The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

“You're either on the bus or off the bus.”



“The world was simply and sheerly divided into 'the aware', those who had the experience of being vessels of the divine, and a great mass of 'the unaware', 'the unmusical', 'the unattuned.”

I decided to read Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test after finishing Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Wolfe follows Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters as they set out to experience a counter cultural American landscape in their 1939 International Harvester. There were parts I really liked. I now know much more about the writer of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and how he saw his work than I previously did. It was also interesting to get an account of other iconoclastic figures of the 60s such as Neal Cassady (the model for Dean Moriarty's character in On the Road) and the poet Allen Ginsberg. Portraits of the Merry Pranksters were also compelling as were interactions with the band, The Grateful Dead, and the motorcycle gang, Hell's Angels. While I'm glad I read this, and found parts interesting, there were other parts that I felt bogged down the account. 3.5 stars

“Put your good where it will do the most!”

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.

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.

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

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is best if you blow through the first fifty pages and take your leisure with the rest. There's equal information in the introduction as in the meat of the story, but less of the fun, and a little more cruelty to the real people behind Wolfe's "new journalism" report. After the introductory portion, where you meet the cast and understand the premise, you're treated to hundreds of pages of episodes, some as short as two pages long, about radical artists, set free to roam in America (and each other), running across parties, senior citizens, and even Hells Angels. Kesey and his merry pranksters are as interesting as any fiction cast Wolfe could have invented, often funny and always irreverent.

It's the lack of reverence in Wolfe's new journalism style that will bother the most people, as those who hated what Kesey stood for won't read the book. Whatever information traditional journalism would have reported is shaped, painting some very unflattering pictures of the key players, especially Ken Kesey. I've met many people who had Kesey's masterpiece, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, ruined by Wolfe's portrait of a selfish anti-establishment radical. This isn't quite like Wolfe's other new journalism, either, as there's a stronger sense of bias to it, a pitfall that (whether the sense of bias is true or not) is unfortunately easy to fall into in Wolfe's favorite genre. Much of the middle portion also seems masturbatory, which shines a poor light on the merry pranksters, and makes Wolfe seem like more boring writer than he really is.

Between the slants and lack of grave substance in so much of the book, it is easiest to take it for its entertainment value. Controversy and intrigue got this book all the sales it needed years ago, and the success of new journalism ensured that this pioneering work would receive literary status, but fans of Kesey, Wolfe and the other artists involved should only be disappointed that what was ultimately a collusion between so many great writers wasn't a better book.

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.

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'.

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.