Ken Kesey: 1935 - 2001

by Christine Hall

In 1959, when the U.S. Government decided to conduct tests using psychoactive drugs on paid volunteers at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital in the San Francisco area, they didn’t know what a cuckoo’s nest they were about to unleash on the world. Taking part in the study on the then legal drug LSD, along with psilocybin, mescaline and amphetamine IT-290, was Ken Kesey, an unassuming graduate student in creative writing at Stanford University. During the period of several weeks, Kesey “dropped” hallucinogenic drugs and wrote about his “tripping” experiences for government researchers.

Of course, terms like “tripping” and “dropping” (as in “dropping acid”) were not part of the vernacular in those days. Nor were there yet any hippies in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, although beats like Lawrence Ferlingetti and Allen Ginsberg had been associated with that city’s North Beach area for some time. In fact, a case could be made that there would never have been hippies, a “summer of love,” a “San Francisco Sound” or even a Woodstock Festival if the federal government hadn’t hand-fed acid to a young Ken Kesey, while paying him $75 per trip, during the last year of the decade of McCarthy and Eisenhower. Nobody had any way of knowing it at the time, but that obscure study might have been ground zero for an entire generation that “turned-on, tuned-in and dropped out,” Timothy Leary notwithstanding.

Though unpublished, Kesey had already completed a novel about college athletics, End of Autumn, before taking-part in this official acid test. By all accounts, however, his brief stint as a government drug experiment changed his imagination and writing habits forever. Soon after completing the study, he took a job as a night attendant at a hospital psychiatric ward in order to earn extra money while working on another novel, Zoo, about the beatniks in North Beach. That job, where he often worked high on peyote and other psychoactive agents, turned-out to be the inspiration for the 1962 novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. which was to forever remain his signature work and, in some ways, an albatross.

The story that he wove was an allegory set in a mental health facility, which cast stern and severe Nurse Ratched as the representative of a bureaucratic society that is the negation of all that is free, lusty and nonconformist. The main character, McMurphy, a con man who comes to the psychiatric facility by way of a penal work farm, is the opposite of Ratched, being exuberant, vital and vulgar. The irrepressible McMurphy tries his best to rekindle the spark of life in his fellow patients, to repair the damage done by his nemesis “Big Nurse.” In the end, however, Ms. Ratched is the victor, treating McMurphy to a midnight lobotomy, forever ending his ability to think, feel and act for himself.

“Cuckoo’s Nest,” still studied at high schools and universities across the country, was an immediate critical and financial success. If Kesey had been content to be merely a writer, this accomplishment would have been more than enough, placing him alongside the likes of Fitzgerald, Twain and Dickens in the literary hall-of-fame. But Kesey had been changed by his experiences in a now all-but-forgotten government study on hallucinogens, so after publishing his novel he set off to change the world, to bring a new paradigm of thought to the American psyche, a feat that few have been able to accomplish and fewer still have been able to pull off with the flair that he exhibited. Beginning in 1962, a time when most Americans were content to be held spellbound by Elvis and Jackie Gleason, Ken Kesey was paving ground for the arrival of hippiedom, expanded consciousness, the be-ins and love-ins, the counterculture and, eventually, Woodstock Nation.

Perhaps the metaphor should be “sowing seeds” instead of “paving ground,” for the Ken Kesey of the early sixties was very much the image of a Johnny Appleseed, sowing the seeds of chemically induced expanded consciousness that would grow into the turned-on generation of the late sixties. Using his new-found wealth from “Cuckoo’s Nest,” Kesey bought some land in La Honda, California, where he moved his wife, children and an assorted group of misfits, visionaries and intellectuals who became known as the Merry Pranksters. There, they began holding parties, the first of the famous “Acid Tests,” where revelers would drop acid, often without their knowledge, though the medium of “electric Kool-Aid,” the Pranksters name for the popular powdered children’s drink spiked with LSD. Before long, street slang would come to call anything spiked with hallucinogenics “electric.”

The “test” was to make it through the hallucinogenic experience without freaking-out or otherwise having a bad trip, since Kesey had come to believe that it was important for people to confront their fears while under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. By all accounts, the Acid Test parties, with their diverse assortment of invited freaks and oddballs, trees painted with day-glo colors, and dissonant music blasting from hidden speakers, could be frighteningly disconcerting to those whose reality tunnels resonated to the beat of suburbia and top-forty radio’s Cousin Brucie or Don Steele. Some didn’t make it through the night with their psyches intact. Those who did survive were forever changed.

Perhaps the most important era for Kesey-the-Prankster came in 1964, with the publication of his second novel, Sometimes A Great Notion. Although this was not to be as universally acclaimed as his first novel, the publication required that he travel to New York – a trip that he made in a grand style rarely seen since in this or any other country. He bought a 1939 International Harvester school bus, named it “Further” and painted it in day-glo colors with the help of the Merry Pranksters. With beat icon Neal Cassady at the wheel, they left La Honda in June of that year and made the cross-country trip smoking marijuana and dropping acid along the way. The top of the bus had been turned into a musical stage, and when they drove through large towns and cities, they blasted a combination of crude homemade music and running commentary to an astonished audience of onlookers. 1964 had never been like this before.

That trip went on to become a hippie legend, complete with some occurrences that still seem rather odd, even for a journey such as this. In New York City, Cassady introduced Kesey to his pal Jack Kerouac, who was totally unimpressed with the writer from California. Equally as unimpressed was the other LSD guru, Timothy Leary, who gave Kesey barely five minutes of his time. Later, Kesey and the Pranksters would be chronicled by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests but, as usual, Wolfe boarded the bus late, joining the group when the legendary journey was nearly at its end.

Chronicling an extraordinary life like Kesey’s in a short essay like this is impossible. Major events, like the later Acid Test parties at venues like Bill Graham’s Fillmore West, the Longshoreman's Hall and Muir Beach, must be skipped entirely. The party where Kesey and Hunter S. Thompson introduced the Hell’s Angels to psychedelics must remain a footnote. There’s hardly space to tell about how he hated the highly acclaimed movie made from “Cuckoo’s Nest,” and how he considered Jack Nicholson wrong for the part. Suffice it to say that Ken Kesey was an unlikely inspiration to an entire generation.

Ken Kesey died on November 10th from complications after surgery for liver cancer. He is survived by his wife, his mother; his brother, his two daughters (Shannon and Sunshine), a son (Zane; another son, Jed, died in a car accident in 1984), and three grandchildren. He was 66 and lived in Pleasant Hill, Oregon.