 Return to Lonely Goat Features Archives THE MERRY PRANKSTER RIDES THE BIG BUS HOME I suppose it's inevitable. As you grow older, one by one the cultural icons of your youth drop off the planet. If you stick around long enough, chances are that you'll outlive them all, since in order to have this great influence they pretty much by definition have to have at least a few years on you. At forty-six, I've lost a number of mine: Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Lennon, Garcia, Leary, Ginsburg, Burroughs - John Hartford died earlier this year - and now I have to add Ken Kesey to the list. His passing on November 10, 2001 at age sixty-six will be noted by a lot of people; but before Rolling Stone hits the stands with a cover story (and he damn well better make the cover), I need to sit down and offer a remembrance of my own. There would probably still have been a hippie movement without Ken Kesey, but its essential flavor and tone were set by Kesey and a small group of friends known collectively as the Merry Pranksters. As a graduate student at Stanford during the early 1960s, Kesey took part in paid LSD experiments that were being conducted at the time by the Army and the CIA. These experiences contributed significantly to his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) and forever changed his perspective on the world. He found he liked acid so much he decided to share the experience with his friends. The series of parties that followed at his Bay Area home eventually grew into the collective shift of consciousness that became the counterculture as we still know it today. Every gaily-painted bus at a Dead concert, or at any of the festivals that have followed the band's demise, owes its inspiration to a certain kaleidoscopic 1939 International Harvester school bus owned by Kesey. The mad trip (in every sense of the word) across the country in 1964 by Kesey and his band of Pranksters aboard FURTHUR, with "Cowboy Neal" Cassady at the wheel, was turned into legend by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and is about as good a point as I can come up with to mark the beginning of the hippie era. Over the next couple of years, the parties got bigger and crazier and gradually became public events known as Acid Tests (it's amazing to think about today, but LSD was legal until sometime in 1966), as friends turned friends on and all explored the new insights, artistic inspiration and lifestyle possibilities offered to them by this new drug. The house band for these gatherings was a young group of folk and blues musicians known as the Warlocks, who soon changed their name to something a bit more cosmic before eventually becoming one of America's most beloved institutions. Thus, nurtured by Ken Kesey's playful curiosity, was born the rituals of fanciful self-expression and celebration, the idea of life as an adventure, and the sense of tribal unity that became associated with the Haight-Ashbury scene and carried over into the Grateful Dead concert culture and beyond. For whatever reason - at one point he claimed he would rather live a book than write one - after 1964's Sometimes A Great Notion, Kesey abandoned longer works for quite some time, concentrating on shorter articles for various publications ranging from Rolling Stone and The Whole Earth Catalog to People and Newsweek. A number of these pieces were compiled in 1973's Ken Kesey's Garage Sale. His next major book, Demon Box, which falls somewhere between a novel, a memoir, and another collection, was not published until 1987. There was always an honesty to his work, as there appeared to be about the man; something real and earthy and common-sense like the farmer he became, yet constantly aware of the sheer possibilities of life. The heroes of his novels tended to be, like Kesey himself, maverick outsiders of one stripe or another. Yet the setting and feel of each book was always different. Sailor Song envisioned a near future Alaskan coastal village during a period of environmental breakdown; Last Round Up (written with sidekick and fellow Prankster Ken Babbs) explored the world of early 20th Century rodeo. The Furthur Inquiry is really strange: a reevaluation, in screenplay form, of the famous road trip, placing the spirit of Neal Cassady on trial. It also features a lot of rare photos from the period interspersed with the text. Kesey lived out his later years on a farm outside Eugene, Oregon, sometimes teaching at the University of Oregon. In 1989, he and the thirteen members of his graduate writing seminar published the novel Caverns under the collective pen name of O.U. Levon (get it?). Also around this time Kesey acquired yet another 1939 International Harvester school bus (the original FURTHUR having long since retired, rusting in a field on the farm), had another paint party, and re-created the trip with a busload of old and new Pranksters. The new FURTHUR continued to make appearances now and then; a couple of years ago, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame celebrated the Psychedelic Sixties, and Kesey & co. drove to Cleveland for the occasion. In 1993 my wife and I happened to be traveling through Eugene. I didn't meet the man himself, but I did meet his son Zane, who runs a mail-order (and now Internet) business called Key-Z Productions, dedicated to memorabilia of Kesey, the Pranksters, and the Beats. I had his catalog and wanted to pick up a few things, so I looked him up. We had a nice conversation about what it was like to grow up among such strange people (he said it was a lot of fun, he always had someone to play with in his sandbox) and how his father had dealt with fame (really, it wasn't that much of a big deal; he was still listed in the phone book, and once in a while took in the odd pilgrim for a meal before sending him politely on his way). I came away with a great tape of Cassady speed-rapping for an hour about cars, and a couple of T-shirts: one with a reproduction of the original Acid Test poster, another with a full-color silkscreen of FURTHUR. Souvenirs. Still, I bet Dad would have been a helluva guy to know. One of Kesey's final published pieces appeared in the October 25 issue of Rolling Stone, the issue dedicated to September 11. Entitled "The Real War", Kesey spoke on behalf of the world coming together, voicing the view, often drowned out or even actively squelched in these flag-waving rah-rah kill-all-the-bastards days, that our true enemy was Hate. The Real War, he maintained, was not between armies or countries or religions, but "between the ancient, gut-wrenching, bone-breaking, flesh-slashing way things have always been and the timorous and fragile way things might begin to be. Could begin to be. Must begin to be, if our lives and our children's lives are ever, someday, in the upheaving future, to know honest peace." According to Ken Babbs, Kesey had recently had part of his liver removed after finding a cancerous spot. On November 10, Babbs wrote: "They decided to cut it out and the surgery went okay. He had sixty percent of his liver left to carry the load but in one of those dirty tricks the body can play on you everything else went to hell and this morning at 3:45 AM his heart stopped beating." Ah, Kesey. Without this guy so many of our lives would be a few degrees less luminous. And the real trip, the best tribute in fact to his importance in the scheme of things, is this: there are a lot of young hippies out following Panic or Phish (when they're together) or other jam bands, or just going to festivals and gatherings in their painted VW buses and tie-dyes, who take this culture for granted; to them it's always been here. A lot of them know the background, but I'm sure many are just partying without giving a thought to the history. The only reaction you might get from some of them if Kesey's name came up would be, "Who?" Which is cool, on some levels. It means that the lifestyle has become institutionalized, and the passing of the torch makes it less likely that it will be extinguished. But if you ever encounter these kids on the road, please fill them in, OK? Let them know where they came from, and make sure you tell them the story of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. For furthur
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