W hat do we expect from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test now, more than half a century after it was first published? Back in 1968 the story of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and their attempts to spread the gospel of LSD was not exactly breaking news – it had not, as the saying goes, been torn from the screaming headlines of today – but Tom Wolfe’s book expanded the reach of the Kesey project to an audience who’d not enjoyed the mixed blessings of encountering the Pranksters or sampling their unusually potent wares. It’s possible that even some of those who could answer the question posed by Hendrix’s first album – “Are you experienced?” – in the affirmative weren’t aware of the backstory. Today we read the book partly because the broad outline of that story is now well known.
In the process it has changed somewhat, has become a story of meetings, tangled bequests and legacies. Allen Ginsberg put it succinctly in the Village Voice: “Neal Cassady drove Jack Kerouac to Mexico in a prophetic automobile to see the physical body of America, the same Denver Cassady that one decade later drove Ken Kesey’s Kosmos-patterned school bus on a Kafka-circus tour over the roads of the awakening nation.” This struck Wolfe as “a marvellous fact” – and it was, it is.
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