Take a Trip With The Merry Pranksters - Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Sunshine-bright day-glo paint on everything. Psychedelic costumes, red, white, and blue. Superheroes, dressed up in glow-in-the-dark masks or army helmets. Acid. Acid tabs, acid-laced orange juice, acid in the kool-aid - electric kool-aid - capsules of acid, acid all over the place, readily available, just hook your hallucinogenic and do your thing. It’s your fantasy, your movie. We’ve got a super-outlandish, glowing bus, man, and we’re taking it Furthur. Ahh, such was the life of Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters, and author Tom Wolfe (The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby) tells their story brilliantly in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

In late 1959, Ken Kesey was working on a novel called Zoo when he volunteered for a $75.00 gig as a laboratory guinea pig for experiments with LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs. It was during these experiments that Kesey imagined a big Indian Chief – Chief Broom – and conceived of his famous novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It was also where he discovered the potential mind expanding possibilities of such drugs.

Soon, like-minded individuals such as Neal Cassady – Jack Kerouac’s Dean Moriarity in On the Road, and Ken Babbs, former Vietnam War helicopter pilot joined on. They group dubbed themselves The Merry Pranksters, glossed each other with fitting nicknames (Mountain Girl, Gretchen Fetchin the Slime Queen, the Hermit, etc.,) and set off on an incredible ride on the Mindway.

And it was one big-time Freak-Out of a movie. Furthur, the day-glo love bus was wired with enough sound equipment to supply a rock band, and then some. Same with Kesey’s compound in La Honda, California. Speakers on the roof, in the trees, microphones planted deep in the woods, just to capture sounds to groove on. Acid/venison stew. Orange and yellow trees. Great, melting blobs of light, and everything in synch, everything…beautiful, man. And the Pranksters documented all of it through film, photos, and audiotape.

By now, the Pranksters’ exploits are fairly legendary, due in no small part to this book. Wolfe’s zestful Technicolor prose was the perfect fit for recounting the Merry band of heads’ adventures.

The Pranksters’ well-known, freewheeling cross-country bus trip is relived with great Wolfe-ian style. Run ins, with cops, curious onlookers, and surly gas station owners, all ending with the acid-addled Pranksters attempting to draw the outsiders into their movie, their fantastic, blissful euphoria, their now.

And then there were the Pranksters’ infamous Acid Tests, precursors to the modern-day Rave. Great marathon sensory overloads of light, various random sounds, and films, all driven along by LSD and live music courtesy of a new band called The Grateful Dead. Kesey and his group threw Acid Tests all over the bay area, in Los Angeles, even in Mexico, where Kesey fled after a marijuana bust.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a wonderful account of a much-publicized portion of the drug culture of the 1960’s. Effectively told through Wolfe’s colorful writing, it’s funny, it’s entertaining, and most important, and it’s a vital document of a very vibrant period of American history. Sure, it was written over 40 years ago, but it’s never too late to give it a read. I highly recommend doing so.