which was named “Furthur.” And the Pranksters drove to New York City to see Jack. But Jack and Kesey didn’t have much they wanted to talk about. And they drove to Millbrook to see Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. But it was too staid. And they hung out with the Hell’s Angels. And sometimes it got tense. And they went to San Francisco to see the Beatles. But it was a bad trip. And the Grateful Dead played rock music. And Allen Ginsberg rang bells and played finger cymbals. And there were strobe lights and neon signs.

Tom Wolfe wrote about the Pranksters and their Chief. He wrote about the chemical they took, which was called LSD. He wrote about what it did to their minds, and sometimes he used a stream of consciousness style that made you feel like you were there. He wrote about the kinds of books the Pranksters liked. Books by writers like Aldous Huxley, Herman Hesse, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. He wrote about the Pranksters’ ideas, like that they saw themselves as characters in a movie, and about their parties, which they called “Acid Tests.” Sometimes you felt that he did not agree with them, but that was okay, because you could see that he had made a genuine effort to understand them.

Acquired perhaps in Fall 1978
H.H.S. Hartland, New Brunswick

I read it all and I want my six hours that felt like 600 years back.

Not quite as impressive as The Right Stuff, which is probably the best work of journalism ever written, but Wolfe's style is completely effective here, yet again. His prose in full 'New Journalism' mode is really a thing of wonder; it's the sort of style that really shouldn't work, and in the hands of almost any other author it would be pretentious and ineffective, but Wolfe completely effaces himself and somehow hits luminous objectivity.

As for Kesey himself . . . Wolfe reaffirms my previous impressions of Kesey and Cassady and all the rest, i.e., they're all shallow dilettantes without any real understanding of religion or spirituality, childish hedonists who ruined their lives and the lives of others. They didn't understand the "square" life they were rejecting and learned all the wrong lessons from psychedelics (vs. Ram Dass, who got it right, I think).