Micah Loewinger: Hey, Brooke.

Brooke Gladstone: Hi, Micah.

Micah Loewinger: So iOS, the Apple operating system has made some changes recently that I think may make it harder for people to listen to On the Media. I've just learned this, but most of our podcast listeners listen on the Apple Podcast app and so it's likely affecting them.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, I listen on that.

Micah Loewinger: I want to walk you through how to change a setting that will greatly improve your On the Media listening experience.

Brooke Gladstone: Okay, but you know how I get when it comes to technology.

Micah Loewinger: [laughs] This is easy, I promise. Go to the podcast app.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm on it.

Micah Loewinger: Go to your favorite podcast On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone: All right.

Micah Loewinger: In the top right-hand corner, do you see a checkmark or do you see Plus Follow?

Brooke Gladstone: Plus Follow.

Micah Loewinger: Click Plus Follow.

Brooke Gladstone: It turns to a check mark?

Micah Loewinger: That's how you know that you have it right. Which means that if you're out and about, and you decide you want to listen to On the Media, it will be there waiting for you. You don't have to stream it, you don't have to use data to download the episode.

Brooke Gladstone: All right, all right, all right. I'm sold.

Micah Loewinger: [laughs] Good. Very good.

Brooke Gladstone: That's not why we're here.

Micah Loewinger: No.

Brooke Gladstone: We're here to talk about Bicycle Day.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. Bicycle Day.

Brooke Gladstone: It was when the inventor of LSD rode home on his bicycle inadvertently and unknowingly, high.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. The April 19th, 1943. The scientist was Albert Hoffman. I'll be honest, this is an excuse for us to rerun one of my favorite episodes that you and I worked on together in 2018.

Brooke Gladstone: I know. You were so young then.

[laughter]

Micah Loewinger: That's true. Arguably, I'm still so young. At the time I was--

Brooke Gladstone: You were still in short pants [laughs].

Micah Loewinger: Hey, you must not spend enough time with me in person. I still wear the short shorts.

[laughter]

Micah Loewinger: This was a story that I pitched and produced for you about Ken Kesey, who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. A friend of mine, River Donaghey, who's a writer and filmmaker. He also made a recent podcast called Good Cult in which he investigates the cult that he grew up in. He came to me with a hard drive filled with audio recordings. The original never-before-aired on radio recordings of Ken Kesey's never made documentary [laughter] about his road trip across the United States from California to New York that was documented in Tom Wolfe's great book, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes. The multi-colored DayGlowed bus.

Micah Loewinger: This sent us down a fun rabbit hole where we ended up thinking, "Well, maybe we should talk to Tom Wolfe himself." I reached out to him and ended up scoring us an invite to his penthouse on the Upper East Side overlooking Central Park.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, I remember it well. It was full of round mahogany bookcases and orchids, Hepplewhite furniture, books everywhere, art on the walls. It was quite the place.

Micah Loewinger: It was. I was taking pictures--

Brooke Gladstone: We could post a picture of them.

Micah Loewinger: Oh, yes. We'll definitely-- Follow On the Media on Instagram to see some of these vintage photos. What was your experience interviewing him?

Brooke Gladstone: Well, I have had some experience talking to very old people. You really have to meet them on their terms. It was very clear that there was only going to be a very little bit that we could use. He couldn't speak that well.

Micah Loewinger: Actually, at the time, I don't think I appreciated the significance of us being there, because we visited him on March 8th, 2018, and on May 14th, 2018, Tom Wolfe passed away. That visit may very well have been the last interview with him.

Brooke Gladstone: Quite likely. I'm glad we've gotten another excuse to run it. Listeners, enjoy.

River Donaghey: Kesey's story really starts in the late '50s when he was a graduate student at Stanford's Creative Writing Program.

Brooke Gladstone: River Donaghey, a filmmaker and writer based in Brooklyn.

River Donaghey: Up until that point, Kesey was this all-American farm boy. He was a college jock and married his high school sweetheart. He had a very wholesome childhood. When he got to Stanford, he needed money to support his new family. He got this job basically being a Guinea pig for clinical drug trials in a nearby hospital.

Brooke Gladstone: The drug trials at Menlo Park Veterans Hospital were marketed as research for treating mental illness. We know today that they were part of Project MKUltra, the CIA's mind control study. Kesey was given a few different drugs, an early antidepressant called IT-290, a vomit-inducing antibiotic called Ditrim.

River Donaghey: One of the pills was LSD.

Brooke Gladstone: How did he feel on LSD?

River Donaghey: Well, you got to put yourself in Kesey's shoes at that point. It's the end of the '50s. It's like Mad Men era. It's suburbs and housewives and dad with the briefcase and the suit going off to work. It was a very repressed time. There's a very narrow window of what was socially appropriate. LSD cracked Kesey's brain open to all these new possibilities, new perspectives, and new ways of viewing the world.

Brooke Gladstone: We actually have some audio from one of Kesey's first experiences with LSD in the Menlo Park Hospital. This was in 1959 or '60.

[door knock]

Ken Kesey: Yes.

Nurse: How are you feeling right now? Do you feel there is still some effect to the drug?

Ken Kesey: Oh, yes. It's strong.

River Donaghey: He's in this little white box, this tiny, little room in the hospital's mental ward. He's sitting there taking this LSD, and periodically, orderlies and nurses are coming in and out, taking blood samples and urine samples. Was not really the ideal place to have an Acid trip.

Ken Kesey: It's quarter to 1:00. I'm high out of my mind, such a good drug in that suddenly, I'm filled with this great loving and understanding of people. Nobody's going to get high on this and go out and rape somebody. They might go out and take a little girl over the hand and give her a bottle of flowers, but that would be all. I say public support has to get behind it. We need a huge missionary. We may need a Messiah.

Brooke Gladstone: We need a huge missionary. We need a Messiah.

River Donaghey: I think Kesey really had this spiritual awakening. I think he saw that there was a path to go down. That all these structures that he had accepted as reality weren't really reality. There were all these different options out there that he had the ability to go explore and figure out where he fit within those.

Brooke Gladstone: He found himself catalyzed creatively by those sessions in Menlo Park.

River Donaghey: In doing these drug tests and in experiencing LSD, Kesey had an idea. "Oh, naturally, I'll go get a job at the mental hospital as a night watchman and sneak some of that Acid out for my friends back at home." Also, as a night watchman, have a lot of time to sit and write. That's where late one night high on psychedelics, he has this vision of one institution patient called Chief Broom, this hulking Native American man. He just starts writing and he writes five pages, six pages of this book that ends up becoming One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Brooke Gladstone: A humanizing portrait of mental illness and civil disobedience. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, released in 1962, made Kesey a literary sensation at the age of 27. It also boosted his profile as a burgeoning Acid messiah, a devoted entourage that he would later dub the Merry Pranksters began to coalesce around him.

River Donaghey: Kesey took some of the money from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and bought this house in La Honda, California out in the woods. That house in La Honda became this proto-commune with people flowing in and out. He also had the LSD and he was throwing really good parties out there in the woods. People naturally gravitated towards him.

Brooke Gladstone: Among the Merry Pranksters, Neal Cassady, a speed freak and the muse of the beach generation, inspiring the main character and On the Road by Jack Kerouac and the Heartthrob Vagabond in Allen Ginsberg's poem, Howl.

Ken Kesey: Neil Cassidy, secret hero of these poems. Joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots and diner backyards.

Brooke Gladstone: It was Cassidy who would ultimately drive that legendary bus.

River Donaghey: To get into the bus trip, we have to start in 1963. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest became a Broadway play starring Kirk Douglas. Kesey and a couple of his friends drove out to New York to go check the play out. On their way back--

News clip: President Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally were shot from ambush today in a motorcade, both are still alive, but in very serious condition in the emergency room at the Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Texas.

[music]

River Donaghey: They're sharing this very intimate moment in this collective space in the car passing through America in the small towns. It gave Kesey this understanding of the road trip as a quintessentially American experience. Once they got back to La Honda, he said, "Let's go back next year." 1964 World's Fair is going to be happening in New York about the same time as the publication of his follow-up to One Flew of the Cuckoo's Nest. This book, Sometimes a Great Notion. Unfortunately, there's so many people hanging out around Kesey's house. They can't all fit in the station wagon, so they need something a little bigger. That's where the bus comes in.

It's this 1938 International Harvester School Bus, they bought it for like $1,500 from a guy who had 11 kids and he had outfitted it so his kids could sleep in it. Kesey and his friends cut a turret in the ceiling and put this big deck on the roof and wired it for sound.

Brooke Gladstone: There's the famous paint job.

River Donaghey: They had a bunch of DayGlo paint floating around, and somebody decided to throw a big smear of orange on there and somebody else decided, "Well, I'll add a little red and add a little blue and a little green." The thing with LSD is that it doesn't really inspire great fine motor skills. By the time they were done, it was like somebody ate a bunch of markers and threw them off or something.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] You have two documents that depict this trip. One is the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe's.

River Donaghey: At the time that Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test finally came out, the hippie movement was in full swing. I guess the book functioned as this behind-the-scenes look at how everything started, how the hippie movement became what it was. Kesey taught the hippies how to be hippies. Before the phrase hippie existed, before anyone knew what LSD was, they were in the bus and people didn't even know what to make of them. People thought maybe they were in the circus or escaped from the loony bin or something.

Brooke Gladstone: What did Tom Wolfe make of them?

River Donaghey: Tom Wolfe saw that Kesey was this quintessential American figure, a little PT Barnum, a little spiritual guru.

Brooke Gladstone: We actually spoke to Tom Wolfe.

Tom Wolfe: His favorite saying was, "You're either on the bus or off the bus." If you were off the bus, it meant you were out of the greatest experience human beings could have. Kesey was striving to become the leader of the entire psychedelic movement. What appealed to me the most was just this was newsworthy. It was gold for me.

Brooke Gladstone: I mentioned that there were two documents. The other one, Kesey and the Merry Pranksters documented their travels for a movie that they never released [chuckles].

River Donaghey: He had this concept of everybody's movies, that everybody is living out a script.

Brooke Gladstone: Kesey believed that Acid could serve as a way of recognizing your script and a way to break character, to live freely in the moment.

Ken Kesey: I feel like you only come to this movie once. If you don't get something rewarding out of every minute you're sitting there, then you're blowing your ticket.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: We got hold of the Kesey tapes, most of which have never been heard by the public. Let me tell you, a band of proto hippies cruising through the South, drinking Acid-laced Kool-Aid in a psychedelic school bus with a manic Neal Cassady at the wheel. It all sounds just about as you'd imagine.

Ken Kesey: We're just barrel-assing across the desert. Cassady's got his shirt off and he's just sweating and sweating and sweating. He's just talking.

Neal Cassady: My Merry Band of Pranksters won't be lollygagging around in the dirt. Come on, come on. No, no, none of this misery stuff. Come on, this is the merry gang. [sings] God, look at it. Look at that. They get that. Hey, you have to take a picture of that. Out of the bus. [sings] Yes, my chillins. Yes, my pranksters.

River Donaghey: Reaching New York was their final destination. They were really expecting this hero's welcome. First, Cassady sets up this party with Kerouac. Kesey, of course, idolizes Kerouac but once they got to this party, it just didn't work. Kerouac was pretty late in his life and an alcoholic.

Brooke Gladstone: I've seen film of that. He looks very glum, almost sour. Then after that, they drive up to visit Timothy Leary, a former Harvard academic. He's an Acid philosopher.

Timothy Leary: Turn off your mind. Relax. Float downstream.

[chime sound]

Brooke Gladstone: It was supposed to be, at least in Kesey's mind, a meeting of the foremost psychedelic experimenter of the East and the West.

River Donaghey: It didn't work out like that.

Brooke Gladstone: No.

River Donaghey: Timothy Leary was in this big mansion in Millbrook with rolling hills and stone bridges.

Brooke Gladstone: Sounds perfect.

River Donaghey: It was lovely but Kesey and his friends roll up throwing smoke bombs off the top of the roof and all the members of Leary's group just ran inside scared. Leary himself was just coming down off of a psychedelic trip and was in a very peaceful place and didn't really want to be involved with all that raucous energy that Kesey and his friends brought along. They go back to La Honda and start trying to cut together the movie that they shot. What they would do is every week, they would cut the footage together and then on Saturday, they would have a screening of the week's cut.

These big parties became very unwieldy until finally Kesey decided, "Okay, my family's living here. I have a couple of young kids. Maybe we should find another place to screen the movie." Out of that came these things called the Acid Tests.

Brooke Gladstone: What was an Acid Test? I've never been clear on that.

River Donaghey: Well, again, the pranksters defy definition a little bit. Everything that Kesey was prototyping at La Honda, this sort of communal experience and this proto-hippie lifestyle, the Acid Tests were the opportunity for him to bring that into public.

Speaker 2: It was like a church group, like the early Christians. They were trying to spread their message. Kesey felt the way you spread them, you had a gigantic party.

River Donaghey: Wild multimedia experiences around the San Francisco Bay Area. This band, the Warlocks would play before they changed their name to the Grateful Dead. Early psychedelic visuals like that oil and water projections and strobe lights.

Brooke Gladstone: Of course, Kesey was attracting the attention of the police. LSD was still legal in the mid-'60s, so the cops eventually pinned him with a marijuana charge.

River Donaghey: Since that was his second marijuana charge, he was facing five years in prison with no chance of parole. In typical prankster fashion, Kesey hatched a plan to fake his own death and go on the run to Mexico.

Brooke Gladstone: [chuckles] Did it work?

River Donaghey: Well, the run to Mexico was successful. Even the suicide note that Kesey wrote, he said in parentheses, like, "I don't think anyone's actually going to believe this, but I'm going to give it a try." [laughter] He had one of his family members that looked like him drive around the Bay Area and then go up to a cliff and throw Kesey's signature boots in the water and leave the suicide note. I don't know if it really threw the cops off the scent very long, but it gave Kesey enough time to make it across the Mexico border.

Brooke Gladstone: Kesey fled to Mexico in January 1966 and spent the next eight months as a fugitive, well aware that he was being tracked by the FBI. Meanwhile, word had spread about the movement he had helped start. As kids from all across the country flocked to Haight-Ashbury, where he'd staged many Acid-laced happenings. They were in search of what he created, whether they knew it or not.

River Donaghey: While he was gone, it took shape without him. While he was in Mexico, Kesey came to this realization that he had gotten everything that he could from LSD. That that awakening consciousness that he got, it was awake. To have it be sustainable, he had to find a chemical-free psychedelic experience.

Brooke Gladstone: In October 1966, Kesey was picked up by the FBI outside of San Francisco. He struck a deal with local law enforcement promising to hold an Acid graduation, a public renunciation of LSD. Almost a year before the Summer of Love, this graduation was a radical notion, perhaps too radical.

River Donaghey: He may have gotten out of jail, but the followers that he had inspired had grown up without him and weren't really keen on the idea of stopping taking drugs, because they liked the drugs.

Brooke Gladstone: [chuckles].

River Donaghey: I think that the moment that the hippie movement refused to give up Acid and follow Kesey further, it's the moment that the movement stalled. I think whatever last vestiges of the hippie movement still exist today are still stuck there in that same place, leaning on the crutch of drugs.

Brooke Gladstone: Why do you care so much about Ken Kesey?

River Donaghey: I grew up in Eugene, Oregon, which is where Kesey retired to with the Pranksters in the '70s. Eugene is a place fundamentally changed by Kesey. It's the last enclave of the hippie ideals. My name is River. I sort of come from it. I come from a different piece of it. My parents were more this new-age, personal growth movement in the '80s.

Brooke Gladstone: They're a full generation after Kesey.

River Donaghey: That's right, but some of that comes from Kesey. I think that creating this heavy, deep, and real emotional group work without drugs is what this personal growth movement in the '80s was also attempting to do. My father gave me a copy of electric Kool Acid Tests when I was in 6th grade, and he said, "Here's the history of your home."

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs].

River Donaghey: My mother wasn't so happy with that.

Brooke Gladstone: Kesey said the Acid Tests, the noisy parties fueled by LSD, were a way to measure a person's willingness to discover what was out there if you moved beyond the norm.

Ken Kesey: It was a test, and there were people that passed and there were people that didn't pass. To give you an example of somebody who passed, some businessman just walking around the street came in. For a buck, you got to see us make all our noise and the Dead make all their noise and anything else that happened. This guy was in a suit, had an umbrella, and he got the customary cup of stuff. About midnight, you could see him really get ripped. Probably never been anything but drunk on beer. He looked around, saw all these strange people, and when he looked down, the spotlight was showing down on him, he saw his shadow, then stand up straight, put that umbrella over his shoulder, and he says, "The king walks. The king turns around. Now the king will dance."

[MUSIC - The Beatles: Tomorrow Never Knows]

Brooke Gladstone: 50 years after the electric Kool-Aid Acid test, we're still being tested. Connecting to something bigger, something beyond what seems to be a profoundly abnormal kind of norm, is back. Or maybe it's being fueled by the realization that the norm was never normal, or shouldn't have been. Anyway, it's creeping back, and so is LSD. If only to make moving beyond the norm a little easier. Much thanks to filmmaker and writer, River Donaghey, who brought us the story and then talked to us about it.

[MUSIC - The Beatles: Tomorrow Never Knows]

Or play the game, Existence, to the end

Of the beginning, of the beginning

Of the beginning, of the beginning

Of the beginning, of the beginning

Of the beginning.

 

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