The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Rating:
Summary: Kool-Aid More than Tastes Good
Review: This book is about the American born, hippie movement. The journalist Tom Wolfe infiltrates the Merry Prankster's before their Acid Graduation and tells the whole story. I liked this book because of the wild details of the tripped out life of acid heads. Wolfe takes us for a ride with the Pranksters, through their beginnings as intellectuals in Stanford, to the low days of living as outlaws in Mexico. In the end Ken Kesey, the leader of the Merry Pranksters, talks about another way other than LSD, DMT, Peptide, and Marijuana making the reader feel reassured. This is a great read and historical reference, so if you're looking for some info on the 60's or just need a laugh I would recommend, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

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Summary: Great History of the American Psychedelic Acid Movement
Review: This book is around 400 pages and a very detailed history, many stories, and it's hard to remember all the facts, you'll have to read the book yourself for that. The story is of the "Intrepid Travelers," Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters, a communal group of acid ingesters who were the progenitors of the acid consciousness in the California, in the US, in the world's consciousness of awareness . . . "your either on the bus or off the bus."

It was the influential chemists, Al Hubbard, Dr. Spaulding and the psychologists, Timothy Leary and Richard Albert, the Harvard psychology professors, who discovered for themselves psylobilin and with Michael Hollingshead and Albert Hoffman, LSD and subsequently held experiments using the right set and setting with experienced psychedelic guides. Yet to this the Merry Pranksters would say, "f**k that!" because they were from a different movie of living; in the now, the unserene and lurid art, your brain being your only guide, not some experienced taker and specific setting for a safe non-freak-out trip (and there were a lot of "freak-outs" from many young, emotionally inexperienced). And the acid influenced cultural movement they began in the early 1960's. It was Leary and Albert who endorsed the "set and setting," the intellectual approach or non-organizational religious approach, the religious experience of the mystics, in their dialogue with acid and mushrooms. With Kesey and the Pranksters it was spontaneous, wild party kind of living in Day-Glow colors, in the multimedia sound and movie.

The Pranksters account starts in North Beach on Perry Lane, which becomes a major hang out for all sorts and eventually ends up in a cottage near La Honda, where the loud party of outlandish, Day-Glo painted woods - rigged with microphones and massive sound equipment, in the communal life takes on a new meaning. The Hell's Angels befriend the Pranksters and there are stories of personalities, telepathic and psychic connections and synchronicity in new fields of human life, the overmind, the collective unspoken mind of the psychedelic group. The religious realm of mystical awareness as in the game of I-Ching and dream wars. The Jungian "synchronicity" seemed to occur uncanningly many times, as their bus out of gas in the middle of nowhere only to have a tanker pull up and fuel them from nowhere. The sign on their door welcoming the Hell's Angels to end up having them and succeeding in their prankster madness. The sign on their door welcoming the Beatles, did not synchronize them to appear, but what did was having Oswley appear, the famous acid maker, who in the ways of synchronistic noncausal effect, was responsible for the finest acid which spread to England, the acid that brought the Beatles to experience the unspoken mind which ended them up traveling by bus across the English countryside with cameras and microphones.

Imagine a Day-Glo painted bus, the magic bus, with Day-Glo painted people and clothes, tripping on acid traveling from California to the New York World's Faire with music blasting, a freak show on wheels, all in the year 1964! And Neil Cassidy (Jack Kerouac's buddy and drive from On The Road) driving the bus!! And their trip to the legendary Millbrook, thinking it would be some historic meeting with Leary and the Pranksters, but instead it was the mystical religious and intellectuals verses the wild party, American flag draped, painted, loud blaring music, party animals of psychedelic madness. I think it relates to the age and the introvert and/or extrovert type personalities that played the large part.

It was actually Stewart Brand who thought up the great Trip Festival of January 1966. The series of acid test parties held by Kesey and the Pranksters helped spawn the movement of higher consciousness, all held at the last minute, the same day notification was put, and the Pranksters playing their instruments, then finding a local band, the warlocks - later known as the Grateful Dead - to play and Roy Seburn's light shows at the acid tests. It was the acid test held in a Unitarian church where the Kool-Aid was spiked, unknowingly to those attending. It was not teachings in the stiff, reverent language and texts of scholarly limnings found in various religions being taught but instead an aura, a religious experience, an awareness that flashed deeper than cerebration, the tradition of the great prophets. People like the beats Allen Ginsberg and his entourage and Neil Cassidy were there. As this spread, so the acid tests, later without Kesey and Haight Ashbury became the scene.

Later on Kesey gets busted twice for weed and is on the run from the law, to Mexico and back until caught - he was in their movie that time, fortunately most charges dropped. A lot to read of the characters and generally a great book to get an idea of a unique and special time and place in history where a much larger degree of freedom existed for the white middle class with the ability to gain other realms of consciousness available for the taking. A great pictorial book on this is "On The Bus" by Paul Perry, Michael Schwartz, Neil Ortenberg & Ken Babbs.

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Summary: I guess I don't understand the appeal of this.
Review: Though I think the sixties were an interesting time period in American history, I could just not get into this book whastoever. If you were there and understood what went on in San Fransisco in the 60s, you might love this book. But I think that it's the most nonsensical piece of crap I have ever come across. At first, the book is interesting, but you have to admit that 432 pages is a BIT too much for completely incoherent acid ramblings, right?

The book is so unbelievably disjointed that I thought briefly that maybe "Tom Wolfe" was an alias for an experiment that involved a million monkeys on a million typewriters. But unfortunately it is the great journalist who wrote this, who by the way is responsible for a number of fascinating books like Bonfire of the Vanities. Say it isn't so.

I hate to knock Wolfe, but I could write a better, more coherent book than this if I went up to a computer and typed completely random thoughts and words for an hour. Maybe this book is why so many people hate hippies. If you were there and have taken acid, you will love this book. Others will think, "God, no wonder acid is illegal now, since so-called books like this were actually written under the influence of it and printed to bore readers out of their minds!"

Rating:
Summary: An Amazing Book That You Can't Miss!
Review: While many people may not approve of the topic of this book, it carries a cross-generational message which we would be well advised not to ignore. Aging baby-boomers with problem children would do well to pick up a copy of The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test as a poignant reminder of our own generation's quirks and foibles. Generation `X' ers might learn that they didn't first invent new ways of tormenting their parents.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test charts the strange odyssey of author Ken Kesey (One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest) and his band of Merry Pranksters as they metamorphosed from Beatniks to Hippies. Tom Wolfe's masterpiece offers a detached view of the alternate lifestyles, experiments with drugs, sex and the world view offered by the counter-culture of the 60's. He doesn't necessarily approve of everything they did, but he does try to offer an objective recounting of some events that had a major impact on American life for all time.

Wolfe recounts how Kesey met a freak/genius chemist with the rather improbable name of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, who lent his middle name to one of the more potent types of LSD which was in circulation in California in the days before it became illegal. Owsley purchased a bulk quantity of Lysergic Acid Monohydrate from a chemical warehouse, using the fictitious name "The Beyer Research Group". He turned this into over 1 million doses of the infamous "Blue Owsley" - an oval tablet with a picture of Batman stamped on the side of it.

Much of the proceeds from this venture were used to fund and equip a band called The Warlocks, which would become better known as "The Grateful Dead". Kesey also managed a rather dubious accomplishment by turning the Hell's Angels on to Acid. I'm not sure what he was trying to do by welcoming self-proclaimed social outcasts with open arms, but he pulled it off without anyone getting beaten or killed.

Purchasing an old International school bus for $1500, Kesey and company set off on the first of many bizarre cross-country trips. Perhaps the strangest confrontation came when the Pranksters dropped in uninvited and unannounced at the Millbrook, NY compound of drug guru Timothy Leary. Never was there such a culture clash as the meeting of the two self-appointed High Priests of High. Leary and his group were into somber meditation and trying to unlock the secrets of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Kesey and his band were simply out to have a raucous good time, and they thought that Leary and his followers took this whole thing altogether too seriously.

Criss-crossing the country from 1964 through 1967, Kesey and company most certainly raised a few eyebrows with their bus painted in every imaginable color. While some would prefer to believe that they were also raising the level of conciousness among the young people of America at the time, the truth is that many people never heard of this legend until well after the fact.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test holds a mirror up to our past which reflects a great deal of cultural change which has transformed our society, in both good ways and bad. Those who didn't grow up or come of age in this period of time will have a difficult time understanding the viewpoint and mores of Middle America in the middle of the 1960s. Those who did may cast a sheepish look back at ourselves and ruefully reflect on how we ourselves have changed, and in ways we never anticipated. Pick up a copy of this great book! You won't regret it! Also recommended is On The Road by Jack Kerouac and The Losers Club by Richard Perez