The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (25 page)
Read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Online
Authors: Tom Wolfe
Tags: #United States, #Social Science, #General, #Popular Culture, #History, #20th Century
In fact, Owsley's acid was famous internationally. When the acid scene spread to England in late 1966 and 1967, the hippest intelligence one could pass around was that one was in possession of “Owsley acid.” In the acid world, this
was
bottled-in-bond; certified; guaranteed; and high status. It was in this head world that the ⦠Beatles first took LSD. Now, just to get ahead of the story a bitâafter Owsley hooked up with Kesey and the Pranksters, he began a musical group called the Grateful Dead.
Through the Dead's experience with the Pranksters was born the sound known as “acid rock.” And it was that sound that the Beatles picked up on, after they started taking acid, to do a famous series of acid-rock record albums,
Revolver, Rubber Soul
, and
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts' Club Band.
Early in 1967 the Beatles got a fabulous idea. They got hold of a huge school bus and piled into it 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 happenedâoff the top of the head!âcavorting, rapping on, soaring in the moment, visionary chaosâa daydream! a black art! a chaos! They finished up with miles and miles of film, a monster, a veritable morass of it, all shaky and out of focusâblissful Zonk!âwhich they saw as a total breakthrough in terms of expression but also as a commercial displayâshown on British TV it wasâthat might be appreciated even outside the esoteric world of the headsâ
was
bottled-in-bond; certified; guaranteed; and high status. It was in this head world that the ⦠Beatles first took LSD. Now, just to get ahead of the story a bitâafter Owsley hooked up with Kesey and the Pranksters, he began a musical group called the Grateful Dead.
Through the Dead's experience with the Pranksters was born the sound known as “acid rock.” And it was that sound that the Beatles picked up on, after they started taking acid, to do a famous series of acid-rock record albums,
Revolver, Rubber Soul
, and
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts' Club Band.
Early in 1967 the Beatles got a fabulous idea. They got hold of a huge school bus and piled into it 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 happenedâoff the top of the head!âcavorting, rapping on, soaring in the moment, visionary chaosâa daydream! a black art! a chaos! They finished up with miles and miles of film, a monster, a veritable morass of it, all shaky and out of focusâblissful Zonk!âwhich they saw as a total breakthrough in terms of expression but also as a commercial displayâshown on British TV it wasâthat might be appreciated even outside the esoteric world of the headsâ
THE MOVIE
âcalled
Magical Mystery Tour
. And ⦠the great banner rippled on the Prankster gate in the nighttime in ripples and intergalactic billows of great howling owsley electro-mad-chemical synchronicity â¦
Magical Mystery Tour
. And ⦠the great banner rippled on the Prankster gate in the nighttime in ripples and intergalactic billows of great howling owsley electro-mad-chemical synchronicity â¦
THE MERRY PRANKSTERS
WELCOME THE BEATLES
WELCOME THE BEATLES
The Frozen Jug Band
S
YNCHRONICITY SPOKEN HERE!
âand the Pranksters sit around Kesey's living room at night, grooving on many strange events. Like the day of the great Blackout in New York City, the great power failure that knocked out subways, elevators, lights, air conditioners, TVs, clocks, buildings and the rest of the hulks in the great cancer capital of the East. The Pranksters grooved over the cataclysm and grokked it. Such consternation in the cancer capital! A huge
surge
of electricity had suddenly rolled through the wires and freaking
blown
everything. The utility companies didn't know what had
caused
this surge, but bygod they had experts working on it and they would figure it out and such a surge would never occur again.
YNCHRONICITY SPOKEN HERE!
âand the Pranksters sit around Kesey's living room at night, grooving on many strange events. Like the day of the great Blackout in New York City, the great power failure that knocked out subways, elevators, lights, air conditioners, TVs, clocks, buildings and the rest of the hulks in the great cancer capital of the East. The Pranksters grooved over the cataclysm and grokked it. Such consternation in the cancer capital! A huge
surge
of electricity had suddenly rolled through the wires and freaking
blown
everything. The utility companies didn't know what had
caused
this surge, but bygod they had experts working on it and they would figure it out and such a surge would never occur again.
A
surge
, Mahavira?â
surge
, Mahavira?â
Meanwhile, there was one story in the newspapers that the Pranksters grooved on most truly. It seems that some kid had been playing hooky from school in New York that day and had
gone off to the movies finally and come out of the movie house about 5:15 P.M. and started walking home, feeling guilty already, and he picked up a stick out of the gutter and he started whacking parking meters with it. When he got to the corner, he whacked the big utility pole there and
gone off to the movies finally and come out of the movie house about 5:15 P.M. and started walking home, feeling guilty already, and he picked up a stick out of the gutter and he started whacking parking meters with it. When he got to the corner, he whacked the big utility pole there and
IN THAT VERY MOMENT
all the lights in New York went out
NOW
and the kid ran home in the dark, crying, confessing all to his motherâ
I
did it,
I
did it, but I
didn't mean to
â
I
did it,
I
did it, but I
didn't mean to
â
And Kesey and the Pranksters did groove on that. The kid was right, that was the funny part. Or at least as right as the utility companies. For no doubt there was a
great surge,
friends, and it came through that kid just like it came through everything and every being that existed in that moment. Just as Severn Darden blew out the candles on his birthday cake
in that very moment
âand they poked through every Con Ed transformer in the system and they never did find the
cause
:
great surge,
friends, and it came through that kid just like it came through everything and every being that existed in that moment. Just as Severn Darden blew out the candles on his birthday cake
in that very moment
âand they poked through every Con Ed transformer in the system and they never did find the
cause
:
COSMO!
â
and once you find out about Cosmo, you know he's running the show
⦠It's like we're strands of wire intertwined in a great cable that runs through a slot, the Pranksters, the Beatles, the Vietnam Day Committeeâ
the Vietnam Day Committee?
ârunning through a slot, and all the wires are vibrated by Cosmo. Most people lead two-dimensional lives. All they can see is the face of the slot, a cross section, so that the wires look like a mass of separate little circles looking bigger or smaller according to how close you are. They don'tâthey can't see that these “circles” are just cross sections of wires that run backward and forward infinitely and that there is a great surge through the whole cable and that anybody who is truly into the full bare essence of the thing â¦
â
and once you find out about Cosmo, you know he's running the show
⦠It's like we're strands of wire intertwined in a great cable that runs through a slot, the Pranksters, the Beatles, the Vietnam Day Committeeâ
the Vietnam Day Committee?
ârunning through a slot, and all the wires are vibrated by Cosmo. Most people lead two-dimensional lives. All they can see is the face of the slot, a cross section, so that the wires look like a mass of separate little circles looking bigger or smaller according to how close you are. They don'tâthey can't see that these “circles” are just cross sections of wires that run backward and forward infinitely and that there is a great surge through the whole cable and that anybody who is truly into the full bare essence of the thing â¦
There is food in the
thing
.
My comrades are envious.
But they cannot harm me.
Good fortune.
thing
.
My comrades are envious.
But they cannot harm me.
Good fortune.
âthe
I Ching
I Ching
â¦
tends to react against political disorder because he is concerned with the deep basic religious experience, the deepest sources of life; transient politics are insignificant to him.
tends to react against political disorder because he is concerned with the deep basic religious experience, the deepest sources of life; transient politics are insignificant to him.
âJoachim Wach
It was against this backdrop, namely, the ultimate and the infinite, that an organization known as the Vietnam Day Committee invited Kesey to come speak at a huge antiwar rally in Berkeley, on the University of California campus. I couldn't tell you what bright fellow thought of that, inviting Kesey. Afterwards, they didn't know, either. Or at least none of them would own up, despite a lot of interrogations and recriminations and general thrashing about. “Who the hell invited this bastard!” was the exact wording. A regular little rhubarb they had for themselves. The main trouble with the Vietnam Day Committee was that they couldn't see beyond the marvelous political whoopee they had cooked up. Why should they? From where they were looking in the fall of 1965, they were about to sweep the country. Berkeley, the New Left, the Free Speech Movement, Mario Savio, the Rebel Generation, the Student Revolution, in which students were going to take over the universities, like in Latin America, and drive some fire up the clammy rectum of American lifeâyou could read about it in all the magazines. And if you don't believe it, come here and watch us, Mr. Jonesâand so forth.
They never looked beyond that, as I say, but it might have been no use, in any case. Maybe there was no way in the world anybody could have made the Vietnam Day Committee realize how their whole beano looked to Kesey and the Pranksters.
Come rally against the war in Vietnam
âfrom the cosmic vantage point the Pranksters had reached, there were so many reasons
why this little charade was pathetic, they didn't know where to begin â¦
Come rally against the war in Vietnam
âfrom the cosmic vantage point the Pranksters had reached, there were so many reasons
why this little charade was pathetic, they didn't know where to begin â¦
Nevertheless, Kesey was invited, and that was how the fun started. Marchers were pouring into Berkeley from seventy-one cities and twenty-eight states, for whatever such sums are worthâat any rate, thousands of students and professors from all over. There were to be teach-ins all day and also an all-day rally starting in the morning, with thirty or forty speakers to whip things up, and then at 7:30 in the evening, when the fever pitch was reached, they would all rise up off the Berkeley campus and march over into Oakland, fifteen or twenty thousand souls in a massive line, marching on the Oakland Army Terminal. The Oakland Army Terminal was where men and supplies were shipped out to Vietnam. Just to spice things up a bitâa large supply of gelignite had been stolen, and everybody had visions of Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco, the whole clump, blowing up in a gelignite earthquake of cops, peaceniks, Birchers, and probably spades and innocent women and children. Nobody had any idea which side had stolen the gelignite, but that only made it better.
The gelignite scare seemed to give Kesey the inspiration for this prank. Kesey's saving grace was that he never got serious where he could say it just as well with a cosmic joke. Kesey's fantasy for the occasion was to come upon the huge anti-war rally as a freaking military invasion. It was a true inspiration, this fantasy. They were going to rig up the bus as a rolling fortress with guns sticking out and all the Pranksters would dress military. Then they would get cars and rig them up the same way, and at the head of the whole convoy, there would beâthe Hell's Angels, in running formation, absolutely adangle with swastikas.
Swastikas.
If would freaking blow their minds, or at least give their cool a test like it never had before.
Swastikas.
If would freaking blow their minds, or at least give their cool a test like it never had before.
First they painted the whole bus a dull red color, the color of dried blood, in fact. Right on over the greatest riot of Day-Glo design in history went this bloody muck. But who gave a damn.
Art is not eternal.
Then they started painting military symbols on the dried blood, swastikas, American eagles, Iron Crosses, Viking crosses, Red Crosses, hammers & sickles, skulls & bones, anything as long as it looked rank. That very night, naturally, the seasonal rains started, and like the Chief said, art is not eternal. All the paint started running until it was the most dismal mess imaginable. Somehow that was appropriate. The next day, Gut and his girlfriend, Little People, showed up. Gut was in a kind of transition period, between the Angels and the Pranksters. He had his old Hell's Angels sleeveless denim jacket on, but he had taken the insignia off, the lettering and the emblem of a skull with a helmet on, but you could see where it had all been, because the denim was lighter underneath. It was what you might call a goodbye-but-not-forgotten Hell's Angels' jacket. Anyway, Gut amazed the Pranksters by painting a big beautiful American Eagle on the bus, a little primitive, but strong. The big hulking jesus angel had talent. The Pranksters were all pleased as hell. They felt they had brought it out of him, somehow. Gut got everybody revved up. They built a gun turret on the bus and rigged up two big gray cannons that you could maneuver. Norman made a machine gun out of wood and cardboard and painted it olive drab. Other people were knocking together wooden guns of various ridiculous descriptions. Faye's sewing machine was going. Pranksters, inner circle and outer circle, were driving in from all over. Lee Quarnstrom, of the outer circle, showed up with a huge supply of Army insignia, shoulder patches, arm patches, hashmarks, bars, stars, epaulets. Kesey was rigging up the bus with tapes and microphones and amplifiers and earphones and electric guitars. Hagen was rigging up his 16-millimeter camera and films. Bob Dylan and the Beatles and Joan Baez and Roland Kirk and Mississippi John Hunt were droning and clattering over the big speakers from over the way atop the dirt cliff. Then Allen Ginsberg turned up from Big Sur, with his companion Peter Orlovsky and an entourage of pale Chester A. Arthur High School hindus. Ginsberg sang mantras all night and
jingled bells and finger cymbals. Cassady hooked down speed and worked himself up from a standing start, jerking, kicking, dancingâhe seemed to be moving in time to the sewing machine on a long seam. Ginsberg seemed to be chanting in time to a Jainist's whisk broom. Cassady began fibrillating the vocal cords, going faster and faster until by dawn if he had gone any faster, he would have vibrated off, as old Charles Fort said, and gone instantly into the positive absolute. It was a nice weird party.
Art is not eternal.
Then they started painting military symbols on the dried blood, swastikas, American eagles, Iron Crosses, Viking crosses, Red Crosses, hammers & sickles, skulls & bones, anything as long as it looked rank. That very night, naturally, the seasonal rains started, and like the Chief said, art is not eternal. All the paint started running until it was the most dismal mess imaginable. Somehow that was appropriate. The next day, Gut and his girlfriend, Little People, showed up. Gut was in a kind of transition period, between the Angels and the Pranksters. He had his old Hell's Angels sleeveless denim jacket on, but he had taken the insignia off, the lettering and the emblem of a skull with a helmet on, but you could see where it had all been, because the denim was lighter underneath. It was what you might call a goodbye-but-not-forgotten Hell's Angels' jacket. Anyway, Gut amazed the Pranksters by painting a big beautiful American Eagle on the bus, a little primitive, but strong. The big hulking jesus angel had talent. The Pranksters were all pleased as hell. They felt they had brought it out of him, somehow. Gut got everybody revved up. They built a gun turret on the bus and rigged up two big gray cannons that you could maneuver. Norman made a machine gun out of wood and cardboard and painted it olive drab. Other people were knocking together wooden guns of various ridiculous descriptions. Faye's sewing machine was going. Pranksters, inner circle and outer circle, were driving in from all over. Lee Quarnstrom, of the outer circle, showed up with a huge supply of Army insignia, shoulder patches, arm patches, hashmarks, bars, stars, epaulets. Kesey was rigging up the bus with tapes and microphones and amplifiers and earphones and electric guitars. Hagen was rigging up his 16-millimeter camera and films. Bob Dylan and the Beatles and Joan Baez and Roland Kirk and Mississippi John Hunt were droning and clattering over the big speakers from over the way atop the dirt cliff. Then Allen Ginsberg turned up from Big Sur, with his companion Peter Orlovsky and an entourage of pale Chester A. Arthur High School hindus. Ginsberg sang mantras all night and
jingled bells and finger cymbals. Cassady hooked down speed and worked himself up from a standing start, jerking, kicking, dancingâhe seemed to be moving in time to the sewing machine on a long seam. Ginsberg seemed to be chanting in time to a Jainist's whisk broom. Cassady began fibrillating the vocal cords, going faster and faster until by dawn if he had gone any faster, he would have vibrated off, as old Charles Fort said, and gone instantly into the positive absolute. It was a nice weird party.
The next morning, October 16, the big dayâthe Pranksters blew the morning, naturally, all stroked out in various attitudes from the night before, and they were late getting off to Berkeley. Art is not eternal, friends. The plan was to meet the Hell's Angels in Palo Alto and go roaring down the freeway in formation. They put on Prankster tapes and Cassady got in the driver's seat. Everybody climbed on in their crazed military costumes, Hassler, Hagen, Babbs, Gretch, Zonker, June the Goon, Roy Seburn, Dale Kesey and all sorts of people, even the Mad Chemistâhe showed up for this oneâand Mary Microgram at the last minute. And then Kesey got on. Kesey was wearing a big orange coat of the sort highway workers wear so cars will see them. He had hashmarks on the sleeves and some kind of floppy epaulets flapping on the shoulders. He had a big orange Day-Glo World War I helmet on his head. It was so big and came down so far over his forehead his eyes were like two little flashlight bulbs under the lid. Kesey got up in the gun turret and they were off. Before they got to Palo Alto, in Woodside, in fact, the cops stopped them and hassled them and checked them over. The Pranksters did the usual, leaped out with cameras and shotgun mikes and tape recorders, filming and taping everything the cops said, and the cops left, but it ate up time.
“Aha,” said the Mad Chemist, “the first skirmish.”
“The Prankster Alert is out,” said Babbs.
That was just about right. They kept getting stopped and hassled and checked over and losing time. They got to the rendezvous in Palo Altoâand no Hell's Angels. They waited and
waited for the Angels, then gave up and took off down the expressway, to Berkeley.
waited for the Angels, then gave up and took off down the expressway, to Berkeley.
They didn't get to the Berkeley campus until almost dusk, and their arrival didn't make any very momentous impression at first. Now, a full phalanx of Hell's Angels, looking like a cross between the Gestapo and the Tonton Macouteâthat would have been a different story, no doubt. Good and noisy, too. But as it was, the bus just pulled into the parking lot by the Student Union building and the Pranksters cut up as best they could, ack-acking their wooden guns at birds and planes. The big rally had been going on all day. They were out on a big lawn, or plaza, on the campus, about fifteen thousand of them, the toggle-coat bohemians, while the P.A. loudspeakers boomed and rabbled and raked across them. There was a big platform set up for the speakers. There had been about forty of them, all roaring or fulminating or arguing cogently, which was always worse. The idea at these things is to keep building up momentum and tension and suspense until finally when it is time for actionâin this case, the marchâthe signal launches them as one great welded body of believers and they are ready to march and take billy clubs upside the head and all the rest of it.
All the shock workers of the tongue were there, speakers like Paul Jacobs, and M. S. Arnoni, who wore a prison uniform to the podium because his family had been wiped out in a German concentration camp during World War IIâand out before them was a great sea of students and other Youth, the toggle-coat bohemiansâtoggle coats, Desert Boots, civil rights, down with the war in Vietnamⓠ⦠could call out to you from their graves or from the fields and rivers upon which their ashes were thrown, they would implore this generation of Americans not to be silent in the face of the genocidal atrocities committed on the people of Vietnam ⦔ and the words rolled in full forensic boom over the P.A. systems.
THE FIRST PERSON IN THE VIETNAM DAY COMMITTEE CIRCLE to notice Kesey approaching the speaker's platform was Paul Krassner, the editor of
The Realist
magazine. Most of the Pranksters were still on the bus, fooling around with the guns for the befuddlement of the gawkers who happened by. Kesey, Babbs, Gretchen Fetchin and George Walker came on over the platform, Kesey in his orange Day-Glo coat and World War I helmet. Krassner ran his magazine as pretty much a one-man operation and he knew Kesey subscribed to it. So he wasn't so surprised that Kesey knew him. What got him was that Kesey just started talking to him, just like they had been having a conversation all along and something had interrupted them and now they were resuming ⦠It is a weird thing. You feel the guy's charisma, to use that one, right away, busting out even through the nutty Day-Glo, or maybe sucking one in, the way someone once wrote of Gurdjieff: “You could not help being drawn, almost physically, towards him ⦠like being sucked in by a vast, spiritual vacuum cleaner.” At the time, however, Krassner thought of Flash Gordon.
The Realist
magazine. Most of the Pranksters were still on the bus, fooling around with the guns for the befuddlement of the gawkers who happened by. Kesey, Babbs, Gretchen Fetchin and George Walker came on over the platform, Kesey in his orange Day-Glo coat and World War I helmet. Krassner ran his magazine as pretty much a one-man operation and he knew Kesey subscribed to it. So he wasn't so surprised that Kesey knew him. What got him was that Kesey just started talking to him, just like they had been having a conversation all along and something had interrupted them and now they were resuming ⦠It is a weird thing. You feel the guy's charisma, to use that one, right away, busting out even through the nutty Day-Glo, or maybe sucking one in, the way someone once wrote of Gurdjieff: “You could not help being drawn, almost physically, towards him ⦠like being sucked in by a vast, spiritual vacuum cleaner.” At the time, however, Krassner thought of Flash Gordon.
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