Review by Richard Meads: Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Posted by sregan | Filed under misc
Told with exactly the kind of disjointed euphoria those proto-hippies must have felt, Wolfe's tale of Kesey's ranch in La Honda reads like a Who's Who of the Sixties.
"Sparkling dazzle!" it says on the back of my copy of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I think this rather misses the point.
Yes, it's the story of The Merry Pranksters: the day-glo, bus-riding pioneers of what would become psychedelic culture. But the tale rolls from the analytical pen of conservative journalist Tom Wolfe, and the story that's really told is massively at odds with the book's garishly optimistic cover art. Originally setting out to investigate the 'fugitive author' Ken Kesey, who in the mid-sixties was on the run from the FBI for narcotics offences, Wolfe is soon drawn into the world of Kesey and his disciples, the Merry Pranksters. To use their own words, he gets 'on the bus'.
It's that very sense of being 'drawn into' something that becomes the major focus of the book. Wolfe, the New York critic-out-of-water, tells the Pranksters' tale in their own words: compiled from a combination of interviews, first hand investigation, and trawling through The Prankster Tapes (they recorded almost everything they ever did, on a day to day basis, either on tape or film), the book offers a rare brand of journalism, in that it's immersively subjective, while at the same time remaining critical. He tells the tale with exactly the kind of disjointed euphoria these proto-hippies must have felt.
And what a tale it is! Kesey's ranch in La Honda reads like a Who's Who of the Sixties. From Hell's Angels to Allen Ginsberg, from the Grateful Dead to The Beatles (sort of), it seems that the Pranksters' experiments had repercussions that reverberated throughout decades. They experimented with variable lag in music, accidently created Acid Rock, pioneered all-night multimedia events and popularised the use of strobe lighting. I was genuinely astounded by just how much we owe to such a small group of innovators in one time and place.
Of course there's a bad side too, and although the experimental, highly stylised Prankster tone carries on into the latter sections of the book, the content becomes increasingly dark as their hastily assembled revolution crumbles about their ears. Again the balance of empathy and critique is maintained masterfully: Wolfe allows us to see both how the Pranksters contributed to the rise of the 'psychedelic wave', and the forces, both within the group and without, that made its downfall inevitable. It's such a fantastic piece of modern tragedy that at times I found myself reading it as fiction.
But it wasn't. And there are many valuable lessons to be learned within this deceptively gaudy-looking volume. For anybody with the slightest interest in the 'hippy' movement - or any musically oriented subculture - this is a fantastic slice of history told in such an immediate way as to make you feel like you've been on the Prankster trip yourself.
- Richard Meads
