Ken Kesey died 10 years ago this month, on the 10th November. In memory of the great man who was “too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie”, here is a brief film interview with the Merry Prankster, where he discusses the characters he met through the Acid Test; the Grateful Dead and The Beatles and the Power of Music; looking for the crack that brings the magic and the Deadheads - what Fame meant and their Legacy.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

 
Variety called Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place “the counter-cultural equivalent of an archaeological dig—or maybe an acid flashback.” Sound about right. The documentary utilizes the legendary 16mm color footage shot by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they rode across America during their infamous 1964 cross-country trip in the psychedelically painted bus dubbed “Further” (a “trip” vividly described in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test). Opening this Friday in New York and on August 12 in Los Angeles, Magic Trip was co-directed by Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney and his long-time collaborator, Alison Ellwood. (It’s also currently available on Pay-Per-View)

This film footage is something that we’ve always read about, but that we’ve have seen very little of, usually just snatches here and there in various documentaries over the years. I always thought it was silent footage, but apparently not, so now we can actually hear the non-stop speedfreak jive of Neal Cassidy, captured for posterity and not merely described on the page. What’s sounds so cool about this movie (which I haven’t seen myself yet) is that the filmmakers opted not forego the route of having elderly burnouts repeating rote anecdotes about events they probably have little memory of in actual fact (especially this crew, they were tripping balls!). Instead they’ve made what they are describing as an “immersive” experience that tries to recreate, to the extent possible, what it was like to BE there when it happened. Along the way, aside from Kesey and motormouth Cassidy, the audience meets Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir and the Grateful Dead, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, Ken Babbs and the other Merry Pranksters.

There is an interesting article about the making and history behind Magic Trip that appeared in the New York Times over the weekend. Charles McGrath writes:

In all Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, as his crew called themselves, shot some 40 hours of 16-millimeter film, but the project was never really finished. As Mr. Wolfe wrote, “Plunging in on those miles of bouncing, ricocheting, blazing film with a splicer was like entering a jungle where the greeny vines grew faster than you could chop them down in front of you.” Kesey showed all 40 hours unedited a couple of times and also hacked the footage up into various shorter versions before stowing the film cans in his barn, near Eugene, Ore., where they rusted away — until Mr. Gibney and Ms. Ellwood showed up.

Kesey was onto something similar to what we would now call reality television: scenes of people with odd names (Mal Function, Gretchen Fetchin, Generally Famished) getting stoned and behaving weirdly. After publishing the novels “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Sometimes a Great Notion,” he had by 1964 wearied of writing or so fried his brain with hallucinogens that he embraced what he saw as a brand new art form: a drug-enabled psychic quest that would document itself as it was happening. The famous bus — a psychedelic-painted International Harvester with a sign in front that said “Furthur” and one in back that warned “Weird Load” — was wired for sound, and there was a movie camera on board. With Kesey sometimes directing and sometimes just standing back and watching, the Merry Pranksters filmed one another and also their interactions with an uncomprehending public when, for example, Neal Cassady drove the bus backward down a Phoenix street as the Pranksters, stoned on LSD, pretended to campaign for Barry Goldwater for president.

This is an major-league, important part of American history that’s been unearthed here. I can’t wait to see this!
 

 
Thank you Shana Ting Lipton!

In the winter of 1963, Kirk Douglas returned to theater in the first stage production of Ken Kesey’s novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Douglas starred as McMurphy, with a supporting cast that included Gene Wilder as Billy Bibbit, and Ed Ames as Chief Bromden. What should have been a triumphant return for Douglas and a theatrical success for Kesey’s novel proved to be a disaster, which was savaged by critics and closed after 11 weeks.

On January 7th of 1964, sickened by the relentless stream of invective from the press, Kesey wrote the following letter to the New York Times, defending the production, its cast, and in particular, responding to the journalists who had criticized the play for its “unrealistic storyline”. Little did these reviewers know the truth of Kesey’s novel. Now read on.

KIRK DOUGLAS
ONE FLEW OVER THE
CUCKOO’S NEST

January 7, 1964

From: Ken Kesey, [Redacted]

Drama Mailbag:

The answering of one’s critics has always struck me as doing about as much good as fighting crabgrass with manure. Critics generally thrive on the knowledge that their barbs are being felt; best to keep silent and starve them of such attention, let them shrivel and dry, spines turned in. So I have tried to keep this silence during the attacks on the Wasserman play of my novel, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest…figuring that the people who saw the play as being about a mental hospital, because it is set in a mental ward, are the sort that would fault Moby Dick for being an “exaggerated” story about a boat, also figuring that such simplemindedness is relatively harmless. And even keeping silent when the play was condemned because the subject of mental health as a whole was treated disrespectfully, or irresponsibly, or—god forbid!—humorously.

But when the defenders of “Cuckoo’s Nest” begin to show signs of suffering some of the same misconceptions as the critics, I feel I must speak out.

Mr. Friedman’s letter last Sunday was as good an argument as I’ve read for judging a work on it’s own terms. Still, by comparing the reality of the setting of “Cuckoo’s Nest” with “1984” or “The Trial,” he does injustice to a number of people connected with the research that went into that setting. First, the director, Alex Segel, who created an atmosphere so faithful to the wacky-weird world of a nuthouse ward (faithful to the real wards, not the public conception of what a hospital should be like) that a friend of mine, (a Speech Therapist in a V.A. Hospital who took time off to fly back to the opening), remarked after the final curtain, “I feel as though I just put in a hard day at the office.”

Second, the actors. Who capture that nuthouse feeling so completely with their characterizations that I found myself wondering where some of them had been sprung from. Just, for a small example, their movement: inmates have a way of walking that is both piticully random and terribly purposeful, and peculiar to no other place I know of save the mental ward. The cast has this peculiar movement. Watch Ruckly when he shuffles onto stage; he’s been shuffling that same path in those same slippers for centuries. Or watch Billy Bibbit’s neck contortions, or the caged-squirell frolicking of Marini’s madness. And Kirk Douglas..after watching his performance, in which the usual Douglas’ gestures and gyrations were secondary, to subtler actions (the way he will playfully punch another character’s arm as he passes, a gesture barely noticible, familiar, reinforcing..) I asked if he had visited any hospital in preparing for the part. “Spent a lot of time in Camarillo,” he told me. “Got to know a lot of the guys. I still correspond with one. “Quite a place. And different, you know? then you think it’ll be…”

And last, the notion that this setting is only a fictional and fantastic one does an injustice to thousands of patients in hundreds of wards almost identical to that ward on the stage of the Cort. While Cuckoo’s Nest is, as Mr. Friedman rightly points out, about more than just a mental hospital, it is also an attack on tyranny of the sort that is perhaps more predominant in mental hospitals then any place else in our land. It is by no accident that the acute ward was picked for the setting; after working for close to a year as an aide in two hospitals in California I could imagine no better backdrop for my parable. I only needed describe what I had seen and heard, what I had felt after endless swing shift hours talking with the broken and defeated men of our society, and what I concluded to be the stress thar broke them. McMurphy is, of course, fictional—a dream, a wild hope fabricated out of need in defeat—but the men he comes to save, and the menace he battles, these are real, live human being. While this world may be fantastic, it is not mere fantasy. Neither is it an exaggeration; when I hear of someone accusing the book, or the play, of “exaggerating the bad” I think of my last days at the hospital: the first draft of the book almost finished, I had handed in my letter of resignation (a day before, incidently, I received a letter from the superior nurse advising me I was being discharged for “a lack of interest in the hospital…”) and I had only one bit of research left: I wished to try shock treatment to get some idea why the patients thought it so bad. And I did. And I found out. And to those who think it is fictionally exaggerated I only say try it first and see.

Because it can never be as bad in fiction as it is in real life.

 
See Ken Kesey’s letter, after the jump…
 
Via Letters of Note
 

Mark Christensen discusses his new book about Merry Prankster/novelist Ken Kesey, Acid Christ: Ken Kesey, LSD, and the Politics of Ecstasy. Christensen himself, “grew up around the Kesey Chautauqua,” and weaves in incidents from his own life (like arm-wrestling Kesey!) into the narrative, in the process speaking to the notion of how Ken Kesey influenced his own life and values, coming of age within the hippie/counterculture milieu of the Pacific Northwest. Acid Christ is a “sheep’s eye-view of the shepherd,” and an interesting experiment in biography.