by Robert Wilkinson
Today would have been the 87th birthday of Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and godfather of the Merry Pranksters and “the electric kool-aid acid tests.”
What I’ll give you today is from Wikipedia, since it tells the tale of this remarkable man. Ken Kesey (September 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001) was “a counter-cultural figure who considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.”
“At the instigation of Perry Lane neighbor and Stanford psychology graduate student, Vik Lovell an acquaintance of Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass, or Baba Ram Dass) and Allen Ginsberg, Kesey volunteered to take part in a CIA-financed study under the aegis of Project MKULTRA, a highly secret military program, at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital where he worked as a night aide. The project studied the effects of psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD, psilocybin, mescalin, cocaine, aMT, and DMT on people. Kesey wrote many detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the study and in the years of private experimentation that followed. Kesey's role as a medical guinea pig, as well as his stint working at the state veterans' hospital, inspired him to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The success of this book, as well as the demolition of the Perry Lane cabins in August 1963, allowed him to move to a log house at 7940 La Honda Road in La Honda, California, an hour south of San Francisco. He frequently entertained friends and many others with parties he called “Acid Tests,” involving music (such as Kesey's favorite band, The Warlocks, later known as the Grateful Dead) black lights, fluorescent paint, strobes, and other "psychedelic" effects, and, of course, LSD. These parties were noted in some of Ginsberg's poems and are also described in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, as well as Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs by Hunter S. Thompson and Freewheelin Frank, Secretary of the Hell's Angels by Frank Reynolds.”
Regarding the Merry Pranksters:
”When the publication of his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion in 1964, required his presence in New York, Kesey, Neal Cassady, and others in a group of friends they called the "Merry Pranksters" took a cross-country trip in a school bus nicknamed "Further.” This trip, described in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, (and later in Kesey's own screenplay The Further Inquiry) was the group's attempt to create art out of everyday life. After the bus trip, the Pranksters threw parties they called Acid Tests around the San Francisco area from 1965 to 1966. Many of the Pranksters lived at Kesey's residence in La Honda. In New York, Cassady introduced Kesey to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who then turned them on to Timothy Leary. Sometimes a Great Notion was made into a 1971 film starring and directed by Paul Newman; it was nominated for two Academy Awards, and in 1972 was the first film shown by the new television network HBO.”
He was a literary giant, a point of focus for the countercultural movement of the 60s, and overall one of the most influential people in the US for many years. He certainly impacted my young life. “Kool-aid acid tests” with the Grateful Dead as a soundtrack set to Allen Ginsberg’s poetry read under black lights? Very much happening in 1969 on hundreds of college campuses, including the University of Texas at Austin. And electric orange juice “tests” set to Johnny Winter at the Vulcan Gas Company as well.
RIP, Mister Ken Kesey. “Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end….”
Copyright © 2022 Robert Wilkinson
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