The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

by Tom Wolfe

  There’s only one thing to do … there’s only one thing’s gonna do any good at all … And that’s everybody just look at it, look at the war, and turn your backs and say … Fuck it …

  —hawonkawonkawonkawonka—

  —They hear that all right. The sound of the phrase—Fuck it—sounds so weird, so shocking, even here in Free Speech citadel, just coming out that way over a public loudspeaker, rolling over the heads of 15,000 souls—

  —Home, home on the range hawonkawonkawonka, and the Pranksters beginning to build up most madly on their instruments now, behind the harmonica, sounding like an insane honky-tonk version of Juan Carrillo who devised 96 tones on the back seat of a Willys Jeep, saved pennies all through the war to buy it, you understand, zinc pennies until the blue pustules formed under his zither finger nether there, you understand …

  —Just look at it and turn away and say … Fuck it

  —say … Fuck it …

  hawonkawonkawonka blam

  —Fuck it—

  Hawonkafuckit … friends …

  THERE WAS NO WAY ONE COULD PROVE KESEY HAD DONE IT. Nevertheless, something was gone out of the anti-war rally. The Real Barnburner spoke, and the Vietnam Day Committee tried to put in one last massive infusion of the old spirit and then gave the signal and the great march on Oakland began, through the gloaming. Fifteen thousand souls … shoulder to shoulder like in the old strike posters. At the Oakland-Berkeley line there was an arrow-shaped phalanx of police and National Guard. The Vietnam Day Committee marched in frantic clump at the head, trying to decide whether to force the issue, have a physical confrontation, heads busted, bayonets—or turn back when they ordered them to. Nobody seemed to have any resolve. Somebody would say, We have no choice, we’ve got to turn back—and somebody else would call him a Martin Luther King. That was about the worst thing you could call anybody on the New Left at that time. Martin Luther King turned back at the critical moment on the bridge at Selma. We can’t risk submitting the crania of our devoted people to fracturization and degradation by those who do not shrink from a cowardly show of weaponry, he had said, going on like Social Science Negro in his sepulchral voice—the big solemn preachery Uncle Tom. Yah! yuh Tuskegee-headed Uncle Tom, yuh, yuh Booker T. Washington peanut-butter lecture-podium Nobel Prize medal head, yuh—Uncle Tom—by the time it was all over, Martin Luther King was a stupid music-hall Handkerchief Head on the New Left—and here they were, calling each other Martin Luther Kings and other incredible things—but nobody had any good smashing iron zeal to carry the day—O where is our Zea-lot, who Day-glowed and fucked up our heads—and there was nothing to do but grouse at the National Guard and turn back, which they did. What the hell has happened to us? Who did this? Why, it was the Masked Man—

  So the huge march turned around and headed for Civic Center Park in Berkeley and stood around there eating hamburgers and listening to music by a jug band—a group that later became known as Country Joe and the Fish—and wondering what the hell had happened. Then somebody started throwing tear gas from a rooftop and Bob Scheer was bravely telling everybody to lie down on the grass, because tear gas rises—but the jug band just stood there, petrified, with their hands and their instruments frozen in the same position as when the gas hit. It seems the jug band was high on something or other, and when the gas hit, the combination of the gas and whatever they were already up on—it petrified them and they stood there in stark stiff medias res as if they were posing for an Iwo Jima sculpture for the biggest antiwar rally in the history of the American people. The whole rally now seemed like a big half ass, with the frozen jug band the picture of how far they had gotten.

  chapter XVII

  Departures

  PREPARE FOR MEXICO

  And then Kesey posted cryptic words on his log-house Prankster bulletin board:

  Let every thought, our whole direction, prepare for Mexico.

  Every morsel you eat, every book you read, every high, every low, every Day-Glo deed …

  But he never said why or when they might expect to go.

  MOUNTAIN GIRL RETURNS TO POUGHKEEPSIE

  Now, Mountain Girl groks fully of the Pranksters’ psychic takeoff

  And is the very radiometer of their superpsychic pace.

  No one ever plunged more fully in the psychedelic risk-all

  Or ever blazed more radiant through the splays of inner space.

  Yet not even a very Isis is immune against the crisis

  That stamps a woman’s psyche when she is going to bear a child.

  It could never be easy to be three thousand miles from Kesey

  But she had to Stop!

  And try to grok

  more fully … and go back East awhile

  SANDY RETURNS TO NEW YORK

  The path was soft as velvet, but Sandy heard it coming—

  Ahor! rising, materializing from the mists of his devotion.

  The demon Speed starts wrenching, leaves Sandy flinching in a bummer,

  Dazed again in a half-crazed demonic DMT implosion

  Causing psychosomatic, psychocidic cortical syndromes,

  Even synarthrotic paralysis down the side of his lean face.

  He tries to cure himself, purify the psychic venom,

  But they’re no use—all the Prankster arts of this limelit magic place.

  Even I Ching says brain scans, EEGs, the whole clinical bit,

  Which costs money—Kesey! Let me pawn the Ampex,

  Four-hundred-dollar tape machine, for after all I brought it

  Here in the first place—and then—stuck in his synarthrotic cortex

  This thought: Kesey refused him the Ampex, Prankster salvation machine.

  He goes back East for the clinical bit, but that won’t be the end of it, Dream Warrior …

  chapter XVIII

  Cosmo’s Tasmanian Deviltry

  “CAN

  YOU

  PASS THE

  ACID TEST?—”

  Comes the call

  Chiseled on each Prankster eyeball

  in Lincoln gothic

  As we moan

  In this graveyard among moonstone tombstones

  with a philosophic

  It’s your ass—

  Can you pass the Acid Test?

  Babbs and Kesey swaying

  In a California graveyard, baying

  deep

  In the synch

  Zonked on LSD on the brink

  freaking steep

  Of a missionary quest:

  Can you pass the Acid Test?

  Tombstones!

  Vaults, coffins and bald carbon-dated bones

  A dream transfusion

  From the Community Breast:

  Can you pass the Acid Test?

  The group mind

  Flying high, Major, but not blind

  in the moonshine

  Was inspired

  With the ceremony that would be required

  in the moon shot

  To extend

  The Prankster message to the ends

  Of the earth. A mindfest:

  a moon ship

  The Acid Test …

  … and Kesey emerged from the weird night in the graveyard with the vision of turning on the world, literally, and a weirdly practical way of doing it, known as

  THE ACID TEST

  For, as it has been written: … he develops a strong urge to extend the message to all people … he develops a ritus, often involving music, dance, liturgy, sacrifice, to achieve an objectified and stereotyped expression of the original spontaneous religious experience.

  Christ! how many movements before them had run into this selfsame problem. Every vision, every insight of the … original … circle always came out of the new experience … the kairos … and how to tell it! How to get it across to the multitudes who have never had this experience themselves? You couldn’t put it into words. You had to create conditions in which they would feel an approximation of that feeling, the sub
lime kairos. You had to put them into ecstasy … Buddhist monks immersing themselves in cosmic love through fasting and contemplation, Hindus zonked out in Bhakti, which is fervent love in the possession of God, ecstatics flooding themselves with Krishna through sexual orgies or plunging into the dinners of the Bacchanalia, Christians off in Edge City through gnostic onanism or the Heart of Jesus or the Child Jesus with its running sore—or—

  THE ACID TESTS

  And suddenly Kesey sees that they, the Pranksers, already have the expertise and the machinery to create a mindblown state such as the world has never seen, totally wound up, lit up, amplified and … controlled—plus the most efficient key ever devised to open the doors in the mind of the world: namely, Owsley’s LSD.

  For months Kesey has been trying to work out … the fantasy … of the Dome. This was going to be a great geodesic dome on top of a cylindrical shaft. It would look like a great mushroom. Many levels. People would climb a stairway up the cylinder—buy a ticket?—we-e-e-elllll—and the dome would have a great foam-rubber floor they could lie down on. Sunk down in the foam rubber, below floor level, would be movie projectors, video-tape projectors, light projectors. All over the place, up in the dome, everywhere, would be speakers, microphones, tape machines, live, replay, variable lag. People could take LSD or speed or smoke grass and lie back and experience what they would, enclosed and submerged in a planet of lights and sounds such as the universe never knew. Lights, movies, video tapes, video tapes of themselves, flashing and swirling over the dome from the beams of searchlights rising from the floor from between their bodies. The sounds roiling around in the globe like a typhoon. Movies and tapes of the past, tapes and video tapes, broadcasts and pictures of the present, tapes and humanoid sounds of the future—but all brought together now—here and now—Kairos—into the dilated cerebral cortex …

  The geodesic dome, of course, was Buckminster Fuller’s inspiration. The light projections were chiefly Gerd Stern’s, Gerd Stern of the USCO group, although Roy Seburn had already done a lot with them and Page Browning showed a talent that surprised everybody. But the magic dome, the new planet, was Kesey and the Pranksters. The idea went beyond what would later be known as mixed-media entertainment, now a standard practice in “psychedelic discotheques” and so forth. The Pranksters had the supra-medium, a fourth dimension—acid—Cosmo—All-one—Control—The Movie—

  But why a dome? The answer to all the Prankster fantasies, public and private, the whole solution—they already found it; namely, the Hell’s Angels party. That two-day rout hadn’t been a party but a show. It had been more than a show even. It had been an incredible concentration of energy. Not only Pranksters, but people from all over, heads, non-heads, intellectuals, curiosity-seekers, even cops, had turned up and gotten swept up in the incredible energy of the thing. They had been in the Prankster movie. It was one show that hadn’t been separated into entertainers and customers, with the customers buying a ticket and saying All right, now entertain me. At the Angels’ party everybody got high together and everybody did his thing and entertained everybody else, Angels being Angels, Ginsberg being Ginsberg, Pranksters being Pranksters, and cops being cops. Even the cops did their thing, splashing those big lush evil revolving red turret lights off the dirt cliff and growling and baying and hassling cars.

  CAN

  YOU

  PASS THE

  ACID TEST?

  Anybody who could take LSD for the first time and go through all that without freaking out … Leary and Alpert preached “set and setting.” Everything in taking LSD, in having a fruitful, freakout-free LSD experience, depended on set and setting. You should take it in some serene and attractive setting, a house or apartment decorated with objects of the honest sort, Turkoman tapestries, Greek goatskin rugs, Cost Plus blue jugs, soft light—not Japanese paper globe light, however, but untasselated Chinese textile shades—in short, an Uptown Bohemian country retreat of the $60,000-a-year sort, ideally, with Mozart’s Requiem issuing with liturgical solemnity from the hi-fi. The “set” was the set of your mind. You should prepare for the experience by meditating upon the state of your being and deciding what you hope to discover or achieve on this voyage into the self. You should also have a guide who has taken LSD himself and is familiar with the various stages of the experience and whom you know and trust … and Fuck that! That only clamped the constipation of the past, the eternal lags, on something that should happen Now. Let the setting be as unserene and lurid as the Prankster arts can make it and let your set be only what is on your … brain, man, and let your guide, your trusty hand-holding, head-swaddling guide, be a bunch of Day-Glo crazies who have as one of their mottoes: “Never trust a Prankster.” The Acid Tests would be like the Angels’ party plus all the ideas that had gone into the Dome fantasy. Everybody would take acid, any time they wanted, six hours before the Test began or the moment they got there, at whatever point in the trip they wanted to enter the new planet. In any event, they would be on a new planet.

  The mysteries of the synch! Very strange … the Acid Tests turned out, in fact, to be an art form foreseen in that strange book, Childhood’s End, a form called “total identification”: “The history of the cinema gave the clue to their actions. First, sound, then color, then stereoscopy, then Cinerama, had made the old ‘moving pictures’ more and more like reality itself. Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve stimulation of all the senses, and perhaps hypnosis as well … When the goal was attained, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could become—for a while, at least,—any other person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or imaginary … . And when the ‘program’ was over, he would have acquired a memory as vivid as any experience in his actual life—indeed, indistinguishable from reality itself.”

  Too freaking true!

  THE FIRST ACID TEST ENDED UP MORE LIKE ONE OF THE OLD acid parties at La Honda, which is to say, a private affair, and mostly formless. It was meant to be public, but the Pranksters were not the world’s greatest at the mechanics of things, like hiring a hall. The first one was going to be in Santa Cruz. But they couldn’t hire a hall in time. They had to hold it out at Babbs’s house, a place known as the Spread, just outside of Santa Cruz in a community known as Soquel. The Spread was like a rundown chicken farm. The wild vetch and dodder vines were gaining ground every minute, at least where the ground wasn’t burnt off or beaten down into a clay muck. There were fat brown dogs and broken vehicles and rusted machines and rotting troughs and recapped tires and a little old farmhouse with linoleum floors and the kind of old greasy easy chairs that upholstery flies hover over in nappy clouds and move off about three-quarters of an inch when you wave your hand at them. But there were also wild Day-Glo creations on the walls and ceilings, by Babbs, and the place was private and tucked off by itself. In any case, they were stuck with the Spread.

  About all the advertising they could do was confined to the day of the Test itself. Norman Hartweg had painted a sign on some cardboard and tacked it onto some boards Babbs had used as cue signs in the movie, and put it up in the Hip Pocket Bookstore. CAN YOU PASS THE ACID TEST? The Hip Pocket Bookstore was a paperback bookstore that Hassler and Peter Demma, one of the Prankster outer circle, were running in Santa Cruz. They left word in the store that afternoon that it was going to be at Babbs’s. A few local bohos saw it and came out, but mainly it was the Pranksters and their friends who showed up at the Spread that night, including a lot of the Berkeley crowd that had been coming to La Honda. Plus Allen Ginsberg and his entourage.

  It started off as a party, with some of the movie flashed on the walls, and lights, and tapes, and the Pranksters providing the music themselves, not to mention the LSD. The Pranksters’ strange atonal Chinese music broadcast on all frequencies, à la John Cage. It was mostly just another La Honda party—but then around 3 A.M.
a thing happened … The non-involved people, the people just there for the beano, the people who hadn’t seen the Management, like the Berkeley people, they had all left by 3 A.M. and the Test was down to some kind of core … It ended up with Kesey on one side of Babbs’s living room and Ginsberg on the other, with everybody else arranged around these two poles like on a magnet, all the Kesey people over toward him and all the Ginsberg people toward him—The super-West and the super-East—and the subject got to be Vietnam. Kesey gives his theory of whole multitudes of people joining hands in a clump and walking away from the war. Ginsberg said all these things, these wars, were the result of misunderstandings. Nobody who was doing the fighting ever wanted to be doing it, and if everybody could only sit around in a friendly way and talk it out, they could get to the root of their misunderstanding and settle it—and then from the rear of the Kesey contingent came the voice of the only man in the room who had been within a thousand miles of the war, Babbs, saying, “Yes, it’s all so very obvious.”

  It’s all so very obvious …

  How magical that comment seemed at that moment! The magical eighth hour of acid—how clear it all now was—Ginsberg had said it, and Babbs, the warrior, had certified it, and it had all built to this, and suddenly everything was so … very … clear …

  The Acid Test at the Spread was just a dry run, of course. It didn’t really … reach out into the world … But! soon … the Rolling Stones, England’s second hottest pop group, were coming to San Jose, 40 miles south of San Francisco, for a show in the Civic Auditorium on December 4. Kesey can see it all, having seen it before. He can see all the wound-up wired-up teeny freaks and assorted multitudes pouring out of the Cow Palace after the Beatles show that night, the fragmented pink-tentacled beast, pouring out still aquiver with ecstasy and jelly beans all cocked and aimless with no flow to go off in … It is so very obvious.