The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1999) - Plot & Excerpts
After finishing Back to Blood, I felt curious about Tom Wolfe's beginnings. My beginning with Tom Wolfe was reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 1969. I married my first husband in April of that year and we set out on our "honeymoon" which was really a glorified road trip across the country from Ann Arbor to San Francisco, inspired by Kerouac's On the Road. We camped the whole way, intending to end up as teachers in a "free school" in San Fran. Reading Acid Test was our preparation, our Rick Steves. We were among the hippest drug-taking heads in Ann Arbor but wanted to be sure we were cool enough for Haight Ashbury. As it turned out, I was most assuredly not.Reading the book again some forty years later was actually a fabulous experience (fabulous meaning "resembling a fable; of an incredible, astonishing or exaggerated nature" (Webster's dictionary.) It recaptured for me the entire mindset we had at the time: the mistrust and disgust we had for middle class values and morality; the disregard for authority and cops and the war in Vietnam; the pure hatred for the military industrial complex; the willingness to ingest any drug; the utter trust and camaraderie we had with all hippies.Wolfe was already an engaging writer. Acid Test is nonfiction but reads like a novel. I recognized in Ken Kesey the birth of the quintessential Wolfe hero: a guy who drops out of his respected role in society and becomes a desperate, sometimes failing, often wanted man, spurred on by a vision and a quest for meaning. I wonder if Tom Wolfe had ingested Joseph Campbell's Hero With A Thousand Faces, another seminal text for literate hippies, which was curiously reissued in 1968.Weird side note: In Back to Blood, the main protagonist Nestor Comacho, pulls himself up a rope, hand over hand, without using his feet, in his first manic feat of the novel. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (on page 385 in the original hardcover Book Club edition I got from the library) Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters plan a similar manic feat. By this time Kesey is wanted, jail-bait in fact, for numerous drug busts, so they are planning the Acid Test of all time at Winterland in San Francisco. All the cops will be there checking out all the stoned people and looking for Kesey. At midnight on Halloween, "Kesey, masked and disguised in a Superhero costume...will come up on stage and deliver his vision of the future, of the way 'beyond acid.' Who is this apocalyptic--Then he will will rip off his mask--Why-it's Ken Kee-zee!-and as the law rushes for him, he will leap up on a rope hanging down from the roof at center stage and climb, hand over hand, without even using his legs, his cape flying, straight up, up, up, up through a trap door in the roof, to where Babbs will be waiting with a helicopter,...and they will ascend into the California ozone looking down one last time..."That was the current fantasy for the day. Either you were on the bus or off the bus. Did it happen? No spoilers here. I'm just saying that Wolfe felt the need to use the prank again 44 years later.Fabulous!!
I had no idea about the sort of person Ken Kesey was; the only frame of reference I had was his novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." This book, or epic journalistic adventure by Tom Wolfe, chronicles Kesey's adventures after the publishing of his first two books (the other "Sometimes a Great Notion," had just been finished). Kesey had been involved in CIA sponsored drug tests, which included such recreational fun things as LSD, mescalin and cocaine. The CIA knows how to party! The Merry Pranksters, Kesey's traveling/living/family/drug experimentation group, are a major player in this story. Their giant psychedelic bus, called Further, makes a trip to NYC for the World's Fair and a disappointing pilgrimage to see Timothy Leary and his clan. The book follows them back to La Honda in California, where the large acid test parties really start taking off......with Hell's Angels! And Ginsberg! Even the Grateful Dead! Crazy, day-glo painted people and things (sometimes Kesey in a spacesuit), tripping for hours and hours. The comparison to a new religion/way of consciousness (or even a cult) that Wolfe makes is an astute one. A charismatic leader such as Kesey somehow could bring in extremely rough and dangerous Hell's Angels as well as new age christian leaders from large Californian sects. Be prepared for stream of consciousness style writing, and sometimes straight up just weird ass poetry. Quite frankly some of the material was either over my head or totally wacked out. I read about a fourth of the book the other night to finish it, and dreamed I was on my own acid trip, which included a Phish show and a wedding. So, did I find a new level of consciousness? No.....is it weirdos like Ken Kesey who may have the right idea? Possibly.
What do You think about The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1999)?
This book was okay. Tom Wolfe was always an outsider, a New Yorker, even a (gasp) Yalie. He was never really 'on the bus' if you know what I mean. But for a square, he explains the scene pretty well. The pranksers were like the scenesters of any era: self-absorbed and fairly boring pricks. It is an interesting book for one fact if nothing else: it's kind of the only book written in the 60's about the 60's. HS Thompson didn't really get rolling til the early 70's (Hells Angels came out in the 60's, but it wasn't til Fear and Loathing in 1970 that he really got it together, and even then it was the beginning of the revisionist nostalgia 60's. . .), and I'm hard pressed to think of another book from the era ABOUT the era.I'm now reading In Cold Blood, written in 1965, the year the pranksters dosed my mom at the Trips Festival in SF. And shit, if Capote isn't from a whole different world than those day-glo banshees. . .
—gaby
This is one of the popular books of adolescence which I didn't get around to reading until an adult, inspired, in part, by having seen the movie version of Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest. I would have liked it more as a teenager.Now, forty some years after publication, Electric is a bit of an historical curiosity. As much as the writings of Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert or Alan Watts, it substantially contributed to the creation in the public's eye of the counter-culture. As a kid I would have read it as a celebration. As an adult I read it from a greater distance, as someone else's loud party which got a bit out of hand.In the popular imagination the psychedelic phenomenon started in the labs around Harvard on the East coast and amidst psychotherapeutic communities on the West, used primarily by intellectuals, then spread throughout America like a virus out of a research lab. This book gives an account of one of its more spectacular courses through the heartland, linking West to East and, incidentally, the countercultural generations of the fifties and sixties, the beats and the hippies.As the outline above suggests, the real source of the psychedelic movement were the laboratories of governments and major pharmaceutical corporations, but, like the Andromeda Strain, the stuff got out of containment and the promised truth serum and miracle cure for addiction became instead 'all things to all men'--anything from the road to god (or Satan), to the party drug of choice.
—Erik Graff
The book reads like a monologue of Dennis Hopper's character in Apocalypse Now!, weird and spiraling and tricked out in acid-head lingo. For the most part its where it should be, its part of the scene and definitely adds to the feel of being "there" and what they sounded like. But the entire later half of the book I struggled to find solid footing (which I should have known about a drug scene-but come on!), and found reading it a little difficult and sometimes frustrating. The last quarter of the book I just pushed myself through, nonstop, to finish it and get the thing done. I felt like I was skimming over random babble and pointless, unnecessary and too frequent use of ellipses. I wanted to read this because it is somewhat of a bridge between the Beat scene and the Hippy scene, and after reading it I can confidently say that it leans far into the later. The better parts of the book provide detail and insight into the Merry Pranksters that, considering the great amount of drugs they were digesting, I am honestly surprised by how much is there. If you are interested in the hippy, drug, LSD or Grateful Dead, you should at least attempt a read of this. But be warned, it might give you a headache.
—J.C.
