Read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Online
Authors: Tom Wolfe
Tags: #United States, #Social Science, #General, #Popular Culture, #History, #20th Century
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (27 page)
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Cosmo's Tasmanian Deviltry
“CAN
YOU
PASS THE
YOU
PASS THE
ACID TEST?â”
Comes the call
Chiseled on each Prankster eyeball
in Lincoln gothic
As we moan
In this graveyard among moonstone tombstones
with a philosophic
It's
your
assâ
your
assâ
Can
you
pass the Acid Test?
you
pass the Acid Test?
Babbs and Kesey swaying
In a California graveyard, baying
deep
In the synch
Zonked on LSD on the brink
freaking steep
Of a missionary quest:
Can
you
pass the Acid Test?
you
pass the Acid Test?
Tombstones!
Vaults, coffins and bald carbon-dated bones
A dream transfusion
From the Community Breast:
Can
you
pass the Acid Test?
you
pass the Acid Test?
The group mind
Flying high, Major, but not blind
in the moonshine
Was inspired
With the ceremony that would be required
in the moon shot
To extend
The Prankster message to the ends
Of the earth. A mindfest:
a moon ship
The Acid Test â¦
⦠and Kesey emerged from the weird night in the graveyard with the vision of turning on the world, literally, and a weirdly practical way of doing it, known as
⦠and Kesey emerged from the weird night in the graveyard with the vision of turning on the world, literally, and a weirdly practical way of doing it, known as
THE ACID TEST
For, as it has been written: â¦
he develops a strong urge to extend the message to all people ⦠he develops a ritus, often involving music, dance, liturgy, sacrifice, to achieve an objectified and stereotyped expression of the original spontaneous religious experience.
he develops a strong urge to extend the message to all people ⦠he develops a ritus, often involving music, dance, liturgy, sacrifice, to achieve an objectified and stereotyped expression of the original spontaneous religious experience.
Christ! how many movements before them had run into this selfsame problem. Every vision, every insight of the ⦠original ⦠circle always came out of the
new experience â¦
the
kairos â¦
and how to tell it! How to get it across to the multitudes who have never had this experience themselves?
You couldn't put it into words
. You had to create conditions in which they would feel an approximation of
that feeling
, the sublime
kairos.
You had to put them into ecstasy ⦠Buddhist monks immersing themselves in cosmic love through fasting and contemplation, Hindus zonked out in Bhakti, which is fervent love in the possession of God, ecstatics flooding themselves with Krishna through sexual orgies or plunging into the dinners of the Bacchanalia, Christians off in Edge City through gnostic onanism or the Heart of Jesus or the Child Jesus with its running soreâorâ
new experience â¦
the
kairos â¦
and how to tell it! How to get it across to the multitudes who have never had this experience themselves?
You couldn't put it into words
. You had to create conditions in which they would feel an approximation of
that feeling
, the sublime
kairos.
You had to put them into ecstasy ⦠Buddhist monks immersing themselves in cosmic love through fasting and contemplation, Hindus zonked out in Bhakti, which is fervent love in the possession of God, ecstatics flooding themselves with Krishna through sexual orgies or plunging into the dinners of the Bacchanalia, Christians off in Edge City through gnostic onanism or the Heart of Jesus or the Child Jesus with its running soreâorâ
THE ACID TESTS
And suddenly Kesey sees that they, the Pranksers, already have the expertise and the machinery to create a mindblown state such as the world has never seen, totally wound up, lit up, amplified and ⦠controlledâplus the most efficient key ever devised to open the doors in the mind of the world: namely, Owsley's LSD.
For months Kesey has been trying to work out ⦠the fantasy ⦠of the Dome. This was going to be a great geodesic dome on top of a cylindrical shaft. It would look like a great mushroom. Many levels. People would climb a stairway up the cylinderâ
buy a ticket?
â
we-e-e-elllll
â
and
the dome would have a great foam-rubber floor they could lie down on. Sunk down in the foam rubber, below floor level, would be movie projectors, video-tape projectors, light projectors. All over the place, up in the dome, everywhere, would be speakers, microphones, tape machines, live, replay, variable lag. People could take LSD or speed or smoke grass and lie back and experience what they would, enclosed and submerged in a planet of lights and sounds such as the universe never knew. Lights, movies, video tapes, video tapes of themselves, flashing and swirling over the dome from the beams of searchlights rising from the floor from between their bodies. The sounds roiling around in the globe like a typhoon. Movies and tapes of the past, tapes and video tapes, broadcasts and pictures of the present, tapes and humanoid
sounds of the futureâbut all brought together
now
âhere and nowâ
Kairos
âinto the dilated cerebral cortex â¦
buy a ticket?
â
we-e-e-elllll
â
and
the dome would have a great foam-rubber floor they could lie down on. Sunk down in the foam rubber, below floor level, would be movie projectors, video-tape projectors, light projectors. All over the place, up in the dome, everywhere, would be speakers, microphones, tape machines, live, replay, variable lag. People could take LSD or speed or smoke grass and lie back and experience what they would, enclosed and submerged in a planet of lights and sounds such as the universe never knew. Lights, movies, video tapes, video tapes of themselves, flashing and swirling over the dome from the beams of searchlights rising from the floor from between their bodies. The sounds roiling around in the globe like a typhoon. Movies and tapes of the past, tapes and video tapes, broadcasts and pictures of the present, tapes and humanoid
sounds of the futureâbut all brought together
now
âhere and nowâ
Kairos
âinto the dilated cerebral cortex â¦
The geodesic dome, of course, was Buckminster Fuller's inspiration. The light projections were chiefly Gerd Stern's, Gerd Stern of the USCO group, although Roy Seburn had already done a lot with them and Page Browning showed a talent that surprised everybody. But the magic dome, the new planet, was Kesey and the Pranksters. The idea went beyond what would later be known as mixed-media entertainment, now a standard practice in “psychedelic discotheques” and so forth. The Pranksters had the supra-medium, a fourth dimensionâacidâCosmoâAll-oneâControlâThe Movieâ
But why a dome? The answer to all the Prankster fantasies, public and private, the whole solutionâthey already found it; namely, the Hell's Angels party. That two-day rout hadn't been a party but a show. It had been more than a show even. It had been an incredible concentration of energy. Not only Pranksters, but people from all over, heads, non-heads, intellectuals, curiosity-seekers, even cops, had turned up and gotten swept up in the incredible energy of the thing. They had been in the Prankster movie. It was one show that hadn't been separated into entertainers and customers, with the customers buying a ticket and saying All right, now entertain me. At the Angels' party everybody got high together and everybody did his thing and entertained everybody else, Angels being Angels, Ginsberg being Ginsberg, Pranksters being Pranksters, and cops being cops. Even the cops did their thing, splashing those big lush evil revolving red turret lights off the dirt cliff and growling and baying and hassling cars.
CAN
YOU
PASS THE
ACID TEST?
YOU
PASS THE
ACID TEST?
Anybody who could take LSD for the first time and go through all that without freaking out ⦠Leary and Alpert preached “set and setting.” Everything in taking LSD, in having a fruitful, freakout-free LSD experience, depended on set and setting. You should take it in some serene and attractive setting, a house or apartment decorated with objects of the honest sort, Turkoman tapestries, Greek goatskin rugs, Cost Plus blue jugs, soft lightânot Japanese paper globe light, however, but untasselated Chinese textile shadesâin short, an Uptown Bohemian country retreat of the $60,000-a-year sort, ideally, with Mozart's
Requiem
issuing with liturgical solemnity from the hi-fi. The “set” was the set of your mind. You should prepare for the experience by meditating upon the state of your being and deciding what you hope to discover or achieve on this voyage into the self. You should also have a guide who has taken LSD himself and is familiar with the various stages of the experience and whom you know and trust ⦠and Fuck that! That only clamped the constipation of the past, the eternal
lags
, on something that should happen
Now.
Let the setting be as unserene and lurid as the Prankster arts can make it and let your set be only what is on your â¦
brain
, man, and let your guide, your trusty hand-holding, head-swaddling guide, be a bunch of Day-Glo crazies who have as one of their mottoes: “Never trust a Prankster.” The Acid Tests would be like the Angels' party plus all the ideas that had gone into the Dome fantasy. Everybody would take acid, any time they wanted, six hours before the Test began or the moment they got there, at whatever point in the trip they wanted to enter the new planet. In any event, they would be on a new planet.
Requiem
issuing with liturgical solemnity from the hi-fi. The “set” was the set of your mind. You should prepare for the experience by meditating upon the state of your being and deciding what you hope to discover or achieve on this voyage into the self. You should also have a guide who has taken LSD himself and is familiar with the various stages of the experience and whom you know and trust ⦠and Fuck that! That only clamped the constipation of the past, the eternal
lags
, on something that should happen
Now.
Let the setting be as unserene and lurid as the Prankster arts can make it and let your set be only what is on your â¦
brain
, man, and let your guide, your trusty hand-holding, head-swaddling guide, be a bunch of Day-Glo crazies who have as one of their mottoes: “Never trust a Prankster.” The Acid Tests would be like the Angels' party plus all the ideas that had gone into the Dome fantasy. Everybody would take acid, any time they wanted, six hours before the Test began or the moment they got there, at whatever point in the trip they wanted to enter the new planet. In any event, they would be on a new planet.
The mysteries of the synch! Very strange ⦠the Acid Tests turned out, in fact, to be an art form foreseen in that strange book,
Childhood's End,
a form called “total identification”: “The history of the cinema gave the clue to their actions. First, sound, then color, then stereoscopy, then Cinerama, had made the old âmoving pictures' more and more like reality itself. Where was
the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve stimulation of all the senses, and perhaps hypnosis as well ⦠When the goal was attained, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could becomeâfor a while, at least,âany other person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or imaginary ⦠. And when the âprogram' was over, he would have acquired a memory as vivid as any experience in his actual lifeâindeed, indistinguishable from reality itself.”
Childhood's End,
a form called “total identification”: “The history of the cinema gave the clue to their actions. First, sound, then color, then stereoscopy, then Cinerama, had made the old âmoving pictures' more and more like reality itself. Where was
the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve stimulation of all the senses, and perhaps hypnosis as well ⦠When the goal was attained, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could becomeâfor a while, at least,âany other person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or imaginary ⦠. And when the âprogram' was over, he would have acquired a memory as vivid as any experience in his actual lifeâindeed, indistinguishable from reality itself.”
Too freaking true!
THE FIRST ACID TEST ENDED UP MORE LIKE ONE OF THE OLD acid parties at La Honda, which is to say, a private affair, and mostly formless. It was meant to be public, but the Pranksters were not the world's greatest at the mechanics of things, like hiring a hall. The first one was going to be in Santa Cruz. But they couldn't hire a hall in time. They had to hold it out at Babbs's house, a place known as the Spread, just outside of Santa Cruz in a community known as Soquel. The Spread was like a rundown chicken farm. The wild vetch and dodder vines were gaining ground every minute, at least where the ground wasn't burnt off or beaten down into a clay muck. There were fat brown dogs and broken vehicles and rusted machines and rotting troughs and recapped tires and a little old farmhouse with linoleum floors and the kind of old greasy easy chairs that upholstery flies hover over in nappy clouds and move off about three-quarters of an inch when you wave your hand at them. But there were also wild Day-Glo creations on the walls and ceilings, by Babbs, and the place was private and tucked off by itself. In any case, they were stuck with the Spread.
About all the advertising they could do was confined to the day of the Test itself. Norman Hartweg had painted a sign on some cardboard and tacked it onto some boards Babbs had used
as cue signs in the movie, and put it up in the Hip Pocket Bookstore. CAN
YOU
PASS THE ACID TEST? The Hip Pocket Bookstore was a paperback bookstore that Hassler and Peter Demma, one of the Prankster outer circle, were running in Santa Cruz. They left word in the store that afternoon that it was going to be at Babbs's. A few local bohos saw it and came out, but mainly it was the Pranksters and their friends who showed up at the Spread that night, including a lot of the Berkeley crowd that had been coming to La Honda. Plus Allen Ginsberg and his entourage.
as cue signs in the movie, and put it up in the Hip Pocket Bookstore. CAN
YOU
PASS THE ACID TEST? The Hip Pocket Bookstore was a paperback bookstore that Hassler and Peter Demma, one of the Prankster outer circle, were running in Santa Cruz. They left word in the store that afternoon that it was going to be at Babbs's. A few local bohos saw it and came out, but mainly it was the Pranksters and their friends who showed up at the Spread that night, including a lot of the Berkeley crowd that had been coming to La Honda. Plus Allen Ginsberg and his entourage.
It started off as a party, with some of the movie flashed on the walls, and lights, and tapes, and the Pranksters providing the music themselves, not to mention the LSD. The Pranksters' strange atonal Chinese music broadcast on all frequencies, à la John Cage. It was mostly just another La Honda partyâbut then around 3 A.M. a thing happened ⦠The non-involved people, the people just there for the beano, the people who hadn't seen the Management, like the Berkeley people, they had all left by 3 A.M. and the Test was down to some kind of core ⦠It ended up with Kesey on one side of Babbs's living room and Ginsberg on the other, with everybody else arranged around these two poles like on a magnet, all the Kesey people over toward him and all the Ginsberg people toward himâThe super-West and the super-Eastâand the subject got to be Vietnam. Kesey gives his theory of whole multitudes of people joining hands in a clump and walking away from the war. Ginsberg said all these things, these wars, were the result of misunderstandings. Nobody who was doing the fighting ever
wanted
to be doing it, and if everybody could only sit around in a friendly way and talk it out, they could get to the root of their misunderstanding and settle itâand then from the rear of the Kesey contingent came the voice of the only man in the room who had been within a thousand miles of the war, Babbs, saying, “Yes, it's all so
very obvious.”
wanted
to be doing it, and if everybody could only sit around in a friendly way and talk it out, they could get to the root of their misunderstanding and settle itâand then from the rear of the Kesey contingent came the voice of the only man in the room who had been within a thousand miles of the war, Babbs, saying, “Yes, it's all so
very obvious.”
It's all so very obvious â¦
How magical that comment seemed at that moment! The magical eighth hour of acidâhow clear it all now wasâGinsberg
had said it, and Babbs, the warrior, had certified it, and it had all built to this, and suddenly everything was so ⦠very ⦠clear â¦
had said it, and Babbs, the warrior, had certified it, and it had all built to this, and suddenly everything was so ⦠very ⦠clear â¦
The Acid Test at the Spread was just a dry run, of course. It didn't really ⦠reach out into the world ⦠But! soon ⦠the Rolling Stones, England's second hottest pop group, were coming to San Jose, 40 miles south of San Francisco, for a show in the Civic Auditorium on December 4. Kesey can see it all, having seen it before. He can see all the wound-up wired-up teeny freaks and assorted multitudes pouring out of the Cow Palace after the Beatles show that night, the fragmented pink-tentacled beast, pouring out still aquiver with ecstasy and jelly beans all cocked and aimless with no flow to go off in ⦠It is so very obvious.
For three or four days the Pranksters searched for a hall in San Jose and couldn't come up with oneânaturallyâit really seemed natural and almost right that nothing should be definite until the last minute. All that was certain was that they
would
find one at the last minute. The Movie would create that much at least. And what if the multitudes didn't
know
where it was going to be until the last minute? Well, those who were meant to be thereâthose who were in the puddingâthey would get there. You were either on the bus or off the bus, and that went for the whole world, even in San Jose, California. At the last minute Kesey talked a local boho figure known as Big Nig into letting them use his old hulk of a house.
would
find one at the last minute. The Movie would create that much at least. And what if the multitudes didn't
know
where it was going to be until the last minute? Well, those who were meant to be thereâthose who were in the puddingâthey would get there. You were either on the bus or off the bus, and that went for the whole world, even in San Jose, California. At the last minute Kesey talked a local boho figure known as Big Nig into letting them use his old hulk of a house.
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