Ken Kesey: From Author to Acid Evangelist
Ken Kesey first encountered psychedelics not through the counterculture but through the U.S. government. In 1959, while a graduate student at Stanford University's creative writing program, he volunteered for CIA-funded experiments at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital, where he was paid to take LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and other substances under clinical observation. The experiences profoundly influenced his debut novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1962), which became a bestseller and, later, the basis for a 1975 Academy Award-winning film.
Using the royalties from his novels (including "Sometimes a Great Notion," published in 1964), Kesey purchased a property in La Honda, California, in the forested hills south of San Francisco. The property became a gathering place for a loose collective of artists, writers, and adventurers who called themselves the Merry Pranksters. Key members included Ken Babbs (Kesey's friend from the Marines), Mountain Girl (Carolyn Adams, later Carolyn Garcia), the poet and filmmaker Stewart Brand, and -- most famously -- Neal Cassady, the legendary driver and real-life inspiration for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's "On the Road."
The Bus Trip: Summer 1964
On June 17, 1964, the Pranksters set out from La Honda aboard a 1939 International Harvester school bus they had painted in psychedelic Day-Glo colors and christened "Furthur" (the misspelling was deliberate). Neal Cassady took the wheel. A large jar of orange juice laced with LSD sat on the bus. Their stated destination was the 1964 World's Fair in New York City and a publication party for "Sometimes a Great Notion," but the real purpose was the journey itself.
Over several weeks, the Pranksters crossed the country, filming everything on 16mm cameras, dosing willing participants, staging impromptu happenings at rest stops and campgrounds, and generally bewildering Middle America. They visited Timothy Leary at his Millbrook, New York estate, though the meeting between the two psychedelic camps was awkward -- Leary was too absorbed in his own session to come downstairs and greet them.
The bus trip was immortalized in Tom Wolfe's 1968 New Journalism classic "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," which remains one of the definitive accounts of the early psychedelic era.
