The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Peter WolfAlthough seeming like a fiction novel, Wolf documents the adventures of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters through several years out of the Psychedelic 60's as they travel from L.A. to New York in a painted bus doing a variety of drugs including marijuana, hallucinogenics and methamphetamines, travel California performing Acid Tests where beatniks, hippies and sometimes cops were esentially LSD guinea pigs, and Kesey's exile in Mexico. It's as insane as it seems, written in a sporadic and spontaneous style enjoyable by teens and Baby Boomers wanting to reminisce about their-wait, of course, your parents never did drugs.
photo: the Prankster's 'Acid Test Graduation' via Britannica.com
I'm pretty excited to read that book. Then we can talk about it!
ReplyDeleteAh, the Merry Pranksters...
ReplyDeleteI'm disgusted by how Kesey unafraid of anybody and anything is in fact afraid when in New Orleans the bus is surrounded by blacks dancing to the r&b and beat tunes. Wolf says Kesey and the Pranksters felt a sense of relief when the cops (pigs, fuzz) came and broke up the group of blacks. What the fuck! I'm not black, I'm not PC and I don't subscribe to multiculturalism or most ultra-liberal crap but such racist attitudes, though very common in the Sixties, are just wrong cominhg from supposedly enlightened people, Now people, Beautiful People. And there are a few instances in which Wolfe gives a negative portrayal of blacks such as Big Nig vis a vis Jerry Garcia, and even Martin Luther King himself. However, that Wolfe uses the words "Negroes" and "spades" does not bother me. That's the historical context, Negro was the accepted term even used by Dr King. Besides that and some oddly bad writing (sentence starts with Jerry's buddy Pigpen keeping his combo organ at Big Nig's and then goes off into another dimension) the book is fine with me. I would've been off the bus. And I think the hippes were full of shit.
ReplyDeleteI'm not conservative, I hate the tea baggers. At 49 I still have wild longish hair and I really dig the beatniks and the beat combos. So my disgust at most hippies is rather personal.
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