Electric Koll Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
- Veronique Goguen
- Oct 26, 2020
- 15 min read
Updated: May 7, 2023
“His theory was that most people live fantasy lives. They live totally in the past or in terms of what they expect in the future, which amounts to fear, generally”
SUMMARY
Tom Wolfe's much-discussed kaleidoscopic non-fiction novel chronicles the tale of novelist Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters. In the 1960s, Kesey led a group of psychedelic sympathizers around the country in a painted bus, presiding over LSD-induced "acid tests" all along the way. Long considered one of the greatest books about the history of the hippies, Wolfe's ability to research like a reporter and simultaneously evoke the hallucinogenic indulgence of the era ensures that this book, written in 1967, will live long in the counter-culture canon of American literature.
Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test ushered in an era of New Journalism, "An American classic" (Newsweek) that defined a generation. "An astonishing book" (The New York Times Book Review) & an unflinching portrait of Ken Kesey, his Merry Pranksters, LSD, & the 1960s.
EXTRACTS
“There are going to be times when you can't wait for somebody. Now you're either on the bus or off the bus”
The Feeling
…blue…all around him and suddenly he was in a realm of consciousness he had never dreamed of before and it was was not a dream or a delirium but part of his awareness.
They get the feeling that kesey was heading out on further, toward a fantasy they didn’t know if they wanted to explore.
I’ve taken lsd twice since then. Each time was different and much less dramatic, more personal, milder. The only storng similarity is the physical effect, which, for me, consist of contractions quite like labor pains and a quivering of the nerve ending..anticipating…for prolonged periods, the feeling of being on the verge of orgasm without any contact at all…these things occurred all 3 times. Otherwise, all have been different.
Their Lifestyle
Their place is called the nest. Their life transcends all the usual earthly gamed of status, sex, and money.
Strategic privacy. Not a neighbor for a mile.
..but how the hell could you resist, it was too freaking madly manic.
And many puzzled souls looking in…at first they were captivated.
Some Characters
Mountain girl : in any case, she caught on to everything right away. She was decisive and had all the nerve in the world.
About 10 minutes after hagen pulled into kesey’s, he had his screw shack built out back of the cabin, a lean to banged together with old boards and decorated inside with carpet remnants, a matress with an india print coverlet, candles, sparkling little bijoux,hi fi speakers- for the delight and comfort of hagen’s girls.
The Beautiful People
LDS , peyote, mescaline, morning glory seeds were becoming the secret new thing in the hip life. A lot of kids who were into it were already piled into amputated apartments as I call them. The seats, the tables, the beds – none of them ever had legs. Communial living on the floor you might say, although nobody used terms like”communial living” or “tribes” or any of that. They had no particular philosophy, just a little leftover Buddhism, and Hinsuism from the beat period, plus Huxley’s theory of opening doors in the mind, no distinct lifestyle, except for the legless look…they were…well, Beautiful People! – not students, clerks, salesgirl, executive trainees- Christ, don’t give me your occupation game labels! We are Beautiful People, ascendant from your robot junkyard:::and at this point they used to sit down and write home the beautiful people letter. Usually the girls wrote these letters to their mothers all over California, all over America, I guess, got to know the beautiful people letter by heart. It went ;
Dear Mother, I meant to write to you before this and I hope you haven’t been worried. I am in ( San Francisco, los angeles m new York, Arizona, a hopi indian reservation!!! New York, aijic, San Miguel deAllende, Marzatlan, Mexico!!!) and it is really beautiful here. It is a beautiful scene. We’ve been here a week. I wont bore you with the whole thing, how it happened , but I really tried, because I knew you wanted me to, but its just didn’t work out with (school, college, my job, me and danny) and so I have come here and it is a beautiful scene. I don’t want you to worry about me. I have met beautiful people and ….” ….and in the heart of even the most unhip mamma in all the usa instinctively goes up the adrenal shriek-beatniks, bums, spades – dope.
Blasting from the speakers
Lord Byron Styrofoam , has hold of the microphone and his disco freak jockey rapping blarred out of the redwoods back across the highway “ this is Non Station KLSD, 800 micrograms in your head, the station designed to blow your mind and undo you bind, from up here atop the redwoods on venus!”
The perfect Acid 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 attractive setting, a house or apartment decorated with objects of the honest sort, tukoman tapestrie, greek goatskin rugs, cost plus blue jugs, soft light – not japanesse paper globe light, however, but untasseleated Chinese textile shade – 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….
Scene?
He infected and inflamed our brains, that damned snake.
God damn wild west obscene
Crazies and dope fiends
And putrescent beatniks
The scene was charged with energy, yet there was a weird serenity
The Acid Test
The acid tests were one of these outrages, one of those scandals, that create a new style or anew world view. Everyone cluckes, fumes, grinds their teeth over bad taste, the bad morals, the insolence, the vulgarity, the childishness, the lunacy, the cruelty, the irresponsibility, the fraudulence and in fact, gets worked up into such a state of excitement such an epitasis, such a slaver, they cant turn it loose. It becomes a perfect obsession. And now they show you how it should have been done.
The acid test were the epoch of the psychedelic style and practically everything that has gone into it. I don’t mean merely that the Pranksters did it first, but rather that it all came straight out of the acid test combination of light and movie projections, strobes, tapes, rock n roll, blacklight. “acid rock”…. the mothers of it all were the grateful dead ag the acid tests. The dead were the audio counterpart of roy seburn’s light projections.
LSD Facts
Humphrey Osmond invented the term “psychedelic” meaning “mind manifesting” in 1957
Owsley – clandestine chemist
In fact , owsleys acid was famous internationally. When the acid scene spread to England in late 1966 and 67, the hippest intelligence one could pass around was that on was in possession of “Owsley acid”. In the acid world, this was bottled- in bord: certified guaranteed : high status
Books Mentioned
Henry david Thoreau – walden 1854
Hermann hesse “the journey to the east”
Book – the nova express by burrough
Nietzche
Dostoevisky
BOOK REVIEW
New York Times
Books of the Times - Freak-Out in Day-Glo By: Eliot Fremont-Smith
Published : August 12, 1968
The Guardian How Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool‑Aid Acid Test changed my life
by Jarvis Cocker May 2018
Extracts sourced from The Guardian
Life Magazine LIFE MAGAZINE, MARCH 25, 1966: LSD
https://www.trippingly.net/lsd-studies/life-magazine-march-25-1966
Vice
New Edition Book
In this Collector’s Edition, signed by Tom Wolfe, an abridged Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is published in traditional letterpress, with facsimile reproductions of Wolfe’s manuscript pages, as well as Ken Kesey’s jailhouse journals, handbills, and underground magazines of the period. Interweaving the prose and ephemera are photographic essays from Lawrence Schiller, whose coverage of the acid scene for Life magazine helped inspire Wolfe to write his story, and Ted Streshinsky, who accompanied Wolfe while reporting for the New York Herald Tribune.
These photographs—together with those of poet Allen Ginsberg and other photographers who covered the scene—paint a vivid picture of the counterculture world that set Wolfe’s scene: acid parties near “capsule corner” in Hollywood, the hippie-filled streets of Haight-Ashbury, the abandoned pie factory the Pranksters called home, and the infamous Acid Tests, Kool-Aid and all.
Source Taschen
THE DOCUMENTARIES
REVIEW ON DOC
New York Time Film Review
Film Hitches a Weird Ride on Kesey’s Bus
By Charles McGrath
July 2011
“Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place,” a film by Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood
It’s a documentary that uses old footage to recreate a documentary that Kesey intended to make about his 1964 cross-country bus trip — the one so memorably chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s account, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”
In all Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, as his crew called themselves, shot some 40 hours of 16-millimeter film, but the project was never really finished.
The famous bus — a psychedelic-painted International Harvester with a sign in front that said “Furthur” and one in back that warned “Weird Load” — was wired for sound, and there was a movie camera on board. With Kesey sometimes directing and sometimes just standing back and watching, the Merry Pranksters filmed one another and also their interactions with an uncomprehending public
...also found in Kesey’s barn some audiotape recorded about 10 years after the bus trip, in which various Pranksters comment on what’s happening on screen, and this made possible what is probably the most interesting feature of “Magic Trip”
But there are also long, aimless sequences that seem to take place in druggy slo-mo: Pranksters covering themselves with pond scum; staring raptly at the random designs made by paint swirling in water; tootling interminably on instruments, apparently under the delusion that they sound like John Coltrane. These people are clearly zonked out of their gourds, and so is whoever is holding the camera.
Most of them too young to be beatniks and too old to be hippies, they have one foot in the ’50s and one in the ’60s.
But it’s Cassady, the real-life model for Jack Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty in “On the Road,” who steals the film. He too is buff and magnetically good looking, and while driving he keeps up a nonstop, amphetamine-fueled monologue. Listening to him is so exhausting that the Pranksters have to take turns sitting next to him."
“They got stopped jillions of times by the police and never got a ticket,” Ms. Ellwood said. “I don’t think Cassady even had a valid driver’s license.
Extracts sourced from New York Times
Podcast
fresh Air by NPR
On Friday's Fresh Air, we'll hear interviews with Kesey in 1989; with Tom Wolfe, who chronicled the bus trip in his best-seller The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; and with Robert Stone, who met the bus and hung out with Kesey, Cassady and the Pranksters when they arrived in New York.
This interview with Robert Stone was originally broadcast on Jan. 3, 2007.
Writer Robert Stone Relives Counterculture Years
Ken Kesey On Misconceptions Of Counterculture
Mountain Girl And The Magic Trip : A Conversation With Carolyn Garcia
Conversation with Mountain Girl discussing the film “Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place,
BR: One of the big things in Magic Trip for me personally is the video and audio of Neal Cassady. There isn’t a lot of it around.
MG: No – and there’s still stuff that needs to be found in that archive; there’s much more of Neal, but it’s gotten lost. Oh, what a character he was! (laughs) We were just surrounded by these characters: Tiny Tim; Neal; and Ginsberg – what a character he was! And they were so sure of who they were and they didn’t have any problems worrying about exactly who they were going to be. They were like strong cheese – they were exactly who they were and kept the ball rolling, all of those people.
BR: They really did quite a job of syncing up the audio and video in the actual footage that’s used in Magic Trip though, didn’t they?
MG: Oh, yes – an amazing job. They found these beautiful scenes, cleaned up that film, and made it look all fresh – an incredible job. They did some creative scenes to put it all together, too, which people will eventually notice – it helps the story flow. Like Ken’s first acid trip in the hospital: they created this wonderful animated sequence. They did such a marvelous job.
...and the Pranksters were just so much fun … such a hoot. (laughs) We took time to have fun, which is really rare in my experience as an American – nobody was doing that then. The Pranksters put “fun” at the top of the priority list, which is so unusual.
Extracts sourced from Brian-Ribbins : journalist
http://brian-robbins.com/mountain-girl-and-the-magic-trip-a-conversation-with-carolyn-garcia/
THE AUTHOR
Tom Wolfe : The Rolling Stone Interview While outlining 'Bonfire of the Vanities' the man who wrote 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test ' reveals he was never on the bus
By Chet Flippo
August, 1980
Thomas K. Wolfe Jr., now forty-nine, was an extremely unlikely candidate to be the writer who would happen along in the Sixties and propel American journalism into a new realism that would become known and worshiped and vilified as the New Journalism.
Tom decided to be a writer and went to Washington and Lee University, where he was surprised to find there was no such thing as a major in writing. He studied English literature instead, was sports editor of the school newspaper and distinguished himself by wearing a hat and carrying an umbrella, rain or shine. A course in American studies led him to pursue a doctorate in it at Yale. In 1957, as he finished his Ph.D. and still yearned to write, he took a “prole” job as a truck loader to try to get insights and become a writer. All he got was drunk after work every day.
He was lucky. Lewis Lapham (now editor of Harper’s) had just quit the Herald Tribune and Tom got his job. It was there that Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill and others were encouraged by editor Clay Felker to try new avenues in journalism. New York magazine, begun by publisher Jock Whitney as the Trib‘s Sunday magazine, was the birthplace of New Journalism. The Trib‘s ad campaign was, “Who says a good newspaper has to be dull?” and Felker let his writers take the bit and run. They were encouraged to go beyond the “objective” journalism that ruled daily newspapers, and the result was crisp, alive writing that, more than anything else, made its subjects personal the way fiction did.
He had stumbled on the fact that the United States of America post-World War II had broken all the rules of history: it no longer took generations for change to take place – after the war, the sudden injection of money into every level of American society had canceled all bets and called off all games. Wolfe was the first to see a major upheaval. The enormous changes allowed subcultures to create themselves despite the fact that the media failed to recognize their existence: Vegas high rollers, rock tycoons, forever-young surfers, Manhattan high-class groupies – America finally was financing a fantasy island for anyone who would lift a little finger. Tom began reporting about a movement that disturbed a great many people, mainly those who controlled the media.
Everyone credits Tom for naming the Seventies the Me Decade. What’s funny is that he was out of sight for most of the Seventies. He was a late-Sixties hero, especially for The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, about Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, and also for The Pump House Gang and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. But once he pegged the Seventies with the Me flag, he took himself off the college-lecture circuit, where his first question from audiences was invariably “What’s Ken Kesey doing?” followed by “How many times did you do acid?” He was not rich, but he was tired of being a Kesey travel guide. Tom was, after all, a journalist, he told himself.
At one point Breslin, I think, said, “There’s no such thing as New Journalism, there’s only boutique journalism and real journalism.” And Hunter said, “I wouldn’t touch New Journalism with a ten-foot pole. I’m a gonzo journalist.” As soon as I tried to say, “Here’s the great champion of the cause,” he says “up yours” with the standard “I’m gonzo.”
Actually, I kind of understand their feelings. Each one said, who the hell does Wolfe think he is, lumping me into his raggedy battalion?
I realized that not only did I not fit in, but because I thought I was fitting in in some way, I was afraid to ask such very basic questions as, what’s the difference between an eight-gauge and seven-gauge tire, or, what’s a gum ball, because if you’re supposed to be hip, you can’t ask those questions. I also found that people really don’t want you to try to fit in. They’d much rather fill you in. People like to have someone to tell their stories to. So if you’re willing to be the village information gatherer, they’ll often just pile material on you. My one contribution to the discipline of psychology is my theory of information compulsion. Part of the nature of the human beast is a feeling of scoring a few status points by telling other people things they don’t know. So this does work in your favor.
Then it even became more extreme when I was working on Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I began to understand that it would really be a major mistake to try to fit into that world. There was a kind of creature that Kesey and the Pranksters, practically everybody in the psychedelic world, detested more than anything else, and that was the so-called weekend hipster, who was the journalist or teacher or lawyer, or somebody who was hip on the weekends but went back to his straight job during the week. Kesey had a habit of doing what he called testing people’s cool. If he detected the weekend hipster, he would dream up some test of hipness, like saying, “Okay, let’s everybody jump on our bikes and ride naked up Route 1.” They would do that, and usually at that point the lawyer, who didn’t want an indecent exposure charge on his life’s score sheet, would drop out. Kesey explained this theory of testing people’s cool, his notion that there’re lots of people who want to be amoral, but very few who are up to it. And he was right.
How did you come to write ‘Acid Test’? This goes back to 1966, the year after The Kandy-Kolored Streamline Baby came out, and I had written a whole bunch of articles that eventually became The Pump House Gang, but I didn’t want to bring out another collection. It just wouldn’t seem like a step forward. I was really casting about for another book to write. About that time, Henry Robbins, who was my editor at Farrar Strauss and Giroux, had gotten Xerox copies of some letters that Larry McMurtry had gotten from Kesey, who was then in hiding in Mexico. These letters were marvelous, paranoid chronicles of his adventures and lamentations about the strange fate that had befallen him now that he was a fugitive. And I got the idea of going to Mexico, finding him and doing a story on the life of a fugitive.
I bought the ticket for Mexico City, and somehow, before I went there, Kesey sneaked back into the U.S. and was arrested by the FBI just south of San Francisco. I went out to the jail in Redwood City where they’d put him, and I met all these crazy-looking people hanging around. There were people trying to get me to take books to Kesey with I Ching coins slipped into the binding. They turned out to be Pranksters. I didn’t know anything about these people and what they were up to. I knew that Kesey had been involved with dope, because that’s what he’d been arrested twice for. I assumed that dope must be what accounted for their strange appearance. Stewart Brand was one of the first ones I met. He wore a piet in his forehead. A piet is a disc, a silver industrial disc; I don’t know what they were used for. They reflected the light in some strange way. They had a very geometric sunburst design.
They had these white coveralls on with pieces of American flag sewed on. Only a few of them had really long hair; it was more just strange rigs and gear. They were very open and invited me to this place, this abandoned pie factory where they were studying while they waited for Kesey to get out. It was down in the skid-row section of San Francisco, worst place I ever saw. Very hard on a boy like me, that life. It got more and more interesting. I’d learned that some of them had been down in Mexico with Kesey, so I started pumping them for information – about the fugitive life. They kept saying, “We’ll tell you about that, but that isn’t what it’s all about.” I said, “Well, what is it all about?” And they said, “It’s the unspoken thing.
The Pranksters were no exception. Their neurological experience had come through LSD, but that wasn’t so unusual either. The Zoroastrians were always high on something called haoma; to this day no one knows what it was, but it was obviously a drug. By the time I met Kesey, he was already starting to promulgate the concept beyond acid: the idea that LSD could only take you to a certain level of understanding and awareness, but that you couldn’t become dependent on it. Having reached the plateau, you must move on without it. He announced this new truth to the movement and was much criticized for it, because by this time, 1966, the rest of the movement was having a helluva good time still getting high. They didn’t want to hear this. But this is exactly what Zoroaster ended up doing. He said, now boys, we’ve got to start doing it without this haoma stuff. A little astral projection if you please, maestro!
Well, the other question that everyone asks, I recall, is how many times you’d taken acid in order to do Kool-Aid Acid Test, and you said you hadn’t, which disappointed everyone greatly.
Yeah, I think they really wanted me to be on the bus. In fact, I never was.
Sourced from Rolling Stone
extra
book
Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties.
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