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.

I was stoned when I read this so I have absolutely no idea what it was even about. Just kidding. Tom Wolfe at his best. Loved it from the very first line: “That’s good thinking there Cool Breeze.”

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.

"Never trust a Prankster." Ken Kesey and his merry band of accomplices habituate this glorious look back at the mid-to late 60's before LSD became illegal & weed was a crime that could incarcerate you ha-ha, look how far we've come! Now we're openly lighting up and micro-dosing like it was baby aspirin. Tom Wolfe takes us there for key events as in the "acid tests" & details the nutty personalities of those who orchestrated the onset of hippy culture. AND, he does it well considering the contact high he must have experienced not to mention his own few excursions with that 'electric Kool-Aid" where he firsthand took a trip not leaving the farm. This is a seminal book for those of us who followed myself included. I "hooked down" some potent windowpane acid before heading out to a Dylan concert a few days before Halloween 1970's when he was going electric and then smoked lots of opium during the show - the results were harrowing as I lost all sense of reality and stumbled around for hours in a freaked-out haze. Woo-hoo but that was a zinger folks! Oh well we & me got through it but not without the realization that I'd never be quite the same again. However, to me, it was a mind expander to which led to further openings and readings and searchings for things beyond just status quo. And speaking of "Further" for that was the iconic bus the Pranksters tricked out in day-glo imagery, 'further' is where Keysey sought to take his and others' trip, to move beyond the drugs into a new realm of consciousness, out of the fog into the new awareness. Me too, I agree with that mostly. Reading cool books, digesting material of consequence, sharing bonds of understanding & accepting the mystery of IT ALL is where my path has ventured. Groovy man, like real groovy!

What is it I plan to do with my one wild and precious life? Not waste time reading this book. DNF. I had high (haha) hopes for this book, but I gave up a few hours into the audio.

The narrator was very good. However, the writing came across as pretentious and foolish. The descriptions of the users’ behavior were just unbearable. The writing often felt similar to listening to a middle schooler tell a story about some kid he perceives as cool.

For one brief moment, I thought the author was going to switch to an interesting documentary of the events surrounding this acid test. I was having delusions. Back to more middle school stories.

I loved taking this ride with the Merry Pranksters, especially when my tour guide was Tom Wolfe.

Sure he was one of the founders of New Journalism. But what thrilled me wasn't merely the verve and exciting texture to his writing.

What else didn't thrill me most? It wasn't just Tom Wolfe's in-your-face narration, in contrast to the relatively diffident narrators who preceded him -- often equally accomplished, just not so in-your-facey.

What a match Wolfe's writing was for the Merry Pranksters, come to think of it!

So, What Did I Love Most?

What I loved most was how Tom Wolfe put himself -- all 200% of him -- into every page. Actually I found that to be a feature, not a bug. Not only in this "Electric" book but in all his fiction and nonfiction that I've read.

Tom couldn't help being an immersive writer of immersive books, no more than he could help himself from looking SO GOOD in his amazingly flattering, trademark, white suits.

Some writers strive hard to be originals. Tom Woolfe didn't have to try. He simply was. And so he wrote that way.

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).

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.

Okay, here we have a book based on true events where the characters are all my favourite authors from the sixties acid counter-culture movement and they're getting off their nut together on LSD... how could I not love it?

Ken Kesey, Neil Cassidy, Hunter Thompson, Timothy Leary, they're all in there and it's written by Tom Wolfe. That should be all I need to say to get anyone to read this book. But here's more anyway. It's actually the only one of Tom Wolfe's books that I've read (So far) and he more than lives up to his reputation in terms of style and insight. Meanwhile, it was an absolute pleasure to hear about some of my favourite 1960's writers getting up to their usual antics but from someone else's point of view. There are crossover moments in this book with other stuff I've read, such as Hunter's Hell's Angels, too.

If like me you are fascinated by that unique moment in human history when LSD dropped like a seed into the fertile ground of youth raised by and now rebelling against the generation of survivors of the worlds most horrific war ever, then this book is a must. There will never be another 1960's. This book is pure hippy, original hippy, riding a wave of love that didn't break until 1969.

4.5 stars from me.

Adam:)

I’m so glad someone was sober enough to capture this amazing insanity, and that it was Tom Wolfe! So funny and wild. 5 stars because it’s about so much more than a bus and acid trips when you put it into a historical context. So crazy to see how massive cultural change happened before the internet.

It’s also a fascinating study on charismatic leaders and groupthink. Kesey was insaaaaaaane. But maybe in a good way? Also, I definitely see how this paved the way for Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind.

Am I sounding like one of those Goodreaders who thinks they’re an Editor for the NYT? Sorry! Just love the book.

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!

I read this book in high school and it is still one of my all-time favorites. Am a hippy at heart. Peace