Ken Kesey’s psychedelic bus, immortalized in “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” is preparing for one more run. And to its owners, America sure could use it.
By Heather Knight in the New York Times
Visuals by Ricardo Nagaoka
Among the rolling hills outside Eugene, Ore., down a winding gravel path and inside a big barn sits a school bus built in 1939. Its once-blazing colors have faded. Its roof is crumbling. Its windows are cracked. The only regular occupants these days are insects.
It might look like a hunk of junk, but the muted technicolor splotches tell the story of one of the most exuberant periods of San Francisco history.
Sixty years ago, this bus symbolized the city’s counterculture revolution, the embrace of psychedelic drugs and the live-out-loud, love-your-neighbor ethos for which the era is remembered.
With the nation once again facing war, polarized politics and cultural battles, Zane Kesey thinks some of that old bus magic is needed. And that is why he has agreed to send the bus, the one he helped cover in swirls of Day-Glo paint when he was 3, back to the city that spawned a movement.
“I would love to see it adored again,” he said. “And for people to feel that pure, innocent love that came out of it.”
His father, Ken Kesey, who died in 2001, had just written the novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” when he purchased the former school bus that a large Bay Area family had tricked out with beds, benches and a refrigerator for road trips. Mr. Kesey and his freethinking friends, called the Merry Pranksters, painted the bus in psychedelic colors, cut a sun roof into it, added a powerful sound system and installed a balcony on top.
The author Ken Kesey, who died in 2001, bought the bus. His son Zane has never known life without it.
A sign on the back read, “Caution: Weird Load.” Above the windshield, where a bus typically displays its destination, somebody painted the misspelled word, “Furthur.” And the name for the bus stuck.
The pranksters set out on a cross-country trip, smoking weed, tripping on LSD and spreading the gospel of opening your mind, man.
The journey was documented in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” hailed by The New York Times back then as not only “the best book on the hippies,” but also “essential.” The bus and its beatnik driver, Neal Cassady, appeared in the Grateful Dead song “The Other One,” which references “Cowboy Neal at the wheel of the bus to never-ever land.”
The bus became part of the landscape of San Francisco’s counterculture movement. In 1967, Mr. Kesey drove it into Golden Gate Park for the Human Be-In, a gathering to protest a California law banning LSD. The event was a precursor to the city’s Summer of Love later that year, during which tens of thousands of young, idealistic people poured into the city’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and the park to protest the Vietnam War and promote hallucinogenic drugs and free love. (continued on page 2 or here)