The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

When Tom Wolfe passed away earlier this year, I realized I had read only one of his books (The Bonfire of the Vanities). Notably, I had not read any of his nonfiction, which is what made him famous. He was part of what was known as "new journalism," in which the author's style was a major part of the story and often included the author himself. Other practitioners were Hunter S. Thompson and Gay Talese.

If you read all of Wolfe's journalism, you will have a pretty good understanding of the 1960s. From the space program to the Black Panthers, Wolfe covered it all. In the book I chose to read, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, he follows a group called the Merry Pranksters, ostensibly lead by writer Ken Kesey. They were something of a bridge between the beatnik and hippie generations.

"About all I knew about Kesey at that point was that he was a highly regarded 31-year-old novelist and in a lot of trouble over drugs," Wolfe begins. Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and attracted a following of outcasts including Neal Cassady, who the model for Dean Moriarty in On the Road, as well as other people who had nicknames like Mountain Girl, Zonker, the Hermit, June the Goon, Black Maria and the Mad Chemist. Kesey was from Oregon, but had settled in San Francisco: "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."

The group, calling themselves the Merry Pranksters, bought an old bus and painted it in Day-Glo colors, and headed East: "So the Hieronymous Bosch bus headed out of Kesey's place with the destination sign in front reading “Furthur” and a sign in the back saying “Caution: Weird Load.” It was weird, all right, but it was euphoria on board, barreling through all that warm California sun in July, on the road, and everything they had been working on at Kesey’s was on board and heading on Furthur."

This was 1964, and what would change these beatniks into proto-hippies was basically one thing: LSD. At that time it was legal, and soon this group was indulging and Kesey was preaching that it lead to expanded consciousness (one of their bibles was Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception). They became friendly with The Grateful Dead, who would start the Acid Rock genre, and turn on the Hell's Angels. They befriended Owsley Stanley, who was the sound man for the Dead, and also the first person to mass produce LSD.

Needless to say, things got strange. There was an interaction with a Unitarian church group, but they were scandalized by the occasional outrageousness of the Pranksters. Eventually Kesey got busted for marijuana, twice, and since a second conviction meant prison time, he fled to Mexico.

Wolfe covers Kesey's time in Mazatlan and Manzanillo vividly. Kesey was eventually tracked down by Mexican police, but actually managed to escape by jumping on a moving train. He made his way back to the States, living as a fugitive: "In short, the fantasy is now to become a kind of Day-Glo Pimpernel, popping up here and there, right out in public, then vanishing, reeking legend in the wake. He will be like one of those movie criminals who send florid coded notes to the police about au pair girls he intends to garrote—and then does it—while all the world pants for next week’s broken hyoid bone."

Eventually Kesey was caught, served a few months on a work farm, but was accused of selling out, because he told kids no longer to do LSD--he said to go "beyond" it. The scene had shifted to Haight-Ashbury, and kids flocked their with Jesus hair and flowers and beads. The page had turned.

Wolfe writes in a kind of stream of consciousness, at times Joycean in its use of sounds and slang and profanity. A little of this goes a long way. I mean, at times you just have to stop and enjoy a passage, like this one: "Instead, somehow they’re going to try it right down the main highway, eight lanes wide, heron-neck arc lamps rising up as far as the eye can see, and they will broadcast on all frequencies, waving American flags, turning up the Day-Glo and the neon of 1960s electro-pastel America, wired up and amplified, 327,000 horsepower, a fantasy bus in a science-fiction movie, welcoming all on board, no matter how unbelievably Truck Stop Low Rent or raunchy—"

But there are times when this becomes a little tedious, and frankly I grew tired of these shenanigans after a while. I'm a guy who's sorry he missed out on all this (but I would have been afraid to take acid, though I would have liked the free love) but there's a basic immaturity behind these people that makes you want to scream. Wolfe does not judge them--they are neither heroic or despicable--and I'm sure every reader will form their own impression. But by the end I thought, just give it a rest.