PLEASANT HILL, Ore. – When the late author Ken Kesey and his pals, the Merry Pranksters, took their psychedelic bus ride across America to visit the New York World’s Fair, the nation was mourning President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the Grateful Dead was not yet a band.
And, perhaps most importantly, LSD still was legal.
For their trip, they rode in a bus painted with brightly colored swirls, outfitted with a sound system and emblazoned with the word “Further” as the destination.
“The whole psychedelic scene came from that bus trip,” said Kesey’s son, Zane, who as a 3-year-old helped paint the bus and waved a tearful goodbye as it drove away.
Now, on the 50th anniversary of the journey, he has launched a campaign on the crowd-funding site Kickstarter, looking for a few good modern-day Pranksters to contribute $200 each for a chance to do it all again, though on a different bus. And without the LSD.
His father, who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, had been a guinea pig for government tests of the mind-altering drug and shared the experience at a series of parties at his home in the hills above Stanford University that became known as the Acid Tests.
They featured a local bar band called The Warlocks, which turned into the Grateful Dead.
It soon became clear the family station wagon would not be big enough, so Ken Kesey sent a friend up to San Francisco to check out an ad for an old school bus converted into a camper, with bunks and a kitchen, Babbs said.
During the acid-trip journey, the bus was pulled over by a police officer in California, got bogged down in an Arizona river and lost one of its crew to a bad trip in Texas. In New York, they met poet Alan Ginsberg, who took them to a Connecticut estate to meet LSD guru Timothy Leary. The tapes and film from the trip gave author Tom Wolfe the material he needed for his 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which made the trip a touchstone of the psychedelic era.
People who want a chance to get on the bus must invest $200 and pass a series of tests, answering questions such as whether they like movies about gladiators. The chosen will get a token to board the bus for a leg and join in making a new movie.
