The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, nonfiction book by American writer Tom Wolfe, published in 1968, that became a classic of the 1960s counterculture and is one of the most notable works of New Journalism.
As exemplified by the work of Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, and Joan Didion, as well as Wolfe, New Journalism creatively blurs the boundaries between the techniques of fiction and those of journalistic reporting. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Wolfe’s account of novelist Ken Kesey and his roving band of acolytes and performance artists, the Merry Pranksters, Wolfe tries, as he claims, “to re-create the mental atmosphere or subjective reality” of the experience.
The book begins with Wolfe’s first meeting with Kesey, near the end of the events described in the narrative. It then moves into a brief background on Kesey, describing his introduction to psychotropic drugs when he joined an experiment at the veterans’ hospital in Menlo Park, California, and his infatuation with the results. During this time, Kesey publishes the books for which he is best known, and when he returns from Oregon to the bohemian Perry Lane enclave near Stanford University, his fame attracts such friends as Beat adventurer Neal Cassady, writer Larry McMurtry, Richard Alpert (later the spiritual leader Ram Dass), and musician Jerry Garcia. Later, Kesey moves to La Honda, California, inviting his friends to join him there. In La Honda, Kesey becomes the leader of the group and buys the school bus, that, painted in psychedelic colors and wired with speakers and microphones, is given the name Furthur.
Kesey and the Merry Pranksters plan to travel in the bus, driven by Cassady, to New York City for the 1964 World’s Fair, stopping first in Arizona for a group LSD trip and to shoot a movie. The journey continues, with stops in Houston, New Orleans, and Pensacola, Florida, before going on to New York City. Here Kesey attempts to meet Timothy Leary, but Leary is not interested. The Merry Pranksters return through Canada to La Honda, where the growing group and chaos attract police attention, and eventually Kesey is arrested.
In 1965, the Merry Pranksters have a two-day party with the Hells Angels motorcycle gang. Events from this time were also covered in Thompson’s book Hell’s Angels (1967). The Pranksters also attend a Beatles concert that year. Later, Kesey decides to start holding Acid Tests, modeled on the party with the Hells Angels. The first such event takes place at the home of his friend Ken Babbs in Santa Cruz, and the next in a house in San Jose after a Rolling Stones concert; at this Acid Test, attendees are serenaded by the Grateful Dead. The Acid Tests continue until, just before the first Trips Festival in San Francisco, Kesey is arrested for marijuana possession.
Kesey flees to Mexico, and Babbs takes over leading the Acid Tests. However, the Pranksters are not as comfortable with Babbs, and many go to join Kesey in Mazatlán. It becomes increasingly clear that authorities are watching them in Mexico, and Kesey decides to return to the U.S. as a fugitive from justice. He makes increasingly brazen public appearances and is finally arrested. He is released after he promises to hold a “Graduation,” at which he will tell his followers to move beyond using hallucinogens. The “Graduation” fizzles, and Kesey has to serve time, after which he returns to California.
Wolfe’s book unfolds like a verbal Pop art painting. It offers an extraordinary collage of the Pranksters’ world, taking in hippie slang, comic book impressionism, and cinematic jump cuts. Wolfe’s style bends and skews to fit itself to the contours of how it might have felt to be there with them, making it a necessary document of the rise and eventual fall of a particular era and mentality. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test hangs together so well stylistically that one cannot always tell where history ends and Wolfe’s journalistic riffs begin. It is an exhilarating and exhausting experience that sucessfully immerses the reader into the experience.
