****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
This book is around 400 pages and a very detailed history, many stories, and it's hard to remember all the facts, you'll have to read the book yourself for that. The story is of the "Intrepid Travelers," Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters, a communal group of acid ingesters who were the progenitors of the acid consciousness in the California, in the US, in the world's consciousness of awareness . . . "your either on the bus or off the bus."It was the influential chemists, Al Hubbard, Dr. Spaulding and the psychologists, Timothy Leary and Richard Albert, the Harvard psychology professors, who discovered for themselves psylobilin and with Michael Hollingshead and Albert Hoffman, LSD and subsequently held experiments using the right set and setting with experienced psychedelic guides. Yet to this the Merry Pranksters would say, "f**k that!" because they were from a different movie of living; in the now, the unserene and lurid art, your brain being your only guide, not some experienced taker and specific setting for a safe non-freak-out trip (and there were a lot of "freak-outs" from many young, emotionally inexperienced). And the acid influenced cultural movement they began in the early 1960's. It was Leary and Albert who endorsed the "set and setting," the intellectual approach or non-organizational religious approach, the religious experience of the mystics, in their dialogue with acid and mushrooms. With Kesey and the Pranksters it was spontaneous, wild party kind of living in Day-Glow colors, in the multimedia sound and movie.The Pranksters account starts in North Beach on Perry Lane, which becomes a major hang out for all sorts and eventually ends up in a cottage near La Honda, where the loud party of outlandish, Day-Glo painted woods - rigged with microphones and massive sound equipment, in the communal life takes on a new meaning. The Hell's Angels befriend the Pranksters and there are stories of personalities, telepathic and psychic connections and synchronicity in new fields of human life, the overmind, the collective unspoken mind of the psychedelic group. The religious realm of mystical awareness as in the game of I-Ching and dream wars. The Jungian "synchronicity" seemed to occur uncanningly many times, as their bus out of gas in the middle of nowhere only to have a tanker pull up and fuel them from nowhere. The sign on their door welcoming the Hell's Angels to end up having them and succeeding in their prankster madness. The sign on their door welcoming the Beatles, did not synchronize them to appear, but what did was having Oswley appear, the famous acid maker, who in the ways of synchronistic noncausal effect, was responsible for the finest acid which spread to England, the acid that brought the Beatles to experience the unspoken mind which ended them up traveling by bus across the English countryside with cameras and microphones.Imagine a Day-Glo painted bus, the magic bus, with Day-Glo painted people and clothes, tripping on acid traveling from California to the New York World's Faire with music blasting, a freak show on wheels, all in the year 1964! And Neil Cassidy (Jack Kerouac's buddy and drive from On The Road) driving the bus!! And their trip to the legendary Millbrook, thinking it would be some historic meeting with Leary and the Pranksters, but instead it was the mystical religious and intellectuals verses the wild party, American flag draped, painted, loud blaring music, party animals of psychedelic madness. I think it relates to the age and the introvert and/or extrovert type personalities that played the large part.It was actually Stewart Brand who thought up the great Trip Festival of January 1966. The series of acid test parties held by Kesey and the Pranksters helped spawn the movement of higher consciousness, all held at the last minute, the same day notification was put, and the Pranksters playing their instruments, then finding a local band, the warlocks - later known as the Grateful Dead - to play and Roy Seburn's light shows at the acid tests. It was the acid test held in a Unitarian church where the Kool-Aid was spiked, unknowingly to those attending. It was not teachings in the stiff, reverent language and texts of scholarly limnings found in various religions being taught but instead an aura, a religious experience, an awareness that flashed deeper than cerebration, the tradition of the great prophets. People like the beats Allen Ginsberg and his entourage and Neil Cassidy were there. As this spread, so the acid tests, later without Kesey and Haight Ashbury became the scene.Later on Kesey gets busted twice for weed and is on the run from the law, to Mexico and back until caught - he was in their movie that time, fortunately most charges dropped. A lot to read of the characters and generally a great book to get an idea of a unique and special time and place in history where a much larger degree of freedom existed for the white middle class with the ability to gain other realms of consciousness available for the taking. A great pictorial book on this is "On The Bus" by Paul Perry, Michael Schwartz, Neil Ortenberg & Ken Babbs.This was a very exciting adventure with Kesey and the gang. Mysticism, star studded cast, and many radical takeaways!I give this non-fiction book about the brilliant author of Somebody wrote after a 1-star review "well I was there". So was I. As a young Englishman, having just finished University I decided to spend my "last summer of freedom" (before taking up my first 9-5 job) exploring that great mysterious, amazing country called America. It was 1966 and I inevitably ended up on the West Coast and took the wonder drug, with some lovely friends who'd showed up from North Carolina.Does Wolfe accurately chronicle that zeitgiest, that era? Not really. He writes interminable pages of detail about the goings on in and around the cult of the Merry Pranksters, for whom Ken Kesey was the leader.Now I have a considerable respect for Kesey as, along with Timothy Leary, he was a leading figure in the LSD revolution, but Wolfe's work I found first of all extremely parochial - he describes one small corner of the acid scene at that time, and not a typical one - in way that is repetitive and BORING. Afler ploughing through a few chapters of this, I gave up looking for substance, and started skimming the rest of the book to see if things changed. It appeared they didn't so, having paid about ten quid for this "famous classic" I decided that my time is too precious to wade through pages of tedious detail, and tossed it in the recycle bin.If you want a read about that era that is well written, doesn't SMOTHER you with detail, and makes you LAUGH as well, you should read the classic" Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas" by Hunter S. Thmpson, who was also "there", but unlike Wolfe speaks from INSIDE the drug experience, and to an excess which none of us "chemical pioneers" would have dared to venture into.Regarded as a classic but I found it tedious from start to finish. Maybe only the title chapter of the book was actually interesting. I’m a huge Tom Wolfe fan but this was one of the most painful reads I’ve had in recent years.Where did the saying "You're either on the bus or you're off the bus" come from ?Who were the real people in Kerouac's On The Road ?How did The Grateful Dead create such awesome sounds ?What did the Pranksters think about their meeting with The Hell's Angels ? (Hunter Thompson reported it in his book of the same name - this gives the other side of the same story)How did The Beatles come up with the idea for their Magical Mystery Tour ?The answer to these and many more questions about the acid culture of the 60s (when it was a lot safer to pop a tab) can be found in this great read. Highly recommended for anyone who was around at the time and can't remember much about it - also recommended for those who can remember and want a great trip down memory lane.Sex, drugs and The Grateful Dead. It should have been fun and fascinating. I just found the style very hard going. It has some interesting ideas and its probably not Wolfe's fault but the Pranksters come over as a bunch of self indulgent kids playing with shiny (day glo) toys while rolling in the slime. Not my thing perhaps?It is with great appropriatenessnessness that Hunter Thompson, in an S-less state, is mentioned, as the author of "Hell's Angels", as this is the other half of the equation whose solution is "Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas".A psychedelic splurge of a book, covering the acid-soaked start of the California Counterculture, of a type that the Summer of Love represented an end of, not a beginning. As the half-century approaches, read it and enjoy as the past turns into history - and no, they're not the same thing.
