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 carr^yaround - 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, w^ere 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. 

 January 21 - 23 1966     The multimedia Trips Festival is held at Longshoremen's Bull in San Francisco. A psychedelic poster handbill promises slides, movies. sound tracks, flowers. Food. rock 'n' roll eagle lone whistle, indians and anthropologists revelations ... A^, the unexpected able. The Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company perform, and Owsley's latest batch of acid is circulated.

"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). His autobiographical The First Third underlined that Cassady indeed was Dean Moriarty, the protagonist of Kerouac's cult novel, and Cody Pomeroy, of the sprawling documentary. — By the time FURTHUR had made it to New York, however, it had become sufficiently clear that, driven by Cassady, Kesey and his Merry Pranksters had left the Beats far behind. Significantly, in New York they encountered, among others, Jack Kerouac, who was completely put off by the Pranksters' appearance and habitus; in particular, the ardent patriot (Kerouac in his youth in Lowell, Massachusetts, had spoken the French Canadian dialect his parents had used at home) resented the Pranksters' abuse of the flag; and Kesey, the "Chief," liked to pose as Captain Flag. The Further Inquiry, cast as a screenplay and enhanced ostentatiously by graphics, is a latter-day reassessment of Cassady's part in the undertaling. More balanced is the recollection offered in Ken Babbs's and Paul Perry's On The Bus: The Complete Guide to the Legendary Trip of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the Birth of the Counterculture.

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 band  

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

[ Home ] [ Up ] [ Dead List ] [ Reading Room ] [ OBIEs Gallery ] [ Useful Links ]
All copyrights remain with the original content creators.
Everything else is copyright 1997,1998,1999,2000,2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 or 2006
by The Official OBIE Homepage.

This site is uploaded and maintained on a dial up 56K modem.
Last modified on
June 09, 2006 09:06 PM -0400