The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

In the very brief Chapter 17, titled “Departures,” Wolfe again writes in poetry to explain changes going on within the Merry Pranksters. Kesey posts a cryptic message on the bulletin board in La Honda telling everyone that they should prepare to go to Mexico, but he provides no details. Mountain Girl returns to her home in Poughkeepsie, New York, because she is pregnant. Likewise, Sandy Lehmann-Haupt returns home to seek treatment after his face becomes partially-paralyzed from drug use. Sandy asks Kesey for some of the sound equipment that he brought with him to La Honda so that he can sell it for medical expenses, but Kesey refuses.

In Chapter 18, Wolfe discusses the formation of the Acid Tests, which Kesey conceives one night in a graveyard with Ken Babbs. His thinking is that the multitudes needed to have an experience for themselves, and that this could be accomplished if he created the conditions. Their model for the Acid Tests is the two-day party that they threw with the Hell’s Angels. This is because “it had been an incredible concentration of energy” (232). The first Acid Test is held at Babbs’s house near Santa Cruz. Wolfe writes that it “ended up more like one of the old acid parties at La Honda, which is to say, a private affair, and mostly formless” (234). The second Acid Test takes place at a large house following a Rolling Stones concert in San Jose and draws a large crowd because the Pranksters hand out handbill advertisements to the crowd. Kesey arranged for a musical act in a rock band named the Grateful Dead, led by Jerry Garcia, whom he remembered as a “dead-end kid” at Stanford that he used to kick out of parties on Perry Lane (236).

The third Test is scheduled to take place at Stinson Beach near San Francisco, but it is switched at the last minute to nearby Muir Beach. Despite the handbills going out with the wrong location, it is still a good turnout. The Grateful Dead plays again, Kesey has added a giant strobe light for increased psychedelic effect, and the Pranksters run The Movie on the wall of the lodge via projector. Owsley shows up as well, and takes some of his acid, something no one had ever see him do before (243). Hours later, Owsley bursts through the lodge doors ranting at Kesey and demanding that the Acid Tests stop because “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” (246). According to Wolfe, Owsley took a large dose of LSD and became thrust into a paranoid trip because of the strobe light and other Prankster special effects.

Wolfe begins Chapter 19 explaining that Richard Alpert, the academic who, like Timothy Leary, sacrificed his career “for the sake of the psychedelic movement,” is against the Acid Tests because he fears a mass freakout could occur and destroy the movement altogether (249-50). Despite the protests of such high-profile LSD proponents, the Acid Tests continue along the West Coast and “were the epoch of the psychedelic style and practically everything that has gone into it” (250). The subgenre of “Acid Rock, pioneered by the Grateful Dead,” came directly from the Acid Tests, as did “mixed media” entertainment, the combination of lights, movie projections, and music (250). Billed as a three-day celebration that would simulate the LSD experience with lights and music, but not the actual acid, the Trips Festival is scheduled for January 21-23, 1966 in San Francisco with Kesey and the Pranksters having an Acid Test mixed in (252).

Only two nights before the Festival is to begin, Kesey and Mountain Girl, who has since returned from New York, are busted for possession of marijuana. From his previous arrest, he was already being sentenced to six months on a work farm, but now he faced a mandatory five-year sentence (258). Despite his attorney advising against it, Kesey attends the festival, and it “was a big thing on every level” (263). Wolfe points out that local promoter Bill Graham began packing the Fillmore Auditorium with a Trips Festival every weekend. He argues that “the Haight-Ashbury era began that weekend” (263). Just after the Festival, Kesey holds a briefing and tells the Pranksters that he is going on the run, to Mexico, and one last grand prank would be his cover story. He writes a suicide note and has a friend smash his truck into a tree near a cliff overlooking the ocean.