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At the dawn of the 1960s, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters were dropping LSD and kickstarting a revolution – and Wolfe went along for the ride, capturing the birth of the counterculture.

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Electric kool-aid & 60s psychedelic revolution
At the dawn of the 1960s, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters were dropping LSD and kickstarting a revolution – and Wolfe went along for the ride, capturing the birth of the counterculture.

How Tom Wolfe's 'The Electric Kool‑Aid Acid Test' changed my life

Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a literary “gateway drug” – a hallucination of a book that introduced me to a whole new way of looking at the world, writing about the world, and gave me my first taste of the work of the American novelist Ken Kesey.

The nearest I ever got to Kesey was on Tuesday 11 August 1998.

He and some of the other “Merry Pranksters” were involved in a signing session at the Tower Records store at Piccadilly Circus in London.

For some reason they had been stationed under a staircase in the basement of the shop, and they looked a bit cramped and embarrassed down there.

It didn’t seem very respectful, for sure. There was some kind of printed banner above them – I can’t remember what it said but, whatever it was, it proclaimed it in one of those super-lame, bulbous “swinging-sixties” fonts you tend to see used on the covers of bad compilation albums or above the fancy-dress aisle of a vintage clothes shop.

Yuck. The whole thing was wrong: here were some of the people without whom the whole countercultural movement might not have happened and they were being presented as some kind of kooky, swinging-60s throwback curio, shoe-horned in among the racks of CDs and video games.

With strip lighting. It was not a consciousness-expanding experience.

I was there because of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Maybe I had even brought my own copy of the book with me, hoping to get it signed (that didn’t happen because I didn’t stick around long enough).

It really is one hell of a special book, you know – a lifechanger, a rabble-rouser, a mind-blower, a gathering of the tribes, a call to arms, a manifesto for a new society, a car repair manual, a fly on the paisley-patterned wall account of a cultural revolution – a masterpiece!

Have I left anything out? Now, let me try to justify that hyperbole if I can.

Ken Kesey was arguably the most important American novelist to emerge in the early 1960s.

His first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, came out in 1962 to rave notices.

The stage was set for him to become the “Alpha-Male” of US writers – but Kesey had other things on his mind.

Or rather, in his mind: in 1959 he had been one of the first people in the country to take LSD, as part of a series of experiments conducted by the US government.

Passages in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest were informed by these experiences.

He found ways to smuggle the drug back home to share with his friends in the literary-bohemian enclave of Perry Lane, Palo Alto.

Word got out, people started visiting. A movement began to emerge. Another book, Sometimes a Great Notion, came out in 1964.

More ecstatic reviews – now he could ascend to the throne and rule the whole leather‑bound, Book Club-endorsed roost. Instead Kesey spent all the money he had on a bus.

Enter: Tom Wolfe. Wolfe had pioneered a fresh approach to writing for magazines.

People were calling it the “New Journalism”. Some of his best articles had already been published in book form in a collection entitled The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.

The title tells you that these pieces were not exactly conforming to prevailing journalistic norms.

Stories about custom car fanatics, surfers, gamblers, disco dancers – the emerging sub-cultures of America.

And not written at arm’s length either: no, there were lists, italics, CAPITALS, exclamation marks!!!!!! – any device was up for grabs if it helped make the reader feel that they were seeing the story from the point of view of the protagonists involved rather than from the detached, objective vantage point of some … journalist.

Wolfe found Kesey in jail in late 1966 and persuaded him to tell the whole story of how he had ended up there.

How the golden boy of American Literature had become a convicted felon. And how the social revolution he had accidentally incited was now rapidly blazing its way across the USA.

That’s what makes Acid Test such an important book – it’s a perfect meeting of minds. An absolutely modern story of an attempt to find new forms of expression, new forms of living, instigated by the most important prose-writer of his times and written up by the most ground-breaking, experimental journalist working in the country at that moment. Kesey and Wolfe: The Dream Team!

How do revolutions happen?

How does an idea spread from one mind until it takes over an entire society?

This is the only book I can think of where you can see that process at work. Written at almost the same time as it was happening, not in some fog of nostalgia or revisionism many years later.

A revolution can’t be just a pet project of the intelligentsia – it also has to connect with some obscurely felt impulse and desire felt by the public at large.

That’s why Kesey bought the bus.

He had to get the show on the road. Literature wasn’t enough any more.

Jack Kerouac had proved that after writing On the Road – his own attempt to reflect the reality of contemporary America back at its populace. It just got absorbed.

So of course Neal Cassady (“Dean Moriarty” in Kerouac’s book) simply had to end up driving Kesey’s bus. He just turned up out of the blue one day and volunteered for the job, by all accounts.

The perfect man for the job, at the perfect time – because this time they were going to go … Further.

“Further” being the destination displayed in that little window above the driver’s seat that you still get on buses nowadays, the name of the place at the end of the route.

The end of The Road.

Comments:

Michelle's Side

It was without question thee best of times!

I'm 68 yrs old now, and without a doubt, this was the best time to be young.

Snarky Snickers

I wasn't there yet I remember it clearly

'Video Producer : Staff-Editor-02

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