by Tom Wolfe
THE DANGER OF LSD
—coming on in big letters on the screen of the monitor sets in the studio, with a drawing of three sugar cubes under it … the symbol of LSD, of course, like four X’s XXXX, for whiskey, … and the voice-over saying
“ … and author Ken Kesey …”
Out in the clearing, beyond the jungle of light stands and wires and the rest of it, in a big pool of light, there’s Kesey in his buckskin shirt and red Guadalajara boots sitting in one of those milky-white fiberglass-coated Saarinen swivel chairs that TV interview shows go for … and Tucker, whose show it is, looking California Ivy League … and his other guest, Frankie Randall, looking sort of Las Vegas Yachtsman, as if any moment he is going to tell a long story about something very frustrating that happened to his El Dorado convertible in a parking lot in L.A. You can see this show has balance, as they say … It fills up your head like a daydream … brain candy … a little talk with Randall about the Persian Room and dining at Sardi’s and lying on the sands at Malibu—“Well, where do you go from here, Frankie!” “Well, I’ll be at Lake Tahoe next week, John!”—and then, gravely, he’ll bring on the elder statesman of psychedelphia, talking about the dangers of LSD and telling the kids to turn off, as if Kesey were an ex-Communist, reformed and returned from the class wars, with a few sizzling stories and then a moral. Just the ticket! a whiff of the dope dens and then a cold shower.
“Well, tell me, Ken, could you give some idea of what an LSD trip is like?”
“Yeah, it blows you out of your gourd.”
"Tucker stares at him—
“Well—now, you’re—going to tell all the people not to take it any more, is that correct?”
“I’m going to tell them to move on to the next step.”
“The next step?”
“It’s time to move on to the next step in the psychedelic revolution. I don’t know what this is going to be in any way I could just spell out, but I know we’ve reached a certain point but we’re not moving any more, we’re not creating any more, and that’s why we’ve got to move on to the next step—”
The next step? … it keeps going that way … They can’t figure out what in the name of Christ this big cowboy is saying … What about the danger, man, those sugar cubes we had up there … and down in front of me, amid the wires and lights, a technician and a production assistant are frantically scrawling away on a big cue board with a marking pencil and they thrust it close to Tucker and Kesey, just out of camera range—
DON’T FORGET ABOUT DANGER OF LSD! SAY ABOUT LSD BEING
DANGEROUS—ESPECIALLY FOR KIDS!
—and Kesey just looks at them and gives them the biggest, most inscrutable upcountry smile, which on the screen looks as though he has suddenly gazed off toward an old buddy who is saying, What a shuck, Kee-zee …
Later in the day, rolling across the TV screens of San Francisco again, Kesey and the Pranksters and the bus pull up to Winterland to look it over for the ACID TEST GRADUATION … TV microphones … Kesey in Flag People coveralls and a ten-gallon straw hat …
“Ken!Ken!” A TV announcer heaves into position. “Ken, could you tell us something about the message you’re going to have for the kids at this Acid Test Graduation?”
Kesey says, “I’m going to tell them, ‘Never trust a—’”
BRAAAAAAAAAAANG
A huge glob of feedback screels into the microphone—
“Could you repeat that, Ken?”
“Braaaaaaaaaaang,” says Kesey.
“Ha-ha. No, what you were saying.”
“Never trust a Prankster,” says Kesey. The scene breaks up in a covey of Flag People bobbing off the bus …
Never trust a Prankster! … Shit! … That shakes them up all over again in Haight-Ashbury, there’s no getting around that. A whole new inflammation of paranoia. The lunger heads are slithering up and down the store fronts on Haight Street. They’re hunkered down gabbling in the India-print living rooms. The whole thing takes a Stakhanovite left turn. Kesey is not a right deviationist but a left deviationist. He’s not going to cop out by telling the kids to stop taking LSD, that’s just the cover story. Instead he’s going to pull a monster prank that will wreck the psychedelic movement once and for all … Well, the acid heads in Haight-Ashbury are like a tribe in one respect, anyway, I can see that. It’s all jungle drums and gossip with them, they love it, they swim in it, like fish in a stream in a cave … A terrific thought bubbles up in the universal brain … The Acid Test Graduation is scheduled for Winterland on Monday, October 31, Halloween. The next night the California Democratic Party is holding a big rally in Winterland for Governor Brown, who is running against Ronald Reagan. Kesey and the Pranksters hold their Winterland blast on Halloween. Right? Far from being an “acid graduation,” it will be an Acid Test of unbelievable proportions. Electric Kool-Aid will rain in the air like a typhoon, swizzle up every vein, 6,000 heads smashed out of their nuts, ricocheting off the walls like electric golf balls … The sky falls … But that’s not all. They won’t stop there! these maniacs … The Pranksters will smear all the doors, railings, walls, chairs, the heating systèm, the water fountains, with DMSO … laced with LSD … Dig? … DMSO is close to being an old alchemical ideal, the universal solvent. Put a drop of DMSO on your fingertip and thirty seconds later you can taste it in your mouth. It goes right through your skin and through your system that fast. DMSO with LSD … What a vision! The following night the entire Democratic Party of California will get turned on, zonked out of their apples. Eight thousand emphysematous fatbacked Senators, Assemblymen, National Committeemen, National Committeewomen, Congressmen, the Governor himself, wailing like banshees, flopping around and gurgling and spitting and frying like a pile of insane pancakes, whereupon the Deaf Policemen descend on the whole psychedelic movement with knouts flailing …
Christ! what a stew … Now the heads don’t know whether Kesey is selling them out or shoving a big Roman candle up the universal arse. They’re fascinated. They come around the Warehouse and peep into the gloom. Their eyes shine at the doorway with a hepatic fever … They come into the Warehouse, they stare at the bus, they stare at Kesey, Mountain Girl, Cassady, Babbs … A whole platoon of them comes in, beads rattling, teetering around like gauchos, staring at the bus and going “Wowwwww! Wowwwwwww!” and smiling at each other, like, it’s so groooovy, and suddenly all the Pranksters fall silent. “Cops,” says Mountain Girl in total disgust. “How do you know?” “Look at their shoes.” They have on lace-up boots like telephone linesmen. “You could never git heads to wear heavy shoes like that,” she says. Only a momentary downer, however. The fact is, the Pranksters are sailing. They’ve got the whole town into their movie by now, cops and all. Kesey is all over TV, radio, and newspapers. He’s a celebrity, the perfect celebrity, the Good-Bad Guy, reeking all the secret Zea-lot delights of sin but promising to do good. They were all over town on the bus, befuddling the communal brain … Even into Fillmore, the big Negro section, with the loudspeakers playing rock ‘n’ roll and American flags flying and a big sign on the bus reading
COLORED POWER
moving through the ghetto in a blur of Day-Glo swirls. The spades in Fillmore didn’t know what the hell to make of that. Were these white freaks serious, only they got the term wrong? Or was it a shuuuuuuuuuuuck—by the time they figured it out, the bus was long gone, wailing off somewhere else. Then the big sign
ACID TEST GRADUATION
went up on the bus, and the bus went wheeling through Haight-Ashbury and downtown San Francisco and North Beach and Berkeley advertising the world’s biggest convocation of all the heads. Pranksters flapping from every portal. George Walker up on top on the drums, Page on the electric guitar. Mountain Girl hanging out the back of the bus exploding sunballs and screaming at the nonplused multitudes on the subject of the race for governor and Kesey’s various busts
“Kesey for Governor!”
“A man of convictions!”
“He stands on
his record!”
“The idiot’s choice!”
“A joint in every stash!”
“No hope without dope!”
They were immune again. The whole freaking town was into the movie. And after …
… WINTERLAND; YES … THE HARDEST PART OF THE WHOLE fantasy, as usual, has been finding the right place. Winterland is perfect, the biggest indoor arena in the city limits, and a tight ship, used for ice shows and so on. The Winterland management didn’t want to deal directly with Kesey and the Pranksters. Maniacs! jailbirds … That was where Bill Graham came in. There was no love lost between Graham and Kesey, but Graham agrees to serve as producer, impresario, the sane hand on the controls, and sign the contract. Graham’s job is to stay up on top of the new wave. But it’s an aesthetic and moral thing with him, too. He’s a believer, underneath it all … Hmmmm … There’s Kesey … Well … Anyway, Hallinan and Rohan draw up a contract between Graham and Intrepid Trips, Inc. It’s signed and a deposit is down, all legal and locked up.
Then there’s the Grateful Dead. Kesey wants them for the Acid Test Graduation. They’re essential, he says. But the Dead have a contract to play at an annual Halloween costume ball at California Hall. Ironically, the Pranksters’ benefactors, the Calliope Company, were sponsoring it, and they had an impresario named Bob McKendrick running it. Kesey and McKendrick and a couple of the Calliope Company, Paul Hawken, Michael Laton and Bill Tara, are up in an apartment on the top floors of a rickety building on Pine Street, all wood slats and bay windows. There are no furnishings, just a mattress in the living room. The sun makes a huge glare in here. Kesey sits on the mattress and everybody else is hunkered down on the floor. Except McKendrick. He is standing up in the middle of the floor like someone dancing on a hot plate. He has on tight black pants, black shark toe slip-on shoes, a soft black sweater and open-neck shirt … dressed Main Stem hipster, in short. He’s broken up in the glare, twenty-seven parts, all fidgeting.
“Look, Ken,” he’s saying, “you’re a leader, a prophet, you might say, and you have an important message, and I dig that, you know? I respect that … But I have to think of this in other terms. I’m responsible to a lot of people, and there’s a lot of money involved.”
Twenty-seven parts!—all moving, doesn’t anyone see that this is a main chance, this dance at California Hall, in the impresario game. Kesey just sits there and keeps working on him like how long is it before he will see how it’s going to be—Hell, man! join forces with the Pranksters. Move your scene to Winterland, co-sponsor it. If he doesn’t, everybody on … The Scene will go to Winterland anyway, and he and his whole California Hall scene will be wiped out anyway. McKendrick is beside himself. His black pants shimmy in the glare. He smells disaster either way. Put me back together again! Everyone stares. It’s all glare and myopia in here! He comes to a stop. He agrees. He pulls out of California Hall, freeing the Dead, thrash, crumble—
—bits and freaking pieces, grumbling. The heads start grumbling about Kesey’s power play. Kesey’s power play. The Grateful Dead … They’ve been doing all right! Since the Acid Tests they have become a thing, the pioneers of the new sound, acid rock, with the record companies beginning to sniff around :::: hmmmmm :::: the very next thing? Freak that. All and everyone in one bag now, Winterland.
Friday night and the Pranksters decide to drop in on the Fillmore. Like, well, it’s Friday night. Kesey, Cassady, Babbs, Page, about a dozen of them, all in the Flag People coveralls, Cassady flipping his sledgehammer. The scene around the Fillmore is a freak show for sure. The dance hall is set down right in the middle of the Negro slums, at Fillmore and Geary, and it’s Friday night with a lot of young spades with Stingy-Brim hats on out on the street having the usual Friday night on the streets and old Negro women doing the groceries for the weekend, liquor stores, drugstores, cars inching along, black faces all over the streets. Right in the middle of them, the white freaks. Kids in psychedelic dress burbling and gaggling up to the Fillmore—Colored Power! the kids have that, all right. Kesey and the Pranksters walk up the stairs to the dance hall, which is on the second floor. Kesey talks to the ticket seller and the ticket taker. There’s a big conference. The ticket taker goes upstairs. He comes back … like, very bad vibrations … They can’t come in unless they buy tickets … Graham … bad vibrations, a freaking insult, in fact. The Pranksters go back out on the street to mull that one over. There’s a Cyclone fence at the rear entrance of the Fillmore with a freaked-out chomping police dog behind it … Graham … Cassady goes off … A few minutes later he’s back.
“I ran into Bill Graham,” he says. “He was out on the street checking tire treads to see if they’d picked up any nickels. I says, ‘Bill …’ and he says, ‘Look, Neal, we’re in two different worlds. You’re a hippie and I’m a square. Square.’ He did it like this”—and Cassady makes a square in the air with his forefingers to show how he did it—“‘You’re a hippie and I’m a square.’ Says, ‘I got off the subway in 1955, but you’re still on it. We’re in two different worlds. You’re a hippie and I’m a square.’ I’m telling you, Chief,” he says to Kesey, “I had some very negative feelings. I remembered what you said about negative feelings, but I had some very negative feelings.” Kesey laughs, but—
All day Saturday the Pranksters are working like mad. They’re hassling up all sorts of equipment, mikes, spots, amplifiers, speakers, strobes, even an electronic music machine, all the stuff they had at the Acid Tests and more. They can’t get into Winterland until Sunday to start rigging it up because there’s some show in there Saturday night. Anyway, they’re working en charrette Saturday and into Saturday night … At five o’clock in the morning, Sunday, it hits the fan. Kesey’s lawyer, Rohan, gets wakened up at 5 a.m., at home … Graham is on the phone, very excited, explaining a million things a mile a minute.
They are having quite a little session up in Graham’s office at the Fillmore. All night it’s been going on. Graham has been wrestling with many negative feelings. He knows that term, too. By heart—also Chet Helms knows it, and the Grateful Dead, and the Quicksilver Messenger Service, and more and more ::::: three fourths of The Scene is here, says Graham, the’re all over the place, hanging on the walls … Everyone is in a terrific sweat. Are we actually going to let Kesey do this thing? pull off this debacle? Go :::: beyond acid, whatever that may be, which, whatever it is, is no good for anyone here … They’ve hauled out all the versions, the cop-out, the power play, the way Kesey twisted McKendrick’s arm, the DMSO … the DMSO! … That’s it! Christ, Bill, can’t you see … They’re putting pressure on Graham to pull out of the deal … They’ve got me by each limb, wild tow trucks heading to the four points of the compass … The more they talk, the more urgent it is to do something, else, Christ, why have we been here all night … Hope incubates in the warm loam of every armpit … Helms has it figured out. Kesey’s mentality is military. He thinks in terms of power differentials. He’s playing the desert fox—lure the enemy into your own battleground by doing a turn-face claiming you came back to stop kids from taking acid, and when you have thousands of these straight people together, turn them on to acid. Kesey’s playing the tactical deceit and façade game—and so on … And the Dead … Why should we blow our hard-earned scenes for Kesey? As Ralph Gleason the columnist says … Kesey’s going to blow the whole new San Francisco scene for us. And Graham … I ran into Cassady on the street. He’s waving this sledgehammer at me like he’s going to knock my head off if I don’t play ball … Many negative feelings. Kesey’s an Elmer Gantry, says Graham … That’s it! Elmer Gantry, the evangelical demagogue … Freaking debacle either way … If he blows it, he blows it for us all. If he succeeds, he takes over the whole psychedelic movement and leads it into the Elmer Gantry thing, Father Divine, Daddy Grace, Cagliostro, charlatan limbo, sledgehammer theocracy, a phosphorescent fascist fandango, King Herod spavining the Flower Children, O Fuck & Corruption, G-narl, G-nash, Elmer Gantry Cagliostro Day-Glo Nero … Stop Kesey �
�
In short, Graham is pulling out of the deal and there will be no Acid Test Graduation at Winterland.
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON IN THE WAREHOUSE—CHRIST, IT’S dismal in here! The place is always a shambles, of course, but now the funk of the day’s debacle is settling in like a sludge. The vermin are regaining the upper hand … The lice! The pigeon fleas! The roaches! rats! scabies! impetigo! clap! piles! herpes! all rising up out of the debris like boils … Faye, Mountain Girl, Babbs, Gretch, Black Maria, Page, Doris Delay, Stewart Brand, Lois, the Hermit, Roy Seburn, Gut the ex-Hell’s Angel, Kesey’s brother Chuck, Zonker—they’re all rumbling around in the gloom, but they’re not Flag People any more, the costumes are off like the war is over … They’re gathering around in a circle in folding chairs and old theater seats on one side of the bus … Acid Test Graduation … The sign is still stretched across the whole side of the bus … Well, shit … Kesey, in his buckskin shirt again, comes around in the midst of them carrying a huge easy chair—stuffed with tiny wings!—over his head—and sets it down with the back to the bus and sits down in it—a molting chair—and the Prankster circle rings out from him. Kesey stares at a spiral notebook he has and then starts talking in a voice so soft I can hardly hear him at first … about what has just happened … about Danny Rifkin and some others who came by to tell him they were pulling out of the Winterland fantasy.
“It didn’t take long to know they wouldn’t change their minds,” he says. “They won’t change because they have too much money involved … As soon as they left, I lay down and I thought about it and then I knew we have everything we want right here …”