by Tom Wolfe
The Pranksters have their own speakers set up all over the barn and Babbs is trying to test the microphones, watching for the needle to jump over the dials … Babbs has on his Day-Glo spirit mask and it glows in the dark, also a Shazam shirt and pants of many stripes and colors and he blows into the microphones, then hums a bit and watches the needles, then keens a bit, then croons a bit, and that’s nice, so he tries a little ululation, and that’s nicer, and pretty soon he is keening and gooning along with the New Dimensions and his voice sails through their sound like a stoned ghost on the airwaves. Kesey sits on a folding chair in the Control Center testing the headsets. Cassady has the Rattar, now painted an infinite number of colors and totally without strings. Doris Delay plays kindly aunt with the zonked-out little girl who’s getting the picture …
The New Dimensions finish their set and they’re mad as hell, of course. What … cube was doing that screaming bit, f’r chrissake … The three of them come stomping up to the likely suspects, the Pranksters, led by the stocky guy with the hat and sunglasses. He walks up to Babbs and says,
“Like, I mean, who’s doing all that—”
“Doing what?” says Babbs.
“Like, later, man, don’t give me the doing-what bit. You know doing-what, man. I mean like—”
“Was somebody doing something?”
“Like, I mean, that’s … later! You know! I mean, it … grates!”
“Oh, you mean that funny noise! I’d say feedback.”
“Sure! Feedback!”
“Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!” Just a parlor sport, this is … fella could do it with his left hand. The little guy is furious. He tries to find the words to express his utter loathing.
“Like, man, this fuck-up bit on somebody else’s set—it’s SO—SQUARE!”
There! he said it! the worst insult he knows! Next, the fire next time—Kesey steps in as the peacemaker: “He wasn’t working against you—he was trying to play with you.”
The little guy stares at Kesey but doesn’t say anything. He just screams it again into the void: “Like, it’s so—SQUARE!”
“Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!” says Babbs. “And there’s the guy who did it!” and he points at Cool Breeze, who is sitting at a little table with a candle on it, hunched over a piece of paper, doing some kind of intense meth-like drawing. “There he goes!” says Cassady, picking up on the thing. “Takes a phantom heart to catch a Cool Breeze, you understand—” and so forth and so on, a shuck, in a word, never trust a Prankster … And the New Dimensions walk off, disgusted …
They refuse to play any more and start packing up their instruments, which leaves Taboory, The Barn’s manager, in a bind. He can’t figure out who the hell to alienate. Kesey is a giant … on the other hand, the New Dimensions can play … But too late for all that. The New Dimensions stomp out, thumbing their noses at the whole scene. The Pranksters wind up for their set. They clamp on their headsets. The headsets are wired up to a variable-lag system. So the Pranksters don’t hear what they are playing right now but what they were playing a second ago. They harmonize off themselves, break up all learned progressions, and only they can hear the full … orchestration, a symphony in their cortices, the music of the Prankster … ah ummmm … Only the kids in The Barn, can’t figure out what’s going on … It’s like, weird … The Pranksters put on their headsets and pick up their instruments, Kesey on an electric guitar, Page on an electric guitar, also Hassler, Babbs on an electric bass, Gretch on the electric organ, George Walker on the drums. They look all ready to go, but nothing happens. They’re waiting … for the … energy … to build up, to come crackling over the headsets … the spontaneous burst … but nothing works. Somebody starts and nobody else can pick it up and soon it’s obvious that none of these crazy-looking people is going to play the instruments, except for the drummer … and they’re not playing songs, they make it up as they go along … the leader, the muscular guy, Kesey, singing:
“It’s a … road map! … that ought to have been issued, about how to reach the edge of time … on a horse who flies in tungsten red …”
And the guy in the mask on the bass singing: “ … floods of screams on the beach in bomby raids of bloody rainbows … It’s dark and I lose my vision …”
Well … the kids start leaving … what the hell …
Babbs belches over a microphone. That gets a laugh. But is it art? Kesey barks like a dog. George Walker says over his microphone: “Where’d that dog go? I heard a … dog! … under my very feet!”
They slough to a halt. Hassler starts chanting into his microphone, which is wired in only to the headsets … Only Pranksters can hear:
“Begin it like we began … at the beginning … Do it like we did … at the beginning … In the beginning … in the beginning …” Chanting over the inner space network.
But the slump and the slough are total … The kids all going in droves now … Just the Pranksters left … An atmosphere of total tedium … It’s … all … too … much … for mortal—
Even Pranksters drifting off … leaving the main floor, going downstairs … Hagen shakes his head. “It’s like a wake …” It’s that burnt-out husk of the dark hours of the morning … Black Maria finds a mattress in a utility room and lies down … Cassady, not high at all—low, in fact—offers to drive a girl home … Now it’s just Kesey on the electric guitar and Babbs on the electric bass, them and their headsets picking up the sound of their instruments and their song in variable lag … Taboory himself, the manager, can’t take it any more … “Just shut the door tight when you leave,” he tells Kesey, and he takes off … All the lights are out now, just a little glow from the dials of Prankster Control Center … Kesey and Babbs have their eyes closed, strumming slowly … alone in the center of the vast gloom of the barn … The whole world contracts, draws closer and deeper and crawls inside the headsets, ricocheting in variable lag in the small hours, and Kesey sings over his guitar, which twangs and wobbles:
“ … and every now and then you can hear her blowing smoke rings around a cloud and trying to lace up her shoe …”
And Babbs: “ … and the message goes out and it breaks out just a little bit but—stops—”
And Kesey: “It’s kind of hard, playing cello on a hypodermic needle and using a petrified bat as a bow …”
And Babbs: “Yes, it’s hard working with these materials, without the grins falling off your knees …”
And Kesey: “ … and the soldiers think of the lowly fleas …”
And—“ … the latrines wade back up around my knees …”
“So let’s set here in this dilapidated people hutch and think about the things we’ve done …”
“ … Yes … down in Mississippi, that bitch girl we diddled in the cotton fields …”
“Still … you want to catch the first subway to Heaven …”
“If I can get myself a new set of scales, I’ll get my ass off this third rail … and so saying, he stood up and retched and looked down on the rail on sparks and long and hairy slavers of various flavors of dark intestinal brown …”
“ … and his teeth fell out by the dozen and Hitler and his infested cousins began to grow in the cellar like a new hybrid corn and the crows wouldn’t touch him …”
“ … and up the rail, old True Blue wiped his nose on his uncle’s clothes …”
“I took some pseulobin and one long diddle …”
“WE BLEW IT!”
“ … Ten thousand times or more …”
“WE BLEW IT!”
“ … so much we can’t keep score …”
“WE BLEW IT!”
“ … just when you’re beginning to think, ‘I’m going to score’ …”
“WE BLEW IT!”
“ … but there’s more in store …”
“WE BLEW IT!”
“ … if we can get rid of these trading stamps that get in the way of the merchandise …”
“WE BLEW IT!”
“WE BLEW IT!”
“ … it was perfect, so what do you do? …”
“WE BLEW IT!”
“ … perfect! …”
“WE BLEW IT!”
Epilogue
THREE WEEKS LATER, NOVEMBER 30, KESEY WENT ON TRIAL IN San Francisco for possession of marijuana—the bust on the rooftop. It ended with a hung jury, split 8 to 4 against him. Kesey’s retrial, in April, ended with another hung jury, 11 to 1 against him this time. Rather than try him again, however, the state let him plead nolo contendere to a lesser charge, “knowingly being in a place where marijuana was kept.” He got 90 days. In May he lost in his appeal of the original San Mateo County conviction for possession of marijuana—the La Honda bust. The sentence was six months on a county work farm, a $1,500 fine and three years’ probation. He was allowed to serve the other sentence, the 90 days, concurrently.
Before he started serving time, Kesey took the bus and headed for his home town, Springfield, Oregon, with just Faye and the kids and Ram Rod on board. The Pranksters pretty much scattered. George Walker and Cassady were off in Mexico. Mountain Girl, with her baby, Sunshine, had already joined the Grateful Dead’s group. Black Maria and Paul Foster went to the Hog Farm, Hugh Romney’s commune near Los Angeles. Babbs and Gretch went to San Francisco. So did the Hermit …
In June, Kesey began his stretch on the work farm, which was just a few miles from his old place in La Honda. He worked in the tailor shop. He was let out last November, after serving five months. He went back to Oregon, and he and Faye set up house in a shed on his brother Chuck’s farm, up a gravel road south of Springfield. The shed was called the Space Heater House, after a gas heater inside that gave off a jet flame when it lit up.
In February, Neal Cassady’s body was found beside a railroad tract outside the town of San Miguel de Allende, in Mexico. Some local Americans said he had been going at top speed for two weeks and had headed off down the railroad track one night and his heart just gave out. Others said he had been despondent, and felt that he was growing old, and had been on a long downer and had made the mistake of drinking alcohol on top of barbiturates. His body was cremated.
In the spring, various Pranksters … Babbs and Gretch, George Walker, Mike Hagen, Hassler, Black Maria … began finding their way to Oregon from time to time. Kesey was writing again, working on a novel. The bus was there, parked beside the Space Heater House.
Also by Tom Wolfe
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
The Pump House Gang
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
The Painted Word
Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine
The Right Stuff
In Our Time
From Bauhaus to Our House
The Bonfire of the Vanities
A Man in Full
Hooking Up
I Am Charlotte Simmons
Tom Wolfe is the author of a dozen books, among them such contemporary classics as The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. He lives in New York City.
Author’s Note
A NOTE ON THE WRITING OF THIS BOOK … I HAVE TRIED NOT ONLY TO tell what the Pranksters did but to re-create the mental atmosphere or subjective reality of it. I don’t think their adventure can be understood without that. All the events, details and dialogue I have recorded are either what I saw and heard myself or were told to me by people who were there themselves or were recorded on tapes or film or in writing. I was fortunate to get the help of many unusually talented and articulate people; most notably, Ken Kesey himself. The Pranksters recorded much of their own history in the Prankster Archives in the form of tapes, diaries, letters, photographs and the 40-hour movie of the bus trip. Kesey was also generous enough to allow me to draw from his letters to Larry McMurtry in the chapters on his flight to Mexico. Much of the dialogue and italicized material in Chapters XXI and XXIII is quoted from these letters.
For all the Pranksters, as I have tried to show, the events described in this book were both a group adventure and a personal exploration. Many achieved great insight on both levels. I can think back especially to my talks with Mountain Girl, Hassler, Black Maria, Stewart Brand, Ken Babbs, Page Browning, Mike Hagen, Doris Delay, Hugh Romney, Zonker, George Walker, and Neal Cassady. Sandy Lehmann-Haupt told me about his Prankster days in especially full and penetrating detail.
There were several excellent writers, in addition to Kesey, who were involved in the Prankster saga. Playwright Norman Hartweg recounted his experiences for me in a series of tapes. Ed McClanahan provided me with information about several phases of the Prankster adventure, and Robert Stone told me a great deal about Kesey’s fugitive days in Mexico.
Hunter Thompson made available to me several tapes he had made while working on his book, Hell’s Angels, and parts of the book itself dealing with the Pranksters and the Angels were also helpful.
I was also fortunate to find people like Clair Brush, who wrote for me a 3,000-word description of her experience at the Watts Acid Test, much of which I quote in describing the Test. Of the many other people I talked to or corresponded with, I particularly want to mention Vic Lovell, Paul Sawyer, Paul Krassner, Pat Hallinan, Brian Rohan, Paul Robertson, Jerry Garcia, Gary Goldhill, Michael Bowen, Anne Severson, Paul Hawken, Bill Tara, Michael Laton, Jack the Fluke, Bill Graham, John Bartholomew Tucker, Roger Grimsby, Marshall Efron, Robin White, Larry McMurtry, Larry Schiller, Donovan Bess, Carl Lehmann-Haupt, and Mr. and Mrs. Fred Kesey.
THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST. Copyright © 1968 by Tom Wolfe.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.
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Parts of several chapters appeared, in very different form, in the World Journal Tribune’s Sunday magazine, New York, in January and February 1967, © 1967 by the World Journal Tribune Corporation.
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-42759-7
ISBN-10: 0-312-42759-X
First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
eISBN 9781429961141
First eBook Edition : March 2011