The Acid Test files
KESEY'S ACID TESTS
The first of Ken Kesey's Acid Tests is held in Santa Cruz.
In
1964, novelist and agent
provocateur Ken Kesey embarked on a cross-country trip
with his Merry Pranksters aboard a school bus that was given a psychedelic paint job. It
was an expedition fueled not only by gasoline but by LSD, which was plentifully ingested
by Kesey's counterculture pioneers searching for new horizons.
Ken
Kesey decided to go public with his own parties. On November 27, 1965, he put up a small
poster in a bookstore advertising an "Acid Test" in a private home. It was clear
to an acidhead what Kesey hoped to do: throw a big party where everyone took LSD and made
some collective cosmic breakthrough. Not by meditation and listening to Indian music,
the way Timothy Leary was recommending on the East Coast, but by courting the
unexpected. If you came to an Acid Test, you'd find Kesey's Merry Pranksters messing with
microphones and gadgets, plus a light show, a slide show about American Indians, a rock
band called the Warlocks, Kesey's own musical group (the Psychedelic Symphonette) and lots
of weird people.
But
how to describe what he was inviting people to? Kesey considered it participatory theater,
like the Happenings that were the current rage in the art world. Everybody paid a dollar
admission, including Kesey.
In
December, Kesey held a public Acid Test at a bar in Oakland. It was advertised by a
bizarre poster showing a Greek statue that was saying: Only one way out!
I'll take the course myself.7 Hundreds of people
came. A week later Kesey threw another Acid Test in a remote community north of San
Francisco.
Each
Acid Test was larger than the one before it, and amazingly, no lightning bolt struck it
down. Maybe Kesey was right. Maybe you didn't have to think about the squares and the
police at all. Maybe by overcoming fear, by taking LSD boldly and disregarding the
consequences, you could make your breakthrough.
The
Pranksters' destination was "Furthur”, and a sign on the back of the bus warned Caution: Weird
Load.
Kesey
orchestrated the Acid Tests, a series of LSD spiked multimedia happenings in 1965 and
1966.
Music was invariably provided by the Grateful Dead, shown performing in Palo Alto as the
Warlocks in 1965.
Revelers at an Acid Test appear to be going
with the flow as best they can.
The cover for The Acid Test LP.
"Can You Pass the Acid Test?" is the rhetorical question asked by a poster
announcing the Muir Beach Acid Test in 1965.
Neal Cassady, the larger than life subject of Jack
Kerouac's Beat Generation manifesto On the Road and the Merry Pranksters' bus driver, hangs out at a 1966 Acid
Test in Los Angeles.
The second Acid Test is held at a
house in San Jose following a Rolling Stones concert. Hand lettered invitations reading
Can You Pass the Acid Test? are given out, and 2400 revelers show up. The Grateful Dead.
who have recently changed their name from the Warlocks perform.
January 8 The largest
Acid Test yet do-airs 2,400 people to San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium The Grateful
Dead play while banks of Audiovisual equipment create a chaotic backdrop of light and
sound.
On January 8, 1966,
the Merry Pranksters put on a colossal Acid Test at the Fillmore Auditorium, in San
Francisco’s black ghetto. They had put down
a deposit on the hall
two days earlier, ignoring the landlord’s earnest warning that there would be no ,way
to publicize an event in that short a time. The Pranksters just smiled mysteriously. About
twentyfour hundred people showed up.
The Fillmore was a
huge dance floor with a balcony running along two sides. The Pranksters wired it up with
so much electronic equipment -
including the TV
Portapaks they were going to carryaround - that the floor was littered with
electronic boxes and skeins of electric cable. The whole place actually gave off a low,
buzzing hum.
The show started in
the usual fashion with Kesey’s Psychedelic Symphonette playing random sequences of
notes at one end of the floor. Down at the other end, the Warlocks, who had
recentlychanged their name to the Grateful Dead, were simultaneously playing
rock & roll built around the expansive noodlings of guitarist Jerry Garcia.
In the middle of the
floor stood a baby bathtub full of Kool Aid spiked with LSD.
From then on, the
evening was psychedelic chaos. Pranksters wore comicbook superhero costumes and wandered
around doing everything they could to make the trip weirder. Phrases that read like
excerpts from a Kesey novel in progress were projected onto the walls. Perhaps this whole
event was a Kesey novel, set in some kind of space age madhouse.
Because of city
regulations, the Acid Test was required to end at 2:00 a.m., and the police showed up to
make sure the curfew was observed. “Who’s in charge?” they demanded.
Hilarious. Everything had been totally out of control for hours.
The police went around
pulling plugs and turning off switches. The Pranksters went around after them turning
everything back on again. When the lights went off, the crowd cheered. When they went back
on, they cheered again. A group of people on the floor had found a ladder and were
climbing toward the police, chanting, “Hug the heat! Hug the heat!” just as
Kesey’s lawyers arrived to smooth everything over.
Neal Cassady, one of
the original beatniks, was there that night. He had been hanging around with the Merry
Pranksters for some time. Habitually wired on amphetamines, he would usually be talking
a motormouthed stream of consciousness while juggling a hammer to deal with his speed
induced restlessness. But here, staring down from the Fillmore balcony at all the stoned
people crawling through mountains of electronic equipment and giant sculptures, he
seemed downright placid.
A poster announcing the Acid Test Graduation, which was to be held at Winterland in San
Francisco on Halloween 1966.
In actuality, the event had to be moved at the last minute, though the spirits of the
graduating class nonetheless remained high.
The event that followed the Fillmore Acid Test was boldly named the Trips Festival. It
aimed at incorporating everything that had been part of these public gatherings into
whatever else might fit. Stewart Brand had rented Longshoremen’s Hall from January
21-23, 1966.
The
Trips Festival poster read: the general tone of things has moved
from the self-conscious Happening to a more jubliant occasion
where the audience participates because it’s
more fun to do so than not. Maybe this is the rock
REVOLUTION.
Not just maybe. From
the first night, the LSD party engulfed the cabaret theater skits and slides of American
Indians. A band called the Loading Zone was hurried onstage to handle the vast,
undirected energy that pulsed through the hall. The second night was supposed to feature
avant-garde films, a light show and the music of Big Brother and the Holding Company,
fresh from their first gig. But the Grateful Dead swept everybody offstage and the event
turned into another thundering Acid Test, complete with flashing strobe lights and
fluorescing colors while Kesey’s messages were projected on the wall in the
unparalleled chaos (one such message: “Anybody who knows he is God, go up
onstage”). When the event closed down at 2:00 a.m., there was still a line outside.
This was nothing new to producer Bill Graham, who had been desperately running around
all night with his clipboard, trying to keep the vast, polymorphous event organized.
The third night, which
hadn’t been entirely planned, automatically became another Acid Test and dance with
the Grateful Dead, the video cameras, the giant sculptures and the rest. In the roaring
chaos, an Olympic trampolinist who wore a mask to preserve his amateur status dove from
the balcony into a trampoline under stroboscopic light.
Well over 6,000 people
had attended the Trips Festival. It was the only place to be that weekend. A band named
the Mystery Trend, who hadn’t been paying attention, booked a theater on Saturday.
Only three people showed up.
Gleeful anarchy reigns at
the Trips Festival a three night psychedelic happening at Longshoremen’s Hall in
1966. A poster for the festival mark it as an
event to rememberthat is, if you could.
"Acid Test" signboard, about 1964
The adventures of the
Merry Pranksters—a band of artists, writers, and students who embraced free
expression, defined a lifestyle opposed to mainstream American values, and traveled the
country in a psychedelic schoolbus—were popularized in Tom Wolfe's 1968 book The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Led by the novelist Ken Kesey, the group became a symbol for
the counterculture based in San Francisco during the 1960s. In the early 1990s Smithsonian
curators contacted Kesey hoping to acquire the famous bus, named Furthur, but it was badly
deteriorated. In 1992 they collected archival material and this colorful plywood panel,
which the Pranksters used to advertise concerts and poetry readings. Fittingly, Kesey
signed the deed of gift with a Day-Glo marker.
Kesey sees that they,
the Pranksters, already have the expertise and the machinery to create a mindblown state
such as the world has never seen, totally wound up, lit up, amplified and... controlled...
For months Kesey has
been trying to work out... the fantasy... of the Dome. This was going to be a great
geodesic dome on top of a cylindrical shaft. It would look like a great mushroom. Many
levels. People would climb a stairway up the cylinder [...] and the dome would have a
great foam-rubber floor where they could lie down on. Sunk down in the foam rubber, below
the floor level, would be movie projectors, video-tape projectors, light projectors. All
over the place, up in the dome, everywhere, would be speakers, microphones, tape machines,
live, replay, variable lag. People could take LSD or speed or smoke grass and lie back and
experience what they would, enclosed and submerged in a planet of lights and sounds such
as the universe had never knew. Lights, movies, video tapes, video tapes of themselves,
flashing and swirling over the dome from the beams of searchlights rising from the floor
from between their bodies, The sound roiling around in the globe like a typhoon. Movies
and tapes of the past, tapes and video tapes, broadcasts and pictures of the present,
tapes and humanoid sounds of the future - but all brought together now - here and now
[...] into the delated cerebral cortex...
The geodesic dome, of
course, was Buckminster Fuller's inspiration. The light projections were chiefly Gerd
Stern's, Gerd Stern of the USCO group [...] But the magic dome, the new planet, was Kesey
and the Pranksters. The idea went beyond what would later be known as mixed-media
entertainment, now [1968] a standard practice in "psychedelic discotheques" and
so forth. The Pranksters had the supra-medium, a fourth dimension - acid - Cosmo - All-one
- Control - The Movie -
acid test 1960's, with Kesey and Babbs
But why a dome? The
answer to all the Prankster fantasies, public and private, the whole solution - they
already found it; namely, the Hell's Angels party. The two day rout hadn't been a party
but a show. It had been more than a show even. It had been an incredible concentration of
energy. Not only Pranksters, but people from all over, heads, non-heads, intellectuals,
curiosity-seekers, even cops, had turned up and gotten swept up in the incredible energy
of the thing. They had been in the Prankster movie. It was one show that hadn't been
separated into entertainers and customers, with the customers buying a ticket and saying
All right, now entertain me. At the Angel's party everybody got high together and
everybody did his [her] thing and entertained everybody else, Angels being Angels,
Ginsberg being Ginsberg, Pranksters being Pranksters, and cops being cops. Even the cops
did their thing, splashing those big lush evil revolving red turret lights off the dirt
cliff and growling and baying and hassling cars. [Tom Wolfe: 1967: 231-232]
The movie, that's one
of Kesey's magic ideas. To be / live in their own movie rather than within a movie created
by others. That is to break the magic capture of the system, not to acknowledge their
narratives, conventions and laws...
The acid test went on and soon it got to Los Angeles, where it became the Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test. Some Pranksters, - Hugh Romney - decided to put the LSD in big Kool
Aid containers, playing with the homey, innocuous drink of middle America.
... the night of the
Acid Test in Watts. Imagine Watts, only a few months after the riots, on acid. All us
crazy-looking middle class white kids all dressed up in weird things with goony eyes. I
remember the black people in the neighborhood standing out there laughing. They found it
hilarious. There was a general air of good feeling. Take a couple hundred or so
freaked-out people in Watts and a a bunch of freaked-out hippies and you wouldn't know
what to expect, but it was very nice. [Law: 23]
The Acid Tests were
one of those outrages, one of those scandals, that create a new style or a new world view.
[Wolfe:250]
The young, and at the
time cool, Tom Wolfe evokes the Los Angeles Acid Tests through the words and memories of
some woman, Clair, who went there and did acid unknowingly for the first time in her life:
... [the next] was set
up for Watts, on Lincoln's birthday, February 12th 1966. Watts! The very Watts where
hardly five months before the freaking revolution of the blacks had broken out, the symbol
of all that was catastrophic and hopeless in American life[...] politics of taking such a
party into the recently stricken neighborhood, as a friendship-thing; also a humorous -
ironical? site for such carryings-on.
The building was a
warehouse, part of a Youth Opportunities center, but still vacant[...] It was legally
leased for 24 or 48 hours by Kesey's group[...] around 200 people were in attendance. When
i arrived, nothing had started... people were clustered in small groups, sitting on mats
and blankets around the walls. The room, the main room was huge... [50 by 25 feet]. There
was also a smaller room to the east and a bathroom to the west, and the large room had a
corridor running along the south wall which had open windows waist high without glass...
through which the scene inside could be observed[...]
Shortly there was an
announcement [by Neal Cassady] that the evening would begin. Films were projected on the
south wall, with a commentary... films of Furthur, the bus, the people in the bus[...]
then a large trash can, plastic, was carried to the middle of the room, and all were
invited to help themselves to the Kool-Aid it contained... Actually there were two cans.
Romney took the microphone and said, "This one over here is for the little folk and
this one over here is for the big folk. This one over here is for the kittens and this one
over here for the tigers..." Then Clair drank a couple of paper cups of the
Electric Kool-Aid, and suddenly dancing under a strobe light she starts laughing crazy,
uncontrollably... "i looked around and people's faces were distorted... lights were
flashing everywhere... the screen [sheets] at the end of the room had three or four
different films at once, and the strobe light was flashing faster than it had been... the
band, the Grateful Dead, was playing but i couldn't hear the music... people were
dancing[...] I was afraid, because i honestly thought that it was all in my mind, and that
i had finally flipped out."...
At that moment with
the help of some insiders she was told what was going on and she started enjoying it, the
different rooms, and lights, her own perception of them... "Mostly i'd call the Acid
Test a master production. Everything was carefully meshed and calculated to produce the
LSD effect, so that i have no idea where the production stopped and my own head took
over... I great flash of insight came to me... N can tell it is coming, the magic [eighth]
hour, and Hassler gets up in a blue pageboy costume and does a funny beautiful slow dance
that is just perfect... and Page is working behind him with the projectors, the film
projectors and the slide projectors... and the Pranksters sit amazed and delighted and he
makes slow changes, abstract patterns and projections from slides and... it all fits
together... everything...
About 6 am, more cops,
narcos now, six in plainclothes - and one of the diehard three o'clock discoverers walks
up to them and announces with a look of total acid-stoned glistening sincerity:
"Listen, I've got more Awareness, more... Awareness, in my little fingernail... My
Awareness is so superior to yours that... uh...", and so his face falls back in a
sweet sincere look, slightly played out, and he says; "How about getting us some
cigarettes? We're all out."
Strangely, one of them
did and returned very quickly... The L.A. sun is up, the good spades of Watts are going to
work... and the Pranksters troop back into the L.A. sunlight... [Wolfe: 271-282]
[283-284] The Watts
Test in L.A., coming on top of the Trip Festival in San Francisco, had caused the
fast-rising psychedelic thing to explode right out of the underground in a way nobody had
dreamed of... This new san Francisco-L.A. LSD thing with wacked-out kids and delirious
rock'n'roll, made it seem like the dread LSD had caught on like an infection among the
youth - which, in fact, it had. Very few realized that it had all emanated from one
electric source: Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.
Ken Kesey and the
Merry Pranksters
To all appearances,
Ken Kesey had a considerable share in the invention of what has since come to be known as
the counterculture of the 1960s. He authored the sensational best-selling novel, One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — his literary debut, published in 1962, before he turned
twenty-seven. In July 1964, then, at his home in La Honda (just south of San Francisco),
Ken Kesey and a group of friends, relatives and devotees embarked a battered 1939
International Harvester school bus, to go on a cross-country ride to New York. Boldly
named FURTHUR (fusing "further" and "future"), the bus was especially
prepared for the occasion. The seats were replaced by couches, many-colored iridescent
day-glo sprays were applied liberally to enhance the coating, and an intricate sound and
film equipment was installed, not merely for entertainment, but to document the outing.
Enormous footage on celluloid and audio tape was produced along the way (much of which
still awaits examination in the Prankster Archives).
The Pranksters'
journey on the bus turned into a trip
— whose general direction was suggested by the Pranksters' desire to visit,
along the way, Timothy Leary and to get attuned, on the road, to the prospective meeting
with the prophet of LSD. The patriarch of the communal outing, Kesey had first come across
LSD when as a graduate student at Stanford he wanted to earn some extra money on the side
(he was married and the father of a boy, with another child on the way). He volunteered at
Menlo Park VA Hospital in a government-sponsored program, participating in experiments
conducted to study the effects of hallucinogenics. The experiences gained with "the
best LSD he ever had . . ., sponsored by the government" (so he has liked to claim),
were vital in the conception of Cuckoo's Nest.
The driver seat of the
Prankster bus was occupied mainly by Neal Cassady, who had inspired Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) and Visions of Cody (1959).
A condescending,
sensationalist account of Kesey's and the Pranksters' adventures has been delivered by Tom Wolfe in The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Ken (Elton) Kesey
(1935-2001)
American writer, who
gained world fame with his novel ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST (1962, filmed 1975).
Kesey became in the 1960s a counterculture hero and a guru of psychedelic drugs with
Timothy Leary. Kesey has been called the Pied Piper who changed the beat generation into
the hippie movement.
Ken Kesey was born in
La Junta, Colorado, and brought up in Eugene, Oregon. His father worked in the creamery
business, in which he was eventually successful after founding the Eugene Farmers
Cooperative. Kesey spent his early years hunting, fishing, swimming; he learned to box and
wrestle, and he was a star football player. He studied at the University of Oregon, where
he acted in college plays. On graduating he won a scholarship to Stanford University.
Kesey soon dropped out and joined the counterculture movement. In 1956 he married his
school sweetheart, Faye Haxby. He began experimenting with drugs and wrote an unpublished
novel, ZOO, about the beatniks of the North Beach community in San Francisco. Tom Wolfe in
his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) described Kesey and his friends, called
the Merry Pranksters, as they travelled the country and used all kinds of hallucinogens.
Wolfe compared somewhat mockingly Kesey to the figures of the world's great religions.
Their bus, called Further - actually written "Furthur" on the vehicle - was
painted in Day-Glo colors. In California Kesey's friends served LSD-laced Kool-Aid to
members of their parties.
At a Veterans
Administration hospital in Menlo Park, California, Kesey was paid as a volunteer
experimental subject, taking mind-altering drugs and reporting their effects. These
experiences as an aide at a psychiatric hospital and LSD sessions formed the background
for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, which was set in a mental hospital. While writing the
work, Kesey took peyote.
…After the work,
Kesey gave up publishing novels….
Kesey gave up
publishing novels. He formed a band of 'Merrie Pranksters', set up a commune in La Honda,
California, bought an old school bus, and toured America and Mexico with his friends,
among them Neal Cassady, Kerouac's travel companion.
In 1965 Kesey was
arrested for possession of marijuana. He fled to Mexico, where he faked an unconvincing
suicide and then returned to the United States, serving a five-month prison sentence at
the San Mateo County Jail. After this tumultuous period he settled down with his wife to
raise their four children, and taught a graduate writing seminar at the University of
Oregon. In the early 1970s Kesey returned to writing and published KESEY'S GARAGE SALE
(1973). His later works include the children's book LITTLE TRICKER THE SQUIRREL MEETS BIG
DOUBLE THE BEAR (1990) and SAILOR SONG (1992), a futuristic tale about an Alaskan fishing
village and Hollywood film crew. LAST GO AROUND (1994), Kesey's last book, was an account
of a famous Oregon rodeo written in the form of pulp fiction. Kesey died of complications
after surgery for liver cancer on November 10, 2001 in Eugene, Oregon.
BOB
WEIR Guitarist FOR THE Grateful Dead
We
did the first one or two Acid Tests as the Warlocks and then changed our name to the
Grateful Dead. I was having every bit as much fun as I could possibly have. I was a kid in
a candy store. All the stuff that was happening was new: this rock & roll explosion,
the Acid Tests and all that kind of stuff. No one had ever even imagined that stuff like
that could possibly happen until it did. It was actually better than realizing my
dreams.
I
think the Dead played all the Acid Tests except for one. There was an Acid Test
somewhere, maybe in Mexico, that we didn't get to. The Acid Tests were complete chaos
with little knots of quasiorganization
here
or there that would occur and then dissipate. A lot of lights, a lot of sound, a lot of
speakers all around the room. You would walk by a microphone, for instance, and maybe
say something and then a couple minutes later you'd hear your own self in some other part
of the room coming back at you through several layers of echo. The liquid lightshows began
there. I think it was the first time anyone saw them. People were rather gaily adorned:
dyed hair, colorful clothing and stuff like that. And everybody was loaded to the gills on
LSD.
There
was a lot of straightahead telepathy that went on during those sessions. We learned during
those sessions to trust our intuitions, because that was about all we had to go on. When
you learn to trust your intuitions, you're going to be more given to try things, to
experiment. And you're going to be more given to extemporaneous assaults of one sort or
another. We learned to start improvising on just about anything.
We
were participants, and so were they. We were all just making waves, as big and bold as we
could, and seeing where they rippled against each other and what kinds of shimmers that
all caused.
Grateful Dead Time Capsule
12/1/65 "Acid Tests" organizer
Ken Kesey enlists Warlocks as house
Jerry: "The prototype for our whole basic trip"
Known Venues:
In Room, Belmont, CA
Soquel, Santa Cruz, 11/??/64
San Jose Acid Test, Big Nig's House, San Jose, 12/04/65
Big Beat Acid Test, The Big Beat Club, Palo Alto, 12/11/65
Muir Beach Acid Test, Muir Beach Lodge, Muir Beach, 12/18/65
Beaver Hall, Portland, OR, 1/??/66
The Matrix, San Francisco, CA
Fillmore Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, 1/8/66
Paul Sawyer's Unitarian Church, Los Angeles, 1/29/66
Northridge, CA
Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA
Danish Center, Los Angeles, CA
Carthay Studios, Los Angeles, CA
San Francisco State Acid Test, 10/??/66
Sound City Acid Test, San Francisco
Known Grateful Dead Performances:
Beat It On Down The Line
Can't Come Down
Caution (Do Not Stop On Tracks)
Death Don't Have No Mercy
Early Morning Rain
Hog For You Baby
I Know You Rider
I'll Go Crazy
I'm A King Bee
It's A Sin
It's All Over Now Baby Blue
Midnight Hour
Mindbender
More Power Rap
Next Time You See Me
On The Road Again
One Kind Favor
The Only Time Is Now
Parchman Farm
The Same Thing
She Belongs To Me
Sick and Tired
Star-Spangled Banner
Viola Lee Blues
You See A Broken Heart
bibliography:
stewart BRAND / 1995 / how buildings learn. what happens after they're built / penguin
books / new york
Lisa LAW [photographs by] / 1997 [0r. 1987] / Flashing on the Sixties / Chronicle Books / San Francisco
Paul PERRY / 1990 / On the bus. The complete guide to the legendary trip of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the birth of the counterculture / Thunder's Mouth Press / New York / with texts by Hunter S. Thompson, Jerry Garcia, Ken Kesey & Ken Babbs
tom WOLFE / 1999 [first ed. 1967] / the electric cool aid acid test / bantam / new york
Ken KNABB / 1981 / Situationist International Anthology / Bureau of Public Secrets / Berkeley
![jockomo[1].gif (10412 bytes)](images/jockomo1.gif)
