The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1968

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-15

Chapters 16-19

Chapters 20-23

Chapter 24-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 13 Summary: “The Hell’s Angels”

In the summer of 1965, Kesey and the Merry Pranksters hold a huge party with the Hell’s Angels, the notorious motorcycle gang. Kesey had met the Angels through his friend and fellow author, Hunter S. Thompson, who was writing a book about them (168). His recent marijuana arrest and his charismatic personality give Kesey immediate credibility with the gang. Despite their reputation for violence, the Pranksters welcome 40 members of the Angels to the property with “what looked like about a million doses of the Angels’ favorite drug—beer—and LSD for all who wanted to try it” (172). Wolfe explains that “the beer made the Angels very happy and the LSD made them strangely peaceful and sometimes catatonic, in contrast to the Pranksters and other intellectuals around, who soared on the stuff” (172). Some of Kesey’s intellectual friends were there, like Allen Ginsberg and Richard Alpert, but so were the local cops, watching from across the highway. Ultimately, the cops decide that a policy of containment was best because the only laws they saw being broken were possibly indecent exposure (174).

Mountain Girl is also a hit with the Angels after she jokes with them and shows them that she has no fear of them. Wolfe argues that “Mountain Girl and a lot of the Pranksters had hit on the perfect combination with the Angels. They were friendly toward them, maybe friendlier than anybody had been in their lives, but they weren’t craven about it, and they took no shit” (175-76). Wolfe describes a sex orgy that takes place between the Angels and a woman who was visiting the property from out of town, but suggests that she was a willing participant and “volunteer.” He points out that the party carried on for two days “and the cops never moved in” (178). Because the intellectual-hip circles in the San Francisco–Berkeley area had a fascination with the Hell’s Angels at the time, word circulates about Kesey’s daring party. Kesey becomes even more of a countercultural icon, and Wolfe writes that La Honda was “practically like an intellectual tourist attraction” (178).

Chapter 14 Summary: “A Miracle in Seven Days”

In Chapter 14, Wolfe recounts another Merry Prankster adventure in 1965, when Kesey was invited to speak at the annual California Unitarian Church Conference in Monterey. A small group of youthful Unitarian ministers known as the Young Turks became interested in Kesey following his recent notoriety, so the invitation went out. Even the older Unitarians do not mind Kesey’s countercultural status, as the church itself was always liberal and believes in the right to dissent. However, when Kesey arrives “with Pranksters in costume, flapping out of every portal” (186), opinions change. Wolfe writes that “by nightfall the Unitarian Church in California was divided into two camps: on the bus and off the bus” (186). The young people gravitate to the Pranksters, which the elders resent, and this is made worse when Kesey steps on an American flag while trying to make a point about symbols (187).

Paul Sawyer and some of the other Young Turk ministers are clearly on the bus with Kesey, but the conference officials and other elders are not. They want Sawyer to ask the Pranksters to leave because of a list of grievances, marijuana usage and sex in the showers chief among them, but he lets them know that it would mean some of the young Unitarians would also leave. They decide to tolerate the Pranksters for the rest of the week. Another concern they have is that Kesey is manipulating the conference schedule and taking control. Wolfe points out that they are correct, adding that Kesey had become “tremendously interested in the whole phenomenon of […] control” (190). Back in La Honda, Kesey receives in the mail a copy of a delegate’s minutes of the conference in which he is repeatedly referred to as “Prophet Kesey.” He objects to this characterization because the Pranksters are “not on the Christ Trip” (193). He argues, “that’s been done, and it doesn’t work. You prove your point, and then you have 2,000 years of war. We know where that trip goes” (193).

Chapter 15 Summary: “Cloud”

When it comes out that the Beatles will be playing a concert at the famous Cow Palace in San Francisco on September 2, the Pranksters make a huge sign reading “The Merry Pranksters Welcome the Beatles.” Kesey’s thinking was that they put out a sign for the Hell’s Angels and they joined their movie, so it might happen with the Beatles. He seemed to believe that the Beatles could be imagined into their movie and the cosmic forces would make it happen (199). One of their acid sources was somehow able to get 30 tickets for the Pranksters and he also loaded them up with acid on their way to the concert. When they arrive at the venue, they are all in the midst of a major acid trip and determine that it looks like a concentration camp. They also find the throngs of screaming young girls there to see the Beatles, which Wolfe refers to as “teeny freaks,” to be disturbing (203).

Even before the Beatles appear on stage, the noise from the screaming teens is like a “very roaring hell” and “perfect madness” (204-05). When the Beatles are finally introduced, the noise, lightbulb flashes, and waving arms intensify and Kesey compares the crowd to one being, a “single colonial animal with a thousand waving pink tenacles” (205). Because they are on acid, the commotion is too much to handle and they decide to leave. First, however, Zonker spreads word around the crowd that the Beatles will be at Kesey’s after the show. The sight when they get back to Kesey’s “is gruesome and comical at the same time” (209), as hundreds of people are there expecting the Beatles. One of them introduces himself as Owsley and seems surprised that Kesey does not know who he is. It turns out that Owsley is 30-year-old Augustus Owsley Stanley III, “the greatest LSD manufacturer in the world,” which Wolfe explains “turns out to be just about right, the Sandoz Chemical Corporation included” (210).

Chapters 13-15 Analysis

In Chapter 13, Wolfe explores one of the more notorious events in the history of the Merry Pranksters, their raucous two-day party with the Hell’s Angels in the summer of 1965. Despite the obvious differences in the two groups, the Merry Pranksters and the Hell’s Angels, Wolfe ties them together because they are both outlaws and countercultural groups. He points out that “the summer of 1965 had made the Hell’s Angels infamous celebrities in California. Their reputation was at its absolutely most notorious all-time highest” (169). Likewise, Kesey had also just became famous from the publication of his first two novels and notorious from his highly publicized drug arrest a few months earlier. Wolfe argues:

[O]utlaws, by definition, were people who had moved off of dead center and were out in some Edge City. The beauty of it was, the Angels had done it like the Pranksters, by choice. They had become outlaws first—to explore, muvva—and then got busted for it (170).

Near the end of the chapter, Wolfe explains that another aspect that linked this “unholy alliance” together was the curiosity that intellectuals had in each group (178).

Part of Chapter 14 is written in verse, showing Wolfe’s experimentation with form. The chapter covers yet another notorious event for the Pranksters in the summer of 1965, their appearance at the annual California Unitarian Church Conference in Monterey. Wolfe points out that Kesey had by then become “tremendously interested in the whole phenomenon of […] Control,” and the notion that he had the ability to control the entire conference is something that he enjoys. It is in Chapter 14 that the theme of New Religion is developed. Wolfe writes that Paul Sawyer, one of the Young Turk ministers, saw Kesey as a prophetic figure because “he had created […] an experience, an awareness that flashed deeper than celebration” (192). Although Kesey rejects the notion that he is a prophet, it is clear by this point that his role and the direction in which the Pranksters are going is religious in nature, even cult-like.

Chapter 15 examines Kesey’s idea of the group mind and control a little more closely as the Merry Pranksters go to a Beatles concert after taking acid. At the concert, Kesey finds the frenzy and screaming from thousands of “teeny freaks” disturbing, but he also notices that the Beatles “have brought this whole mass of human beings to the point where they are one, out of their skulls, one psyche, and they have utter control over them” (206). Wolfe also uses Chapter 15 to exhibit the profound influence that the Merry Pranksters had on the larger American culture in the late 1960s.

Owsley introduces himself to Kesey after the concert and is surprised to learn that Kesey does not know him. The reason for that is because Owsley is “the greatest LSD manufacturer in the world” (210). It turns out that Owsley is a scion of a famous political family in Kentucky who dropped out of college and used his flair for science to instead set up an acid factory near the University of California campus, producing several million doses of LSD that became internationally famous (212). Owsley also became a famous sound engineer and was the brain and financial backer behind the formation of the Grateful Dead, the rock band who gave birth to the subgenre of “acid rock”. Wolfe ends the chapter with the anecdote describing how the Beatles began using acid in 1967 and came up with an idea to load onto a school bus with scores of friends and make a spontaneous movie of themselves with handheld cameras as they drove around the British countryside (213). Wolfe argues that the Beatles saw their movie, “all shaky and out of focus,” as a “total breakthrough in terms of expression but also as a commercial display” (213). The movie was shown on British television as Magical Mystery Tour.