‘I never took LSD – it was far too dangerous’

Tom Wolfe tells Mick Brown how he wrote his famed account of psychedelia without drinking the Kool-Aid

In 1964, when Ken Kesey, author and LSD evangelist, and a group of friends calling themselves the Merry Pranksters, set off across America in a bus daubed in psychedelic colours, they talked of being either on the bus or off the bus. It was a phrase both literal and metaphorical. Not simply, were you there, physically – bumping and jolting across the great expanse, jagged on drugs and sleeplessness – but were you there, one might say, mystically? Were you attuned to the deeper, collective acid unconscious, “The Great Flow” as they called it, that, so it was believed, would presage a revolution in consciousness and turn the whole world Day-Glo?

Tom Wolfe was not, in any sense, on the bus. Yet in 1968 Wolfe wrote the definitive account of that journey and its aftermath, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, that would become one of the key texts of the psychedelic revolution that swept across America in the late Sixties. The book is now being republished in abridged form by Taschen in a deluxe edition, featuring extraordinary pictures by the photographers Larry Schiller and Ted Streshinsky, who chronicled Kesey and the California LSD scene when it was in its infancy.

“I think young people today probably look back on that period in the Sixties in much the same way as I look back on the 1890s,” Wolfe says with a laugh. “But it was a very wild time.”

In 1958, Ken Kesey, a former college wrestler, voted in high school “the boy most likely to succeed”, arrived at Stanford University in northern California on a graduate writing course. When a friend suggested there was money to be earned participating in a programme (covertly funded by the CIA) at the nearby Menlo Park hospital to test the effects of psychotomimetic drugs, among them a substance known as LSD, Kesey, who went on to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, eagerly volunteered. Before long, he was experimenting at home with his friends.

In 1964, Kesey purchased an antiquated International Harvester school bus and with 13 friends set out for New York, ostensibly to attend the World’s Fair. At the wheel was Neal Cassady, the fast-talking hero of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and the living connection between the beat generation of the Fifties and the nascent hippie movement. A rolling, carnivalesque advertisement for the coming psychedelic revolution, it would become the most famous bus journey in American history. Returning to San Francisco, Kesey retreated to his home in the woods near La Honda, throwing a series of drug-fuelled parties known as “acid tests”, with the Grateful Dead as the house band. In 1966, after twice being arrested for possession of marijuana, he skipped bail and fled to Mexico, where he remained for nine months before returning to America, and jail. It was at this point that Wolfe entered the story.

Wolfe’s reputation as one of the originators of what would come to be called “the New Journalism” had been established in 1963, when as a reporter on the New York Herald Tribune he came across a story about a hot rod and customised car show. Realising he had stumbled upon an unreported world of car fanatics, he pitched the story to Esquire magazine. But with deadline looming, Wolfe experienced a block. His editor, Byron Dobell, told him to just file his notes, and they’d knock it into shape. Wolfe sat down and in a panic began typing furiously, “Dear Dobell, the first good look I had at customised cars was at an event called a ‘ Teen Fair’…” As Wolfe tells it, Dobell simply struck out the salutation, and ran the notes in full under the title “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”.

Wolfe, who later wrote bestselling novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, had found his voice, and his subject: a new American culture, energised by a booming economy – teenage scenemakers, pop tycoons, hip social butterflies – all captured in a hyperventilating prose as vivid and colourful as the subjects themselves.

In 1966 Wolfe was shown some letters that Ken Kesey had written from Mexico – “marvellous, paranoid chronicles of his adventures and lamentations about the strange fate that had befallen him now that he was a fugitive”. Intrigued, Wolfe arrived in San Francisco to seek out Kesey. He found him, released on bail, at the abandoned pie factory in the city’s skid row district, which the Pranksters had co-opted as their headquarters.

“Kesey had real charisma,” Wolfe remembers. “He came in and they gathered around at his feet as he talked to them in what were essentially parables, about the games that the cops and other people can play with your mind. It was very well done. You could see how disciples become enchanted. And I think that’s what they were – disciples.”

History has come to define the Pranksters as happy anarchists. But Wolfe believes the impulse was essentially a religious one. “Many religions have started out exactly the same way: a small group of people have an ecstatic experience and they want to share this, and convert, the rest of the world. There was one famous acid test where Kesey got on the microphone and said, ‘ Will everyone who is God please come up on stage’, and 12 people came up! It was really extraordinary.”

Wolfe was to spend almost a year interviewing the Pranksters and their fellow travellers, and immersing himself in the hundreds of hours of film and audio recordings made by them on the bus journey. But he made no attempt to fit in – forever the beady-eyed observer, in his trademark three-piece tailored suits and silk ties.

“I was at a party one day. People were dressed in the wildest way you can imagine, and one of the Pranksters, Doris DeLay, came up and said, ‘ You’ve got the weirdest outfit of anybody around here.’ I took that as a great compliment.

“I think the only reason Kesey wanted me around,” he says, “was that if he could get publicity he’d probably have a better fate in the legal system. At one point he came up to me and said, ‘Tom, why don’t you put away that notepad and ballpoint pen and just be here?’ And I knew what he meant. He wanted me to give up my reportorial duties and become a member of this essentially religious sect. And I thought that over – for maybe 10 seconds.”

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test stands as a defining example of New Journalism (“although I didn’t call it that,” Wolfe insists) – reportage employing all of the devices of fiction: reported speech, scene-setting, intimate personal details and the use of interior monologue. The book is threaded with vivid, streamof-consciousness descriptions

‘They had had an ecstatic experience and wanted to share it – like a religion’