Kesey Gets On The Bus With Movie
By JEFF BARNARD=
Associated Press Writer=
PLEASANT HILL, Ore. (AP) _ For Ken Kesey, digital technology has
made it possible to finish what LSD started back in the psychedelic
'60s.
Working in a cluttered motel-room-turned-studio near his Oregon
farm, the author and an old friend, Ken Babbs, have just completed
the first installment of a movie from their 1964 LSD-fueled bus
trip across America _ the trip immortalized in Tom Wolfe's book
``Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.''
Kesey, best known for his novel ``One Flew Over the Cuckoo's
Nest,'' had always intended to come out of the bus trip with a
movie, ``Intrepid Traveler and his Merry Band of Pranksters Look
for a Kool Place.'' Despite recruiting a Hollywood film editor,
however, he could never get the audio in sync with the pictures.
Powered off the bus generator, the tape recorder had speeded up and
slowed down when the bus did.
``It finally just broke our back,'' said Kesey, now 64.
Until now.
Babbs' son, Simon, and Kesey's son, Zane, transferred the film
and the audiotape to a digital editing rig. With modern software
and a turn of a knob, the sound and pictures came together. Like
Frankenstein's monster, ``Kool Place'' lives.
``When people ask what my best work is, it's the bus,'' Kesey
said. ``Those books made it possible for the bus to become.''
Kesey had used the profits from ``Cuckoo's Nest'' to buy the old
school bus and take his friends _ known as the Merry Pranksters _
to New York for the World's Fair and a party for his second novel,
``Sometimes a Great Notion.''
But the trip soon turned into more, for them and in the public
imagination.
Kesey, who had tasted LSD in government trials, wanted to share
it with the masses. A pitcher of LSD-laced orange juice was a
staple of the bus refrigerator. The Pranksters put on LSD parties
known as Acid Tests. (The drug was legal then; by 1968, half the
states had criminalized it.)
The bus, nicknamed Furthur and painted in psychedelic colors,
became a counterculture icon.
``I thought you ought to be living your art, rather than
stepping back and describing it,'' Kesey said. The bus is ``a
metaphor that's instantly comprehensible. Every kid understands it.
It's like John Ford's `Stagecoach' with John Wayne in the driver's
seat just like Cowboy Neal.''
Episode one scopes in on Neal Cassady, the wheelman from Jack
Kerouac's ``On the Road,'' who piloted the bus while turning out a
stream of rhythmic rap-babble.
``It's what keeps this from just being `what I did on my summer
vacation,''' Kesey said. ``We are keepers of the flame of
Cassady.''
The Proust-quoting Cassady, who had only a ninth-grade
education, was a bridge between the Beats and the hippies. He died
along a Mexican railroad track in 1968.
Kesey said his cinematic inspirations are Bergman and Fellini,
but ``Kool Place'' is more like home movies _ complete with Kesey
stepping in front of the projector to inject comments.
The story would be unclear without Wolfe's book. But the images
create an intimacy that makes the characters seem forever young, at
a time when gas cost 28 cents a gallon.
Episode one opens with an older Kesey and Babbs in lab coats,
finding a key to a vault.
``I'm scared,'' Kesey says.
``I don't blame you,'' says Babbs.
They open the vault and take out the films. The flick of a
switch starts the clickety whirr of a projector.
In California oilfields, a highway patrolman pulls them over but
never suspects these college kids dressed like Tommy Hilfiger are
packing LSD and marijuana. In Arizona, the bus gets bogged down in
the sand by a river.
``I'm going to take some LSD,'' Kesey says. ``Babbs could take
some. Cassady, you want to take some?''
Cassady whispers, ``I would, yes, I would.''
A woman on her first acid trip swims in an algae-filled pool.
Dogs and horses run by. Cassady returns with a farmer who pulls
them to solid ground with a tractor.
In Houston, Kesey visits pal Larry McMurtry, and the Pranksters
lose one of their number to a bad trip. In New Orleans, they jam
with a piano player in a bar and get thrown out of a blacks-only
beach.
Kesey is offering the film in video episodes _ there might be 10
_ in signed psychedelic boxes painted by him and Babbs on the motel
bathroom's floor and sold on his Web site, Intrepidtrips.com.
``We're the people who planted the seeds,'' Kesey said recently.
``Whether it's artistically valid or not, we have to cultivate the
crop.''
``You compost it long enough and stuff will grow out of it,''
said Babbs, a Vietnam helicopter pilot and longtime Prankster.
Todd Gitlin, a New York University professor and author of ``The
Sixties,'' said the film won't add much to the historical record.
``Kesey was a force, and the bus trip, thanks to Tom Wolfe, took
on mythic proportions,'' Gitlin said. As for the movie: ``I would
watch it if it was stuck in front of me.''
But Aaron Kipnis, a professor of clinical psychology at Pacific
Graduate Institute who says the Pranksters turned him on at an Acid
Test, said he is eager to check in with them again.
``I can't say whether it was the substance or the people, the
environment or the time, but it moved me from being a street punk
to being a spiritual seeker,'' he said.
``Instead of publishing words,'' he said, Kesey ``published a
way of being in the world.''
-----------------------------------------------------------
[Image]
-----------------------------------------------------------
Back to document index
Original file name: Kesey's Movie
This file was converted with TextToHTML - (c) Logic n.v.