Ken Kesey

They had this little area.

Um, a guy named Ken Kesey and the Merry...

Merry Pranksters.

Merry Pranksters show up in this bus that they had driven all the way over.

Was, was the bus-

F-U-R-T-H-U-R. [laughs] Furthur ends up making it all the way across the country.

Now, this is the last time that the Merry Pranksters and Ken Kesey's bus, Furthur, will be seen in public doing any sort of thing.

This is the one last hurrah.

Meanwhile, the Grateful Dead were pumping LSD into the culture.

And guess who helped? Ken Kesey.

He had his acid from the CIA mind control experiments known as MK Ultra.

Government introduced LSD to the youth, then sat back and watched the chaos.

The dead were the ones who walked out of them and into a career.

Kesey got busted, faked his own suicide, and fled to Mexico, and the band he had adopted kept right on rolling, bigger every year, while the bus sat rusting in a field.

so which was it a meeting of equals or a launching pad with a friendly face the people who loved the partnership point out that it was genuine while it lasted that the affection plainly ran both ways that nobody was using anybody in a room built that loose The people who doubt it point out, just as fairly, that one side stayed obscure and one side became legend, and that history has a quiet habit of promoting the fans of the famous into their co-founders.

The bus is gone now, or it sits somewhere as a relic, depending on which rumor you happen to trust.

The dates line up well enough to tell it that way.

The law arrived, the substance went underground, and the great open experiment folded up its tent.

kessy held one last graduation a strange ceremony for moving beyond the very thing he had built and then he was gone to mexico and the era closed quietly behind him but the harder story insists the tests were already ending on their own and the law only signed a death certificate for something that had mostly stopped breathing In that version, the band had simply outgrown them, the crowds had turned scary, the anarchy had begun to eat itself, and Kesey himself had come to feel that acid had already shown him whatever it was going to show.

The point had been made.

It was a band walking into somebody else's experiment and coming out on the other side as something they didn't plan to become.

Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters timed that night specifically to hijack the Rolling Stones' audience.

The van they pulled into the living room wasn't the draw.

They were part of the apparatus.

Remove the direction.

Remove the place you're supposed to face.

And then Kesey decides to take that out of the woods and put it in public.

Think about how strange the ambition is.

Last two guys standing at this party we were at.

And we started talking about the Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey.

And he goes like this.

My friend Chris goes, listen, it's simple.

mean,

read Ken Kesey and the electric Kool-Aid acid test.

But Tom Wolfe wrote that.

yeah that's really when the all the um what i call jam bands started it was it was the grateful dead and it still goes on today with almond brothers and these guys but and they did this because everyone stoned on acid you could play the same song for half an hour so it's important if you're interested in psychedelic rock uh may 16th 66 pet sounds is released Well, listeners of this podcast know my feelings about Pet Sounds.