The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Selected Book Details
- Paperback
- Author: Tom Wolfe
- Publisher: Picador
- Release Date: August 2008
- ISBN-10: 031242759X
- ISBN-13: 9780312427597
- List Price: $16.00
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryThey say if you remember the '60s, you weren't there. But, fortunately, Tom Wolfe was there, notebook in hand, politely declining LSD while Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters fomented revolution, turning America on to a dangerously playful way of thinking as their Day-Glo conveyance, Further, made the most influential bus ride since Rosa Parks's. By taking On the Road's hero Neal Cassady as his driver on the cross-country revival tour and drawing on his own training as a magician, Kesey made Further into a bully pulpit, and linked the beat epoch with hippiedom. Paul McCartney's Many Years from Now cites Kesey as a key influence on his trippy Magical Mystery Tour film. Kesey temporarily renounced his literary magic for the cause of "tootling the multitudes"--making a spectacle of himself--and Prankster Robert Stone had to flee Kesey's wild party to get his life's work done. But in those years, Kesey's life was his work, and Wolfe infinitely multiplied the multitudes who got tootled by writing this major literary-journalistic monument to a resonant pop-culture moment. Kesey's theatrical metamorphosis from the distinguished author of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest to the abominable shaman of the "Acid Test" soirees that launched The Grateful Dead required Wolfe's Day-Glo prose account to endure (though Kesey's own musings in Demon Box are no slouch either). Even now, Wolfe's book gives what Wolfe clearly got from Kesey: a contact high. --Tim Appelo |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Before raves were "in" there were acid tests
Rating:
Tom Wolfe does an admirable job of getting close to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. He follows them through varied adventures and chronicle such activities as the meetings of the Pranksters and Leary's Harvard group. A glimpse of the early Wizards acid test concerts is given also. The Wizards continued on afterwards for years as the Grateful Dead. Encounters with the Hells Angels are visceral and brutal.
This book is one way to get a glimpse of what was going down when people were turning on at the acid tests.
Couldn't be any longer or stranger trip
Rating: 
There are trips and then there are the trips that Kesey and the Merry Pranksters made and took while on the bus Further back in the early 1960's. Wolfe was just launching his career and this/these trip(s) was the perfect vehicle (pardon pun) to do so. Kesey is striving to turn the world on to the wonders of LSD and the bus Further brings his group - the Merry Pranksters & the drug to America. Wolfe writes in a demanding style of the language of his subjects. It is in Hippie-jargonese that Wolfe accounts for Kesey's life after the success of the novel "One Flew Over The Cuckoo Nest." Wolfe picks up the story after Kesey is first released from prison only later to be hunted to Mexico.
Encounters with the Hell's Angles and numerous law enforcement agencies are also accounted in this new-style of journalism. If the book has any short-comings it is precisely in the style that Wolfe presents. At times this style is entertaining, but too cumbersome at other times. It is unique approach and lays the foundation for some of his other better works (The Right Stuff, Bonfire of the Vanities)but doesn't entice the reader as it should. Good account of hippie life and one of the most influential writers of his generation.
Historic Fun
Rating:
A classic bit of American history and a fun story. Anyone who has ties to psychedelia or enjoys learning about some of the events that made the 60s the unique decade that it was should read this book.
Fun and sociology as a way of change
Rating:
Tom was a bit inaccurate in this delightful reflection of a complex time. These details are for the family to eternally bitch about. Why not? The story is about their personal lives. The value of this piece is in touching on realizing the breakdown of social mores towards an independent and free state of character and concious. To even begin to comprehend these times is not an easy spite. Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" also somehow "begins" to touch on the total freedoms and absurdities of the era. We are all free'er citizens because of these pscycadelic pioneers. Enjoy your no prob. lives-keep character in society!
Product received in fine form and time.
Fun Read, Twice Removed
Rating:
What can be told about Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test? It's a reporting of the Merry Pranksters and their whacked-out, drug addled misadventures across the country with Ken Kesey as their assumed and humble leader. While overall, I was not a big fan of this book, I should not continue without saying that there are some truly entertaining stories to be told here (Kesey's first experience with acid and the "buddha", Kesey meeting Owsley, experiences with the Dead, etc.). In fact, I wouldn't even necessarily not recommend it. I say this because I don't think the problems that I have with this book would bother the average reader.
Having said this, I think that I just see this book as being moot. It's a story told about acidheads, from a person who never actually tried any acid. Anyone who has tried this psychedelic drug will try to explain it's significance to you, but will ultimately admit that it transcends words and it must simply be experienced (unintentional nod to Hendrix). Now, this could potentially not matter (and who would want to read the ramblings of a tripper anyhow?), but a sort of US V THEM scenario is created as a result. The "us" being Wolfe and the reader, and the "them" being the subjects of the book. The author, therefore the reader, seemingly stick out like a sore thumb in a style of book in which the reader is supposed to feel immersed in the time and place. If you want to hear an account of a Phish concert, do you want to hear it from the parents who have brought their 16 year old son to his first concert whilst sitting in the back row covering their mouths with handkerchiefs as to avoid inhaling any marijuana smoke, or do you want to hear from the guy near the front who has created an open space for himself from the reeling of fellow concert goers as to avoid the flailing limbs of his frantic dance? I know my answer.
However, the fatal flaw for me, which may not bother anyone else is that the appeal of the subject matter seemed to diminish as time went on. The book maintained a level of interest in me that was equal the number of pages I held in my right hand. I went from the wide-eyed curiosity of the examination of a group of people determined to change the world, to being bored and kind of angry that a group of drug-addled hedonists had garnered so much attention. They contributed nothing to society, other than proving that simply TALKING ABOUT changing the world won't amount to anything if you simply lie around and trip out and screw each other all day. My interest in this book was a perfect metaphor for the significance of the hippie revolution. In the end, it all went up in a puff of smoke. The admiration of hedonism in our culture hasn't died, but it has taken upon a different form. Thankfully at least taking baths has come back in a big way. If I need a lift in knowing that there are people out there trying to change the world I'll look to the Nelson Mandelas and the Gandhis of the world. And this book will remain as forgotten as a memory of Woodstock.
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