The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Time makes fools of us all. Although I think we do far worse things to time. We count it. We cling to it. We try to bottle it up, label it. We talk about a year being a good year for everybody, which isn’t just ridiculous but impossible. We paint the past to look nice and shiny - turning it, at best, into a caricature of itself. Then we carry that nostalgic snapshot around with us, close to our hearts, as if it’s connected to the real events we went through.

Growing up in the 1980s was fine, I guess. I didn’t have to worry about the political stuff or the financial stuff. I didn’t have social media to contend with, or twenty four children’s TV to fit into my already busy schedule. I heard people taller than me talking about the Falklands or the IRA, but I didn’t really understand it all. I also, for the record, didn’t put on a Walkman every day and ride my bike with my friends down to the mall to buy a Rubik’s Cube. Which is weird, because I know people who didn’t live in the 80s seem to assume that’s what we all did now. Probably whilst listening to Kate Bush.

I guess it might be the same for anyone who came through the 1960s. I know, to my generation, the 60s and 70s held this strange obsession for some of us. They looked like a worldwide high watermark of hippies, free love, acid, and anarchy. I’ve watched more than my fair share of documentaries on the 60s and the counterculture movement over the years. I’ve also read a lot of Hunter S Thompson, thanks to a youthful encounter with Terry Gilliam’s movie adaptation of Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. That movie was responsible for a lot of nights out with Thompson talking in my head. As a kid who grew up on the Marx Brothers, I could hear Groucho in that growl of a voice. Its fast, warped brilliance. The gonzo attitude to authority.

That interest in the San Francisco scene had made me aware of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test quite early on. It was held up by a lot of people as something pivotal. A Rosetta stone if you wanted to really decode the why and how of the acid scene. I knew the basics. Wolfe had followed Ken Kesey, the genius writer behind the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, trying to make sense of the man and his ambitions when it came to acid and testing the boundaries of consciousness and social normality. Kesey, along with a group of likeminded individuals, had piled onto an old school bus, dressed in some wild costumes, and took legendary doses of all manner of drugs. They kickstarted the hippy movement during their trip across the American psyche. They helped spark the creation of bands like The Grateful Dead. They hooked up with the Hell’s Angels. They terrified white picket fence America and, because Kesey’s mind was so lethally sharp even when under the influence, they got caught plenty of people’s attention and got them thinking, got them talking.

I picked a copy of Wolfe’s book up ages ago, only I could never quite get to grips with the thing. He felt like diet Hunter S Thompson to me at first, which was a bias thing without a doubt. I’d read Lester Bangs ranting record reviews and Bukowski’s drunken slurring poetry far easier than I could ever get into the denser, contorting paragraphs of Wolfe’s shifting point of view. Even William S. Burroughs was a more understandable ride into the fringes of pop culture – if only because you could hear the shock value cast back through polite and startled gasps created by those strange, nightmare paragraphs that Burroughs had written in some broken little Mexican hotel room with a needle in his arm and an apple on his wife’s head.

Deciding to give it another go this year, I made sure I turned down my expectations, and went into the book waiting to see where Wolfe wanted to take me. It was not exactly the experience the hype had led me to believe was waiting for me, sure, but this time it definitely caught my attention.

Wolfe’s writing feels pretty fearless when you consider he was putting this book together for a brace of curious, rubbernecking readers who either want to be tempted into throwing their lot in with Ken Kesey’s way of thinking or were looking for a chance to tut and roll their eyes. Not that Wolfe gives into either side. Instead, he rarely puts himself in the Acid Test as an outsider. He weaves the story through a jumble of narratives strung out as one dancing trip across states both mental and American. You enter the world with him, but the experience shifts you off onto the road pretty quickly. From there, your point of view flows through the main players, through the audience to the wild experiments that Ken Kesey and his bus full of acid taking freedom seekers were attempting wherever they went. Through the people shooting the forty hour plus movie that was going to change the world, if anyone ever actually saw it and could make sense of it.

Wolfe takes you through the highs (at times as literally as he can), and the lows (without pulling a single punch) of what the Merry Pranksters had to endure as they tried to find ways to expand their minds and change the rules. He never pokes fun at them, although he does laugh with him at times. He also captures the paranoia and dayglo insanity that they spread around them as they tried to make sense of the world and each other. He recorded their mutations into alternate names and personalities. He wrote down the results of their games. Their brinksmanship. It’s all a fascinating glimpse into the evolution of a movement. Especially one that was so precariously balanced on the knife’s edge of hallucinogens.

I can definitely see why people get so excited about this book. It’s a weaving, looping theme park ride that the participants can’t seem to get off, no matter how badly they want to at times. Whilst there, at the centre of it, sits Ken Kesey, pulling the controls and listening to the yells and screams around him.

Throughout the book, Kesey is tricky to pin down. Wolfe, who starts the book wanting to understand Ken, finds himself swept along with the charisma and sheer momentum of the man’s intellect. At times, he can feel almost dangerously connected to his bus full of living experiments. At other times, he pulls away, abandons them. Sometimes he outright flees. Also, thanks to Kesey, I don’t think I’ll ever look at Beatlemania the same way again. His visions of a many headed screaming beast watching the band play onstage is going to be a hard one to shift. Although this book is full of those moments. The people spiralling into their own paranoia nightmares. The dancing, wild mania of the parties with bikers and celebrities. The weird, synchronous things that seemed to happen to the pranksters no matter where they went.

Wolfe doesn’t do go for the jugular like Thompson, and he doesn’t crank up the strange for shock value like the beatnik writers who came before him. He, instead, takes the stories and paints something with them. A rippling, shifting mural which refuses to hold still and refuses to let go until the story is ready to settle down and start to live under your skin. It is certainly one of the moment eye opening and head spinning accounts of the 60s I’ve read in a long time.