The acid test was breaking out into an area in which it had no specific goals. It was just discovering what there was out there if you continued to move away from the norm.

It was a test. And there were people that passed, and there were people that didn't pass.

When we did the show up in Portland—to give you an idea of someone who passed—some businessman, just walkin' around on the street, came in; we charged a buck, and for a buck you got to see us make all our noise, and the Dead make all their noise, and anything else that happened.

This guy was in a suit, and he had an umbrella. He got the customary cup of stuff. And about midnight, you could see him really get ripped. Somebody who'd probably never been anything but drunk on beer. But he looked around, and he saw all these strange people, and he looked down, and the spotlight was showing down on him, and he saw his shadow.

And he stands up straight, puts that umbrella over his shoulder, and he says:

"The king walks."

And:

"The king turns around."

And:

"Now the king will dance."

—Ken Kesey

The first Merry Pranksters bus trip was crosscountry in 1964, to visit the World's Fair in New York.

After intensive preparations, they, at last, in the bus, pulled out.

And ran out of gas. While still on their embarkation point: Ken Kesey's wild-wooded La Honda, California, property.

On a bridge. They ran out of gas.

Across the many miles of their journey, they were stopped frequently by police.

But they were not harassed about hippies or drugs.

Because there were no hippies or drugs.

Yet.

Just the Pranksters.

Even if the cops had found the LSD and such, there was nothing the cops could do about it. Because LSD, and such, was then legal.

They invented tie-dye, the Pranksters, in Arizona.

It came about like this: Neal Cassady, for no sane reason, drove the bus off the road, and into a field, and it got stuck.

While they waited for help, they dosed. And, in the course of things, decided to pour some colorful enamel-based paint into some water. Where it floated.

They told Zonker to take off his white t-shirt, and they ran it under the floating paint, then lifted the shirt up, now streaked with color.

Thus: tie-dye.

It was at this same spot that communication was achieved with the algae people.

Gretchen Fetchin first, high as any and all gods, contacted pond water. And then the algae in it.

The algae was quite pleased. It had been trying for eons to communicate with human beings. And now, at last, it had succeeded.

The acid additionally allowed communication with machines.

During the Stanford experiments, Kesey would sometimes switch off the tape recorder he was supposed to use to record his experiences. Because he understood that the tape running through the recorder was the recorder's brains. And he, compassionately, didn’t want to use up all the machine's brains.

They, the crosscountry 1964 Pranksters, were so beyond politics that their one foray into that forever and always larval world consisted of painting the words "A Vote For Goldwater Is A Vote For Fun" on the bus and then driving it backwards down the main streets of Goldwater's hometown of Phoenix.

In New Orleans they decided they wanted to swim. So they drove the bus into the parking lot of a big public lake, and then got out and went swimming.

It was quite some time before they realized they were swimming in segregated waters: on the "black beach."

They didn't know this because they didn’t pay attention to such things. It wasn't of their world.

When they got to NYC Robert Stone met them, and he got on the bus. He said that driving through the NYC streets was 'like being in an aquarium."

Kesey said "the bus was the best it ever was in Harlem," because there the black people got it immediately.

They went to the World's Fair.

Stone observed that all the visions of "Tomorrowland" there on display were already over. Because the real Tomorrowland was the bus.

They went up to Millbrook to pay a friendly call on Leary and the East Coast acid people.

It was an awkward meet. Leary grabbed Cassady and took him upstairs; Leary did not want to hang with the other Pranksters. The remaining Millbrook people went into hiding. Except for Ram Dass (then still Alpert), who tried to explain to the Pranksters the principles of "control" in re acid.

As Gretchen Fetchin observed, "they were cold and clinical; we were freeform. We were explorers; they were the scientists."

So the Kesey people went and dosed in a waterfall.

In Yellowstone Kesey saw a sign that said "Beware Of The Bear."

And realized it used to be, once upon a mind, "Be Aware Of The Bear"—an appropriate form of consciousness.

But now, these days, with "Beware Of The Bear" consciousness, people live in fear.

And that’s all that they are. Fear.

When they got back to La Honda they met every Saturday night to try to put together the 40 hours of 16mm film they'd accumulated on the trip. People started coming over to watch this. These audiences soon outgrew Kesey's house, or Babbs' house, so they started renting cheap halls. And thus was born the Acid Tests.

They decided it would be fun to have a band, to play, while trying to edit the film.

And thus, the Grateful Dead.

Kesey said the special thing about the Dead was that they would play what the audience was feeling.

The Dead's Garcia said "our first and best audience," was the Acid Test people.

Before LSD was even made illegal, the Pranksters held the Acid Test Graduation.

As Kesey said, "any head knows that you take drugs so you eventually don't have to take drugs."

By this time the world knew about hippies and drugs, and Kesey was in what he would later describe, when writing about John Lennon, as "the spotlight." And so he needed to be arrested.

LSD wasn’t illegal yet, so they arrested Kesey for marijuana.

He served six months in jail.

He determined he didn't ever want to go into a cage again.

So he moved to the farm, up in Oregon, so he could control a large section of physical space, with the ability to keep cops and other manifestations of the world off it.

It’s a West Coast thing. Hunter Thompson did it too.

As Robert Stone observed, the East Coast solution is more to drop $7 million on some postage-stamp-sized suite at some fashionable NYC address. And there burrow in.

The farm was open to all and sundry until Kesey discovered one day "a hippie warren" in the hay in the loft of the barn where he and his family lived. And in this warren was a candle somebody had stuck in the hay, and that somebody had let that candle burn down to a nub. The whole farm could have gone up in flames. So, for a time, Kesey put a sign out on the front gate that said, simply, "No." Understanding, with Herman Melville, that "only the man who says 'no' is free."

Kesey denied that he ever "wanted to be a writer."

"I'm a magician," he said. "Writing is just one of my tricks."

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