The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (32 page)

Kesey looks out upon the stroboscopic whirlpool—the dancers! flung and flinging!
in
ecstasis!
gyrating! levitating! men in slices! in ping-pong balls! in the creamy bare essence and it reaches a

Synch

he never saw before. Heads from all over the acid world out here and all whirling into the pudding. Now let a man see what

Control

is. Kesey mans the strobe and a twist of the mercury lever Up

and they all speed up

Now

the whole whirlpool, so far into it, they are. Faster they dance, hands thrown up off their arms like confetti in the strobe flashing, blissful faces falling apart and being exchanged, for I am you and you are me in Cosmo's Tasmanian deviltry. Turn it Down

and they slow down—or We turn down—It—Cosmo—turns down, still in perfect synch, one brain, one energy, a single flow of intersubjectivity. It is
possible
this alchemy so dreamed of by all the heads. It is happening before them Control

CURIOUSLY, AFTER THE FIRST RUSH AT THE ACID TEST, THERE would be long intervals of the most exquisite boredom. Exquisite, because it was so unsuspected after the general frenzy. Nothing would happen, at least not in the usual sense. Those who were ... not on the bus... would come to the realization that there was no schedule. The Grateful Dead did not play in
sets;
no eight numbers to a set, then a twenty-five-minute break, and so on, four or five sets and then the close-out. The Dead might play one number for five minutes or thirty minutes. Who kept time? Who
could
keep time, with history cut up in slices. The Dead could get just as stoned as anyone else. The...

non-attuned would look about and here would be all manner of heads, including those running the show, the Pranksters, stroked out against the walls like slices of Jello.

Waiting; with nobody looking very likely to start it back up. Those who didn't care to wait would tend to drift off, stoned or otherwise, and the Test would settle down to the pudding. The Prankster band started the strange Chinese cacophony of its own, with Gretch wailing on the new electric organ. Norman got up and danced, it being that time. He even fooled about a bit with a little light projection thing of his own, although he didn't think it was good enough, but the magic hours were coming on like electric velvet. Kesey spoke softly over the microphone. They were into the still of the hurricane, the pudding.

AT DAWN — A FREAKING COLD LIGHT ON THE MARSH GRASS AND the beach. A purple shadow all over the ocean like one huge stone-cold bruise. Suddenly the main door bursts open and it's Owsley.

Owsley is lurching and groping and screaming

"Survival!"

It comes out like a steam whistle forced out of a constricted little opening

"Survival!"

Owsley, the Acid King, in his $600 head outfit, groping through the blue bruise dawn with his eyes like disaster craters, hissing

"Survival!"

The sight of Kesey apparently hits him with a surge of adrenaline, however, because he recovers his voice and starts in on Kesey:

"Kesey!"

The gist of it is that Kesey can't do this again. This is the end. The Acid Tests are over. Kesey is a maniac and the Tests are maniacal and the roof is falling in. Taking LSD in a monster group like this gets too many forces going, too much amok energy, causing very freaky and destructive things to happen, and so on. It's his acid and he says this is the end. None of them can figure out precisely what he is saying. Just that he has flipped and Kesey did it.

Little by little, they piece it together. He has had quite a trip for himself on his own LSD, has Owsley. It seems that Owsley took the LSD, a good dose, apparently, and the strobe light and the incredible layers of variable lag began rocking and rippling him and it threw him into a time warp, or parallel time dimension. The heads were always talking about such things. They could cite some serious thinkers, scientists even, such as C. D. Broad and his theory of a
second temporal dimension
—"events which are separated by a temporal gap in one dimension may be adjoined without any gap in the other, just as two points in the earth's surface which differ in longitude may be identical in latitude"—or J. W. Dunne's theory of serialism, or infinite regress—or Maurice Maeterlinck. The heads were always talking about such things and Owsley was primed for it. Then he got high. Then he got caught in the whirlpool, spun out of his gourd by all the special effects of the Pranksters' variable lag devices—and the legend of the trip he took eventually was told as follows: Back he went into the eighteenth century, Count Cagliostro! no longer plain Giuseppe Balsamo of Palermo, the Oakland of the Mediterranean, but the good Count, alchemist, seer, magician, master of precognition, forecaster of lotteries, alchemical creator, from out of base elements of...
this diamond,
greatest and most dazzling in history—
here,
Cardinal Louis de Rohan—
but!
—persecuted as a thaumaturge—thrust into this spinning black donjon, the Bastille, seeping with lurid water and carbonated moss and twitching dismembered rats, anatomized in the flashing light of the diamond they wouldn't believe, a rat shank here, a rat metacarpal there, rat teeth, rat eyes, rat tails leaping and frozen in the air like city lights—that noise—a mob in the streets—either salvation—or—the Bastille begins to disintegrate into absorbent felt cubes—

—and so on. The world began fragmenting on him. It began coming totally to pieces, breaking up into component parts, and he wasn't even back in the twentieth century yet, he was trapped—where?—Paris in 1786? ... The whole world was coming to pieces molecule by molecule now and swimming like grease bubbles in a cup of coffee, disappearing into the inter-galactic ooze and gasses all around—

including his own body. He lost his skin, his skeleton, his pulmonary veins—sneaking out into the ooze like eels, they are, reeking phosphorus, his neural ganglia—

unraveling like hot worms and wiggling down the galactic drain, his whole substance dissolving into gaseous nothingness until finally he was down to one cell.
One human
cell:
his; that was all that was left of the entire known world, and if he lost control of that one cell, there would be nothing left. The world would be, like,
over.
He has to rebuild himself and the entire world from that one cell with a gigantic act of will—too overwhelming. Where does a man start? With California Route 1 so he can get out of here in his car? or will it turn out to be merely the filthy Rue Ventru with the Bastille mobs waiting? or start with the car? the differential? how do they make the bastards?

or the beach? all those freaking grains of sand? the marsh grass? the tourist cabins?

got to put
every
blue door back? or the ocean? or leave it dry? save making all those filthy blind bathosphere black animals down there ... or the sky? how far does it go?

the Big Dipper? the Ursa Minor? the Delphinium? suppose it is really infinite concentric spheres of crystal making infinite gelatinous submarinal vibrations? the Dead? the Pranksters? Kesey, Kesey's
out
for good, Kesey and the bathosphere brutes—but with a superheroic effort he begins. But by the time he gets himself re-made, it is too much. It is overwhelming. He makes his car. He makes the parking lot and the beginning of the road out. He'll make the rest of it as he goes along.
Freak it!

Split!
Leave the rest of the known world to its own devices, out in the gasses. He jumped into the car and gunned off; and smashed it into a tree. A tree he hadn't even put
back
yet. But the crash somehow pops the whole world back. There it is; back from the fat-bubbling ooze. The car is smashed, but he has survived. Survived!

Survival!

and he plunges into the lodge to seek out the maniac Kesey.
That
sombitch has prolly popped back, too.

The Trips Festival

OWSLEY'S FREAKOUT! OWSLEY BECAME OBSESSED WITH IT himself. Whenever the subject was the LSD experience— which it was most of the time around Owsley—he would recount his experience at Muir Beach. It seemed to horrify and intrigue him at the same time—such morbid but wonderful details. Everyone listens ... can such things be? In any case, it sounded like Owsley thought Kesey was a demon and he was going to cut off their LSD supply.

Richard Alpert was also unhappy with the Acid Tests. Alpert, like Timothy Leary, had sacrificed his academic career as a psychologist for the sake of the psychedelic movement. It was hard enough to keep the straight multitudes from going hysterical over the subject of LSD even in the best of circumstances—let alone when it was used for manic screaming orgies in public places. Among the heads who leaned toward Leary and Alpert, it was hard to even freaking believe that the Pranksters were pulling a freaking prank like this. Any moment they were expecting them to explode into some sort of debacle, some sort of mass freakout, that the press could seize on and bury the psychedelic movement forever. The police watched them closely, but there was very little they could do about it, except for an occasional marijuana bust, since there was no law against LSD at the time. The Pranksters went on to hold Tests in Palo Alto, Portland, Oregon, two in San Francisco, four in and around Los Angeles—

and three in Mexico—and no laws broken here, Lieutenant—
only every law of God
and man
—In short, a goddamn outrage, and we're
powerless
—

The Acid Tests were one of those outrages, one of those
scandals,
that create a new style or a new world view. Everyone clucks, fumes, grinds their teeth over the bad taste, the bad morals, the insolence, the vulgarity, the childishness, the lunacy, the cruelty, the irresponsibility, the fraudulence and, in fact, gets worked up into such a state of excitement, such an epitasis, such a slaver, they can't turn it loose. It becomes a perfect obsession. And now they'll show you how
it should
have been done.

The Acid Tests were the
epoch
of the psychedelic style and practically everything that has gone into it. I don't mean merely that the Pranksters did it first but, rather, that it all came straight out of the Acid Tests in a direct line leading to the Trips Festival of January 1966. That brought the whole thing full out in the open. "Mixed media"

entertainment—this came straight out of the Acid Tests' combination of light and movie projections, strobes, tapes, rock 'n' roll, black light. "Acid rock"—the sound of the Beatles'
Sergeant Pepper
album and the high-vibrato electronic sounds of the Jefferson Airplane, the Mothers of Invention and many other groups—the mothers of it all were the Grateful Dead at the Acid Tests. The Dead were the
audio
counterpart of Roy Seburn's light projections. Owsley was responsible for some of this, indirectly.

Owsley had snapped back from his great Freakout and started pouring money into the Grateful Dead and, thereby, the Tests. Maybe he figured the Tests were the wave of the future, whether he had freaked out or not. Maybe he thought "acid rock" was the sound of the future and he would become a kind of Brian Epstein for the Grateful Dead. I don't know. In any case, he started buying the Dead equipment such as no rock 'n' roll band ever had before, the Beatles included, all manner of tuners, amplifiers, receivers, loudspeakers, microphones, cartridges, tapes, theater horns, booms, lights, turntables, instruments, mixers, muters, servile mesochroics, whatever was on the market. The sound went down so many microphones and hooked through so many mixers and variable lags and blew up in so many amplifiers and roiled around in so many speakers and fed back down so many microphones, it came on like a chemical refinery. There was something wholly new and deliriously weird in the Dead's sound, and practically everything new in rock 'n' roll, rock jazz I have heard it called, came out of it.

Even details like psychedelic poster art, the quasi-
art
nouveau
swirls of lettering, design and vibrating colors, electro-pastels and spectral Day-Glo, came out of the Acid Tests. Later other impresarios and performers would recreate the Prankster styles with a sophistication the Pranksters never dreamed of.
Art is not eternal, boys.

The posters became works of art in the accepted cultural tradition. Others would even play the Dead's sound more successfully, commercially, anyway, than the Dead.

Others would do the mixed-media thing until it was pure ambrosial candy for the brain with creamy filling every time. To which Kesey would say: "They know
where
it is, but they don't know
what
it is."

IT WAS ACTUALLY STEWART BRAND WHO THOUGHT UP THE

great Trips Festival of January 1966. Brand and a San Francisco artist, Ramon Sender.

Brand was 27 and an ex-biologist who had run across the Indian peyote cults in Arizona and New Mexico. Brand founded an organization called America Needs Indians. And then one day he took some LSD, right after an Explorer satellite went up to photograph the earth, and as the old synapses began rapping around inside his skull at 5,000 thoughts per second, he was struck with one of those questions that inflame men's brains:
Why Haven't We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?
—and he drove across America from Berkeley, California, to 116th Street, New York City, selling buttons with that legend on them to Leftists, Rightists, Fundamentalists, Theosophists, malcontents, anyone with the health or stealth of paranoia or the put-on in their souls ...

He and his friend Sender got the idea of pulling together all the new forms of expression that were kicking around in the hip world at that moment and having a Super Acid Test out in the open. Hire a hall and call in the multitudes. They found an impresario for the thing, Bill Graham, a New Yorker who had a lot of cachet in the hip world of San Francisco as a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which used to get busted for putting on political dumb shows in the park, that kind of thing.

The Trips Festival was set for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights, January 21—23, at the Longshoremen's Hall in San Francisco. The Trips Festival was billed as a big celebration that was going to simulate an LSD experience, minus the LSD, using light effects and music, mainly. The big night, Saturday night, was going to be called The Acid Test, featuring Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.