The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

“Despite the skepticism I brought here, I am suddenly experiencing their feeling. I am sure of it. I feel like I am in on something the outside world, the world I came from, could not possibly comprehend, and it is a metaphor, the whole scene, ancient and vast.”

In Chapter 3, when Wolfe is waiting in the Warehouse for Kesey to return from jail, he is taken aback by how the acidheads and Pranksters always speak so philosophically but suddenly he begins to understand them better and gets caught up in what they are thinking and feeling.

“Fantasy is a word Kesey has taken to using more and more, for all sorts of plans, ventures, world views, ambitions. It is a good word. It is ironic and it isn’t. It refers to everything from getting hold of a pickup truck—“that’s our fantasy for this weekend”—to some scary stuff out on the raggedy raggedy edge […] like the current fantasy, which is somehow to be told at the Acid Test Graduation.”

Wolfe is referring both to the countercultural language that the acidheads communicate with and to the subject at hand—that Kesey has been released from jail in order to deliver the message that young people should stop using psychedelic drugs. Kesey’s fantasy in this regard is not so much they will abstain from using drugs but rather that they graduate and move on to other consciousness raising activities.

“All of us have a great deal of our minds locked shut. We’re shut off from our own world. And these drugs seem to be the key to open these locked doors.”

When Kesey began taking part in the experiments at the Menlo Park Veteran’s Hospital, he was given a range of drugs: LSD, Ditran, psilocybin, mescaline, peyote, IT-290. While Ditran always brought on a terrible experience for him, the others, and especially LSD, brough on a realm of consciousness he had never experienced before. Wolfe argues that “with these drugs your perception is altered enough that you find yourself looking out of completely strange eyeholes” (44).

“It was a strange feeling for all these good souls to suddenly realize that right here on woody thatchy little Perry Lane, amid the honeysuckle and dragonflies and boughs and leaves and a thousand little places where the sun peeped through, while straight plodding souls from out of the Stanford eucalyptus tunnel plodded by straight down the fairways on the golf course across the way—this amazing experiment in consciousness was going on, out on a frontier neither they nor anybody else ever heard of before.”

Wolfe is referring to the fact that through Kesey’s introduction of these psychedelic drugs to his group of friends on Perry Lane, they had embarked on something that very few people in the world even knew about yet. They were taking part in something that all of the people only a few yards away from them could not even imagine. Wolfe argues that they were learning “that the world is sheerly divided into those who have had the experience and those who have not” (53).

“The whole other world that LSD opened your mind to existed only in the moment itself—Now—and any attempt to plan, compose, orchestrate, write a script, only locked you out of the moment, back in the world of conditioning and training where the brain was the reducing valve.”

When Kesey moved with his wife and kids from Perry Lane to La Honda, he invited several of his friends to come there to live to try and recreate what had existed at Stanford. Kesey and this group in La Honda were attempting to “develop various forms of spontaneous expression” (58) by recording their acid trips on film and audio. Wolfe points out that this likely sounded like gibberish to human ears because everything like this grows out of the experience with LSD (59).

“The original fantasy, here in the spring of 1964, had been that Kesey and four or five others would get a station wagon and drive to New York for the New York World’s Fair. On the way they could shoot some film, make some tape, freak out on the Fair and see what happened. They would also be on hand, in New York, for the publication of Kesey’s second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion.”

Wolfe begins Chapter 6 explaining the origin of the bus trip to New York. While he is not sure which of the Pranksters originally had the idea for the bus, he suggests that “it had the Babbs touch” (67). Instead of his original plan, Kesey purchased a 1939 International Harvester school bus and the Pranksters painted it in psychedelic colors and set up elaborate microphone and speaker systems. The group of Kesey and four or five others also expanded to 14.

“There was no more reason for them to remain in isolation while the ovoid eyes of La Honda suppurated. They could go through the face of America muddling people’s minds, but it’s a momentary high, and the bus would be gone, and all the Fab foam in their heads would settle back down into their brain pans.”

Before the group set out for New York, they took the bus on a test run into northern California. Wolfe explains that right away the bus started catching attention and they found that the people “weren’t totally turned off” so “the bus had great possibilities for altering the usual order of things” (69). On their test run, they even got pulled over by the cops while they were all high on acid, but the officer only told them to make some repairs with lighting and let them go on their way.

“That this or a couple of other crackups in the experience of the Pranksters had anything to do with that goofy baboon, Dope, was something that didn’t cross the minds of the Pranksters at that point. Craziness was not an absolute. They had all voluntarily embarked upon a trip and a state of consciousness that was ‘crazy’ by ordinary standards. The trip, in fact the whole deal, was a risk-all balls-out plunge into the unknown, and it was assumed merely that more and more of what was already inside a person would come out and expand, gloriously or otherwise.”

Wolfe is referring to what took place with Stark Naked when the Pranksters visited Larry McMurtry in Houston and she got off the bus in the nude and grabbed McMurtry’s son. Wolfe points out that when they left Houston, and Stark Naked had been taken to the county psychiatric ward, there was no discussion about it on the bus. This implies that the whole group seemed to agree that she was already unstable and the drugs had nothing to do with it.

“If there was anybody in the world who was going to comprehend what the Pranksters were doing, it was going to be Timothy Leary and his group, the League for Spiritual Discovery, up in Millbrook, New York. Leary and his group had been hounded out of Harvard, out of Mexico, out of here, out of there, and had finally found a home in a big Victorian mansion in Millbrook, on private land, an estate belonging to a wealthy New York family, the Hitchcocks.”

After the bus left New York City, they decided to travel to Millbrook to visit Timothy Leary’s group, the League for Spiritual Discovery, several members of which Kesey knew well. They expected a glorious reception from this group because it and the Merry Pranksters were both arcane societies engaged in experiments with human consciousness and LSD (104), Instead, they were received coldly and looked at as if they were a raucous college fraternity. Likewise the meeting between Kesey and Leary was highly anticipated, but Leary refused to even meet with him.

“The trouble with Leary and his group is that they have turned back. But of course! They have turned back into that old ancient New York intellectual thing, ducked back into the romantic past, copped out of the American trip.”

Just after Leary refused to meet with Kesey at Millbrook, the Pranksters begin heading back to California but continue doing what they had done on the way to New York, interacting with America. Wolfe points out that the primary difference between the Pranksters and Leary’s group is that the intellectuals have always looked for another country, “a fatherland of the mind, where it is all better and more philosophic and purer” (112).

“The experience—that was the word! and it began to fall into place. In fact, none of the great founded religions, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, 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.”

In Chapter 11, “The Unspoken Thing,” Wolfe explores one of his primary themes of New Religion. He writes about the parallels between what was going on with Kesey and the Pranksters and how religions begin. Chief among these is that both provide followers with a new experience, something that they were not aware of. For the Pranksters, this was psychedelic drugs, and throughout the book they often divide the world into those who have had this experience and those who have not.

“The Pranksters never talked about synchronicity by name, but they were more and more attuned to the principle. Obviously, according to this principle, man does not have free will. There is no use in his indulging in a lifelong competition to change the structure of the little environment he seems to be trapped in. But one could see the larger pattern and move with it—Go with the flow!—and accept it and rise above one’s immediate environment and even alter it by accepting the larger pattern and grooving with it.”

One of Wolfe’s primary themes throughout the book is that of Intersubjectivity and how the Pranksters seem to be so attuned with one another that they know their thought. He also uses the terms “group mind” and synchronicity to explore the same principle within the group. Here, he is referring to the idea that Kesey and the Pranksters seem to be convinced that cosmic or psychic forces are behind everything that happens, so they are determined to simply live and the here and now without other concerns.

“There were no rules. There was no official period of probation, and no vote on is he or isn’t he one of us, no blackballing, no tap on the shoulders. And yet there was a period of proving yourself, and everyone knew it was going on and no one ever said a word about it.”

In Chapter 12, Wolfe discusses the drug bust that took place at Kesey’s in the spring of 1965 and the ensuing weeks when some newcomers began showing up. One of these was Norman Hartweg, a teenaged playwright and writer, and another was Paul Foster, a professional computer programmer. Wolfe compares these two in terms of how they fit in with the Pranksters and explains how the idea that becoming a member of the Pranksters was not official; it simply boiled down to whether someone fit in or not.

“The Angels brought a lot of things into synch. Outlaws, by definition, were people who had move off of dead center and were out in some kind of 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.”

In Chapter 13, Wolfe discusses the notorious two-day party that took place when Kesey and the Pranksters hosted the Hell’s Angels. He points out that the two did not much in common on the surface, but both had recently become outlaws, by virtue of the recent drug bust at Kesey’s, and famous. Likewise, both of the groups fit into the realm of Counterculture because they existed against traditional norms.

“Paul Sawyer looked at Kesey […] and he saw a prophetic figure. He had not taught or preached. Rather, he had created […] an experience, an awareness that flashed deeper than celebration.”

In Chapter 14, Wolfe discusses one of his primary themes with his discussion of Kesey and the Pranksters taking over the annual California Unitarian Church Conference in Monterey. Some of the younger Unitarian ministers were already aware of Kesey, so they invited him to speak, but it ended up in an exercise of control for Kesey. While older people at the conference were put off by some of the antics of the Pranksters, the younger people flocked to Kesey and began to see him as a prophet. They had experienced the “mystic brotherhood” offered by the Pranksters instead of simply observing it (192).

“Early in 1967 the Beatles got a fabulous idea. They got hold of a huge school bus and piled into with thirty-nine friends and drove and wove across the British countryside, zonked out of their gourds. They were going to […] make a movie. Not an ordinary movie but a totally spontaneous movie, using hand-held cameras, shooting the experience as it happened—off the top of the head!—cavorting, rapping on, soaring in the moment, visionary chaos—a daydream!”

Wolfe is making the point that the Beatles came up with the same idea of a roving bus trip while using psychedelic drugs and filming it three years after the Merry Pranksters had done the same thing. Even the results were similar in that it resulted in miles of film, most of which was shaky and out of focus. The Beatles’ film, however, was shown commercially on British television and was named Magical Mystery Tour (213).

“Leary and Alpert preached ‘set and setting.’ Everything in taking LSD, in having a fruitful, freakout-free LSD experience, depended on set and setting.”

Wolfe is referring to some of the considerations when Kesey and the Pranksters were planning the Acid Test. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, who were both academic proponents of LSD, believed that the setting had to be strictly controlled to prevent freakouts. The Pranksters, however, believed the opposite. They felt as though such a controlled environment only “clamped the constipation of the past” (233).

“The Acid Tests were the epoch of the psychedelic style and practically everything that has gone into it. I don’t mean merely that the Pranksters did it first but, rather, that it all came straight out of the Acid Tests in a direct line leading to the Trips Festival of January 1966. That brought the whole thing full out in the open.”

Wolfe is referring to the fact that numerous elements of the psychedelic era came directly from the Acid Tests. For example, Mixed Media entertainment, the mixture of music, strobe lights, black lights, and continuous movie projectors during LSD usage was established by the Pranksters at the Acid Tests. The music itself did as well. What became known as “acid rock” was pioneered by the Grateful Dead, who regularly played at the Acid Tests. Even the Pranksters LSD supplier, Owsley, became the financial backer and sound engineer for the Dead (250).

“Leary and Alpert and their experiments had had plenty of publicity, but that seemed like a fairly isolated thing with a couple of Harvard docs at the helm and being pretty solemn-faced and esoteric about it, all in all. This new San Francisco-L.A. LSD thing, with wacked-out kids and delirious rock ‘n’ roll, made it seem like the dread LSD had caught on like an infection among the youth—which, in fact, it had. Very few realized that it had all emanated from one electric source: Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.”

In Chapter 20, Wolfe explains that the Acid Test in Watts and the later Trips Festival caused “the fast-rising psychedelic thing to explode right out of the underground in a way nobody had dreamed of” (283). He points out that acid usage had gotten plenty of publicity previously because of Leary and Alpert’s work, but it had not become the sensation with kids until the Acid Tests began.

“Kesey was the most magnetic person she had ever met. He radiated something, a kind of power. His thoughts, the things he talked about, were very complex and metaphysical and cryptic but his manner was back-home, almost back-country. Even when he was reeking with paranoia, he seemed to have total confidence. That was very strange.”

When Kesey flees to Mexico, he has Zonker with him and they meet a group of kids from San Jose who had been to an Acid Test. One of the girls actually already knows Zonker and she is immediately taken with Kesey when she meets him. She leaves with Kesey and Zonker and later officially become a Prankster, whom Kesey names “Black Maria.”

“Kesey had a good melodrama for going back in. Pain it big enough and bright enough, and they will never see you. He figured to sneak back in on the purloined-letter principle. If you are gross enough about the whole thing, they will never know it’s you.”

When it got too hot for the fugitive Kesey in Mexico, he determined that it was time to head back across the border but had to develop a plan to get across the border. The plan was to assume another alias, “Singing Jimmy Anglund,” a country-western musician who had no visa or identification because he had just been mugged by drunken Mexicans. Kesey even dressed the part with a cowboy hat and rented a horse to ride when he approached the border crossing.

“Kesey and the Pranksters had been so cut off they got almost no news from San Francisco. It was all perfect Devil’s Island down there. They had only a dim idea of what was going on among the heads in Haight-Ashbury. But now, like, you don’t even have to look for it. It hits you in the face. It’s a whole carnival.”

Wolfe is referring to the changes that had taken place in the Haight-Ashbury district in the small time from when Kesey fled to Mexico to when he returned less than a year later. The area was already a countercultural hotspot but it later became the epicenter for the psychedelic movement, and it was due entirely to Kesey and the Pranksters’ Acid Tests. While the cops knew how to handle drunks and junkies and understood the beatniks, the whole acid scene was new to them, as were the strange new “hippie-dippies” who were there (353).

“The Probation Generation! Not the Lost Generation or the Beat Generation or the Silent Generation, or even the Flower Generation, but the Probation Generation, with kids busted right and left up and down the coast for grass, and all get off the first time, on probation—What’s Probation!—with this millennium at hand, and it is, because there’s no earthly stopping this thing.”

Wolfe argues that there is no way of stopping the changes taking place with young people and psychedelic drug usage. He also explains that there are two directions that it can go: the Buddhist direction, like with Timothy Leary and those who see it as a religious-type experience, or Kesey’s direction, which is more like a mystic experience.