Investigative Classics is a weekly feature on noteworthy past examples of the reporting craft.
Grateful Dead fans call the beginning of August the “Days Between” – a period bookended by Jerry Garcia’s birth on Aug. 1, 1942 and his death on Aug. 9, 1995. While Deadheads crank up epic versions of “Dark Star” and “Morning Dew,” we’ll recall one of Garcia’s earliest introductions to a national audience – in Tom Wolfe’s classic 1968 work of reportage, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”
Wolfe’s prose style is as iconoclastic and kaleidoscopic as his main subject, the counterculture embodied and espoused by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, whose most famous effort was a series of acid-drenched raves with live music provided by the Dead.
Although the 1960s is largely remembered as a decade of politics and protests, Wolfe’s book reminds us that the early hippies were more libertarian than leftist, seeking a world not so much with better rules, but fewer rules.
Garcia is featured just once in the book, but it’s a sparkling section that showcases Wolfe’s gift for capturing cosmic cultural forces in the details of his reporter’s notebook. Here's a slightly sanitized taste:
Ken Kesey. Below, Grateful Dead.Kesey had hooked up with a rock 'n' roll band, The Grateful Dead, led by Jerry Garcia, the same dead-end kid who used to live in the Chateau in Palo Alto with Page Browning and other seeming no-counts, lumpenbeatniks, and you had to throw them out when they came over and tried to crash the parties on Perry Lane. Garcia remembered—how they came down and used to get booted out "by Kesey and the wine drinkers." The wine drinkers—the middle-class bohemians of Perry Lane. They both, Kesey and Garcia, had been heading into the pudding, from different directions, all that time, and now Garcia was a, yes, beautiful person, quiet, into the pudding, and a great guitar player. Garcia had first named his group The Warlocks, meaning sorcerers or wizards, and they had been eking by playing for the beer drinkers, at jazz joints and the like around Palo Alto. To the Warlocks, the beer drinker music, even when called jazz, was just square hip. They were on to that distinction, too. For Kesey —they could just play, do their thing.
The Dead had an organist called Pig Pen, who had a Hammond electric organ, and they move the electric organ into Big Nig's ancient house, plus all of the Grateful Dead's electrified guitars and basses and the Pranksters' electrified guitars and basses and flutes and horns and the light machines and the movie projectors and the tapes and mikes and hi-fis, all of which pile up in insane coils of wires and gleams of stainless steel and winking amplifier dials ... [The] house is old and has wiring that would hardly hold a toaster. …
This very night the Pranksters all sit down with oil pastel crayons and colored pens and at a wild rate start printing handbills on 8-1/2 X 11 paper saying CAN YOU PASS THE ACID TEST? ... As the jellybean-cocked masses start pouring out of the Rolling Stones concert at the Civic Auditorium, the Pranksters charge in among them. Orange & silver Devil, wild man in a coat of buttons—Pranksters. Pranksters!—handing out the handbills with the challenge, like some sort of demons, warlocks verily, come to channel the wild pointless energy built up by the Rolling Stones inside.
They come piling [in] ... and suddenly acid and the Worldcraze were everywhere, the electric organ vibrating through every belly in the place, kids dancing not roc dances, not the frug and the—what?—swim, mother, but dancing ecstasy, leaping, dervishing, throwing their hands over their heads like Daddy Grace's own stroked-out inner courtiers—yes!—Roy Se-burn's lights washing past every head, [Neal] Cassady rapping, Paul Foster handing people weird little things out of his Eccentric Bag, old whistles, tin crickets, burnt keys, spectral plastic handles. Everybody's eyes turn on like lightbulbs, fuses blow, blackness—wowwww!—the things that shake and vibrate and funnel and freak out in this blackness—and then somebody slaps new fuses in and the old hulk of a house shudders back, the wiring writhing and fragmenting like molting snakes, the organs vibro-massage the belly again, fuses blow, minds scream, heads explode, neighbors call the cops, 200, 300, 400 people from out there drawn into The Movie, into the edge of the pudding at least, a mass closer and higher than any mass in history, it seems most surely, and Kesey makes minute adjustment, small toggle switch here, lubricated with Vaseline No. 634 —3 diluted with carbon tetrachloride, and they ripple, Major, ripple, but with meaning, 400 of the attuned multitude headed toward the pudding, the first mass acid experience, the dawn of the Psychedelic, the Flower Generation and all the rest of it, and [the landlord] wants the rent.
